‘Weep for your Brothers, Boy! Weep for your Brothers … ’ by Peter Cresswell Peter Cresswell is a New Zealander. For the past four years, he has lived in Alberta, Canada, working in the small town of Pincher Creek (population 3,000). He became very interested in the Indian people on the nearby Peigan Reserve, and set out to learn as much as possible about their past culture, and their way of life. In August of 1968, he became the President of an organisation known as the Napi Friendship Association, working on a voluntary basis to improve White-Indian relations. In June of 1969, he became the first full-time director of the Association, and has since organised more than 30 programmes designed to create a mutual understanding. Mr Cresswell returned to New Zealand for a five-week holiday in December 1969, and during that time, investigated the possibilities of an Indian-Maori student exchange, tentatively planned for 1971. There is a folk ballad that begs mankind to understand and recognize the problems that it has nurtured in the last century — the problems that many people would prefer to turn away from, wanting neither to look at, nor to become involved with. Apathy has become a sign of the times. The silent majority are tired of Vietnam, of campus riots, of black power, and of the starving children in Biafra. The television has socked it to every North American home, and relentlessly the violence of the '60s has become a mundane, everyday thing to our jaded way of living. No one wants to hear of the Red Man's plight. He has neither the dynamics of the black people, nor the outspoken leaders of other protest groups. He lives closer to the poverty line than any other ethnic group in North America, and yet is constantly forgotten in the shuffle of power politics. The glory of western history was told with the blood of many Indians, and for protecting his rights and his land, he was termed ‘savage’. When the soldiers won a battle, it was a ‘victory’; when the red man was the victor, it was a ‘massacre’. History still brands the Indian as a thorn in the flesh of North American progress — history as it was recorded by the white man. In 1970, the Indians are still the forgotten people. They are the real North Americans, but to many they are just ‘lazy good-for-nothing drunken hoboes’. The Indians live mainly on Reservations. In Canada, the majority of Reservations are close to being depressed areas. There are few jobs, poor housing conditions, high infant mortality rates, poor communications and an atmosphere of abject depression. Not for them the shiny Cadillacs, or the latest in colour television sets. While western civilization hurries madly on its way to the stars, a race of people on our own continent sink deeper and deeper into forgotten limbo. For many, the bottle of wine is the means of escape — the means of hiding the fading pictures of a people who once had a strong culture and a great pride. The warrior in buckskin has become a grubby youth dressed in faded, patched blue jeans, staggering along some alien city's skid row. The hunter has become the labourer who handles the manual jobs that many white men scorn. The very word ‘Indian’ has become a dirty word. The statistics are staggering: The life expectancy of the Canadian Indian is 34 years; the national average is 62 years.