Great Speeches

Last night I watched this film:

A Great film

It's a great film, especially if you like strong bloody violence, which if you are Fleams fans, I will assume you do.  Apparently it is a much more violent version of a foreign language film.  I haven't seen that one.  This version has Russell Means as the old pathfinder.

Russell Means was famous as a defender of the rights of native and indigenous peoples worldwide as well as an actor and author.  He was one of the founders of the American Indian Movement (AIM), and it was obviously great for him to be able to act in films as if he was in a time of his ancestors, before they had been dispossessed of their land.

He also got a chance to do it in this film, probably the bestest film ever made:

A Very Good Film

A couple of extracts of speeches he made are in this book:

An Interesting Book

including part of one he gave at the time of the occupation of Wounded Knee.  In it he talks about the history of how American Indians have been treated in the US:

"World War I came along, and the United States asked the American Indians if they would fight their war for them.  So we went out and saw around the world what was happening, and we came back.  Then another war happened.  this time they not only took Indians into the army, but into the defense plants all across America, and into the big cities.  And we learned the ways of the white man, right here in this country, found out about the white man to bring that knowledge back for the use of our people."

Means was talking about American Indians in white society, but the story is the same here with the government and ordinary working people, especially rural working people.  It was the World Wars that gave people the ability to stand up for their rights and achieve social justice.  We're all Indians to governments, that's why we have to fight them.