Assertion #6

          The assertion made by John Lame Fire Deer implies how unjust he and his people were treated. Treated unjustly as in how he and his people were deemed unworthy to be labeled "civilized people". All simply because they had no prisons, no written laws, no money that could differenciate them between each other, no locks or keys. They did not have these things because they did not have a need for them. John Lame Deer and his people took care of one another. The white people say otherwise.
          For the author to get his message across, he uses rhetorical devices, verbal irony and satire. Deer mentions how he would not know how he and his tribe would manage were it not for the white people and their "fundamental teachings", that the white people, in a way, saved them. This is satire, ridiculing how the white people's fundamental teachings are what ruined his tribe. There is verbal irony as well when Deer says "we were really in bad shape before the white people arrived". Furthermore the Native Americans because they lived differently than the white people's lifestyles were "corrected" to live the right "civilized" way of life.