"They were a pestilence, coming upon us in so many ways- with guns, knives drawn behind empty handshakes, bringing sickness and fire. No matter how many we killed, no matter how firmly we stood, they just kept coming. It was we who saw our numbers dwindling, our villages emptied or turned to ash. The death and desecration and misery was beyond what our gods had prepared us for. There were no ancestral stories to tell in the night which were more brutal than what we’d seen in the day, and so there was no wisdom to draw on… no comfort. In the end, staring at their piece of paper, the one they said would make it all stop, I took the pen and did the only thing left for me to do- I drew a tiny little elk’s head."
This fascinating post at The Nonist covers a little of the history with a lot of images of the totemic drawings Native Americans used when they signed treaties, and why reproductions of the treaties often show only an "X" in place of the original drawings.
