“I read a book called, “Indians of the Americas” and after reading the book I realized that I knew nothing about the American Indian, and everything that we are taught about the American Indian is wrong. It's inaccurate, and our schoolbooks are hopelessly lacking — perhaps criminal lacking in revealing what our relationship was with the Indian.
When we hear, as we've heard throughout our lives no matter how old we are, that we are a country that stands for freedom, for rightness or justice for everyone, it simply doesn't apply to those who are not white. It just simply doesn't apply.
We were the most rapacious, aggressive, destructive, torturing, monstrous, people who swept from one coast to the other murdering and causing mayhem among the Indians. That isn’t revealed, because we don’t like that image of ourselves. We don’t like to see us — we like to see ourselves, perhaps as John Wayne sees us.
And also, what we’ve learned about the Indians has been largely taught to us by Hollywood and by motion pictures. They have educated us. So we naturally believe that when the Indians came that the wagons circled and the Indians rode around and subjected themselves to terrible fire and died at a ratio died at a ratio of 65 to 1. (Cavett interjects for a few seconds, then Brando continues…)
Indians have been tragically misrepresented in films, and in our history books, in our attitudes, in our reporting…
So we must set about to re-educate ourselves. At a time when we say, especially, that ‘we are going o keep our treatises’ and that ‘we do keep my word’ and that ‘we above all people do keep our word,’ I think it’s important to mention there have been nearly 400 treaties written by the United States in good faith with the Indians, and every single one of them was abrogated.
Marlon Brando continued his advocacy and activism for American Indians until he died in 2004. Some positive changes have been been made within the film industry since his 1973 Oscar night, but far, far too little has been done, even today, to protect, respect, and secure the rights of the American Indian.