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Fellow delegates, distinguished guests and friends.

We meet here in the Fourth Annual Convention of the NCAI, having completed the most successful year of our organized existence. When I have reviewed the record, giving you the highlights only because others who follow will paint in the details of the year's successes, I know that you will agree with me. This, our most successful year, and yet perhaps it would be more appropriate to speak of this as the year that prepared the way for what is next to come. For we are in fact about to start our greatest undertakings. Of these too we will have more to say.

Let us think first of ourselves gathered here. I have just checked the registrations and find that 181 delegates or observers are here, representing 51 TRIBES. In all, perhaps 150,000 Indians see and hear through your eyes and ears, and speak through your lips. To our white friends, that may mean little or much, depending on how well they know and understand our Indian history.

Let me try to tell our white friends across the Nation a little of what this gathering means. The Indian people never moved in massed numbers. Free peoples in history never cared for thundering armies, and the Indians were a free people par excellence. Think of some of the famous Indian leaders and their followings. Of King Phillip and the scattered remnants of the New England tribes, coming uncomfortably close to destroying the colonists in Massachusetts. Of Pontiac with never more than 450 fighters laying siege to the British fort at Detroit, and for six months fighting off every effort to raise the siege. Black Hawk fighting engagement after engagement with never more than forty or fifty men. Captain Jack, the Modoc, with fifty warriors in the Lava Beds of 

Transcription Notes:
150,000 overwrites 100,000