"I do not wish to be shut up in a corral. All agency Indians I have seen are worthless. They are neither red warriors nor white farmers. They are neither wolf nor dog."
"I love this land and the buffalo and will not part with it …I have heard you intend to settle us on a reservation near the mountains. I don't want to settle. I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when we settle down we grow pale and die."
Chief Satanta, Kiowa
Photo: Carving near Loveland, CO; November 9, 2012. For years now, I've wished I could remove the fence around this carving. Since I can't, I've never taken seriously any of my photos of the statue. This past Friday, however, I suddenly realized that the fence has great symbolic value when viewed as a metaphor that stands for the tragic removal of American Indians from their ancestral homelands.
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