I Have Stood Up for You

Being of your blood,
Through thick and thin,
      I have stood up for you.
When the world’s most devilish
Intrigue of humanity was set
And was coiling around you tighter and tighter—
      I have stood up for you.
When public sentiment was against you
And sent you to oblivion,
      I have stood up for you.
When the country was hysterically enraged
For defending your loved ones
And your birthright of priority—
      I have stood up for you.
When you were tagged as “Indians”
And outlawed creatures—
      I have stood up for you.
Haunted and hunted on thy domain,
With no chance of redress
But doomed, as though thy fate—
      I have stood up for you.
When you were described and pictured
And cartooned as cruel and savage—
      I have stood up for you.
When prejudice, hate and scorn
Sounded the keynote against you—
      I have stood up for you.
When starving and naked,
At the verge of your annihilation
By swords in the hands of criminals—
      I have stood up for you.
When the palefaces said
There was no hope for you—
      I have stood up for you.
When you were condemned and relegated
To the reservation system of hell—
      I have stood up for you.
When in prison and in bondage,
When you could neither speak nor see—
      I have stood up for you.
When decreed by the people across the sea
That you could neither learn nor be taught,
      I have stood up for you.
When it was put down black and white
That you could neither work nor support yourselves,
And that you were lazy and worthless—
      I have stood up for you.
When politics and greed were working you
For all that you were worth—
      I have stood up for you.
When everything you possessed was disappearing,
And your personal rights ignored—
      I have stood up for you.
As the Indian Bureau, like an octopus,
Sucked your very life blood,
      I have stood up for you.
For your freedom and citizenship,
By the abolishment of the Indian Bureau,
      I have stood up for you.
When the Indian Bureau says, “Were you freed
You would starve and be cheated”—
Only to feed its 7000 employees—
      I have stood up for you.
When you were judged “incompetent”
For freedom and citizenship by the Indian Bureau—
      I have stood up for you.
God knows that I am with thee day and night;
That is why I have stood up for you.
It might have been self-sacrifice.
It might have been the hand of God leading me.
Whatever it was, you have proven yourselves to be
What I have stood up for you to be.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 26, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I Have Stood Up for You” was first published in Wassaja vol. 3 (May 1919), a monthly newsletter of Indigenous politics of which Carlos Montezuma himself was the founder and editor. In passionate, free-verse lines evocative of the style and sentiment of Walt Whitman, the poem’s speaker “becomes the spokesperson for an imagined Native community, calling for the ultimate freedom—freedom from the Indian Bureau,” as Cristina Stanciu, associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, writes in “Americanism for Indians: Carlos Montezuma’s ‘Immigrant Problem,’ Wassaja, and the Limits of Native Activism,” published in Studies in American Indian Literatures vol. 33, nos. 1–2. Montezuma’s characterization of the Indian Bureau as an “octopus” appears again in his essay “The Octopus and What,” published in Wassaja vol. 8 (September 1922), in which he laments that, like an octopus of sorts, “[t]he System’s ways are deep, devious and mystifying. Its resources in money, favors and influence are unlimited. Its workings are so complex and its autocratic power so great, that only spasmodically does its corruption rise to the surface.”