THE INDIAN'S LAMENT
Peacock Collection. Trad.?

An Indian he sat in his birch-bark canoe,
And paddled away o'er the water so blue;
He sang of the days when the land was their own,
And before the palefaces among them were known.
2
The time when the red-men were lords of the soil,
We lived at our ease free from sorrow and toil;
We hunted the beaver, the otter and deer,
And roamed through the wild-wood with nothing to fear.
3
When the white-men first came to our own native land,
We used them like brothers, we gave them our land;
We knew they were weary, we gave then repose,
Not dreaming those white-men would e'er be our foes.
4
For a whle we lived happy with our white friends around,
We gave them the best of our own hunting ground;
They paid us with trinkets which pleased for a while,
And caused us like children upon them to smile.
5
But soon they began to encroach on our rights,
Their numbers increased and they put us to flight;
They drove us away from our own native shore,
And the smoke of our campfire shall rise there no more.
6
They builded great cities all over our land,
And on our rich meadows their farmhouses stand;
They cleared all the country from Texas to Maine,
And the Indian may seek for his wigwam in vain.
7
The graves of our forefathers where are they now?
They are rudely gone over and torn by the plow;
They have ruined our country and tore up our home,
And the Indian and buffalo will never more roam.
8
We'll go to the westward and find there a home,
Where hunting is good and white-men are unknown;
And when the Great Spirit calls us from the plain,
In our own spirit-world we will all meet again.

Variant collected in 1958 from Mrs. Thomas Walters of Newfoundland, published in Songs of the Newfoundland Outports vol. 1, pp. 157-158. "Probably written by a New Englander...."
Posted online by GEST.

Also recorded by Tommy Nemec (Songs From the Cape.

Typical romantic nonsense of the late 19th-early 20th century. They Indians were often engaged in intertribal warfare, and the conquering of their land is a story old in history, from first writings to the displacement of the Palestinian people.