Our greatest problem with all of this in America is that there has been no recognition of this cultural extinction, no owning up to it, no atonement for what happened, no education about it. When I ask people how many different kinds of Indians they can identify, they can scarcely name any. The mythology of America is based on the denial of natives. Nobody admits that the holocaust took place. This is because the white settlers believed they had a God-given right to the continent, and anyone with this right wouldn't recognize what happened as holocaust. Yet it was a holocaust of unparalleled proportions: Bartholomew de las Casas and other contemporaries of Columbus estimated that fifty million indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere perished in a sixty-year period. In terms of millions of people, this was probably the largest holocaust in world history.

Now, it is not appropriate for me to say that my holocaust was worse than someone else's holocaust. But it is absolutely correct for me to demand that my holocaust be recognized. And that has not happened in America. Instead, nobody knows anything about the native people, not even people as educated as yourselves. Why? Because this system is based on a denial of our existence. We are erased from the public consciousness because if you have no victim, you have no crime. As I said, most Americans can hardly name a single Indian nation. Those who can are only able to name those which have been featured in TV Westerns: Comanche, Cheyenne, Navajo, Sioux, Crow. So the only image of a native which is widely recognized in this society is the one shown in Westerns, which is a caricature. It is a portrayal created in Hollywood or in cartoons or, more recently, to a minimal degree in "New Age" paraphernalia. We do not exist as full human beings in this society, with full human rights, with the same rights to self-determination, to dignity, and to land - to territorial integrity - that other peoples have.