Honorable Murder

"When a white man kills an Indian in a fair fight, it is called honorable, but when an Indian kills a white man in a fair fight, it is called murder."

Chiksika, Shawnee Nation War Chief, died 1792

Chiksika (also spelled Cheeseekau) was the older brother of the better-known Shawnee Chief, Tecumseh.

He, along with all his Shawnee Nation was conquered first by the Iroquois, at point of rifle, uprooted from their lands in Ohio.  In 1792, the Shawnee took on the American settlers and their armies and were routed in 1794.

In one skirmish, in October of 1792, Chiksika was shot dead.

Chiksika is known for a more ominous quotation related mostly to the environment and , with the passage of time, increasingly difficult to deny:

"The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it wastefully until it is all gone and then he simply moves on leaving the waste behind him and looking for new places to take. The white man is a monster who is always hungry and what he eats is land."

REFERENCES:

• Duhaime, Lloyd, Law & Justice Quotations
• Duhaime, Lloyd, Your Law, Our Law
• Langer, H., American Indian Quotations (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996)