“Where today is the Pequod?

Where the Narragansett, the Mohican, and many other powerful tribes of our people?

They have vanished before the avarice and the oppression of the White Man, as snow before a summer sun.”

The argument he was making — that the pattern of collapse had already occurred, nation by nation, and would continue unless it was interrupted by unified resistance — was not only true but demonstrated in the very audience he was addressing.

The Choctaw and Chickasaw had already lost enormous territories through exactly the treaty processes he was criticizing.