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"President Garry, Mr. Wesley, honored guests at this table and our friends: We are deeply grateful to be here this morning and participate in what to me was a stirring experience. I have not as much reason as she, but Mrs. Peterson almost expressed my views as you marched in here with her suggestion that she felt like shedding tears. I had the great experience of serving for about three years aboard a United States warship with a fine Indian friend from the Navaho tribe in New Mexico. We lived very closely in the crew quarters, being both enlisted men. and I came to know him and love him and to make an association which has endured through the years since then. And I hope you feel as he felt and as I feel, a little bit of emotion, honestly and humbly, at the sight of this great flag, for which we mutually fought and for which all of us stand. We think it very appropriate that you should be here in this city and in the heart of the church I represent. I wonder if you know, and I am sure if you do not, I should take time to tell you just a little about it, the history of the people in whose central city you are visiting. You see, we know something about, that is our ancestors did, and we know by history and extension, something about being unwelcome visitors on land we once owned, not to rehash old events, or bring up sores that have healed, but to give you a little example of the kind of people among whom you are visiting, may I tell you that this church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was organized in the year 1930 in the state of New York, within a period of a few short years the early inherents of the faith were forcibly driven, mobbed, burned, violated, their property taken, through four of the great states of the American Union. They went from New York to Ohio, from there to Missouri, from Missouri to Illinois, and finally left Illinois and were literally expelled from their own country to this very land on which we stand, then by treaty owned by the Mexican government. And I might say, because I think it is important, that having been thus treated, and it is a serious blot on the history of the American governmental relationships, One of the very first things that these people did, though in alien territory, having been expatriated from their own land, was to plant this flag on the hillside overlooking the valley and proclaim themselves to be loyal Americans, who would in fact, fight for and defend the land. 

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