Politics & Power Quote by James Welch

Welch is diagnosing a shift from imposed dependency to hard-won agency, and he does it without romanticizing it. The first sentence is blunt to the point of discomfort: “so defeated” isn’t just psychological; it’s historical. It compresses generations of broken treaties, boarding schools, resource extraction, and bureaucratic paternalism into a habit of mind: waiting for “outsiders” and “the government” to “fix things.” That verb is doing heavy lifting. “Fix” implies a machine with a broken part, a problem solvable by a technician. Welch’s subtext is that this framing has been one of colonization’s most durable victories: convincing people that survival must be administered from elsewhere.

Then comes the turn: “But now.” It’s modest, almost cautious, as if he’s wary of declaring a triumph. “They seem to realize” signals observation rather than manifesto, leaving room for unevenness, for backsliding, for the fact that awakening isn’t a policy program. Still, the payoff lands like a dare: “the only ones who can save themselves.” It’s a rallying cry with splinters. “Save” carries spiritual weight, but it also hints at emergency, at a community on the brink. Welch refuses the comforting fantasy that liberation arrives as a grant, a reform, a benevolent administrator.

Context matters: Welch wrote in an era when Native activism and cultural resurgence were colliding with the realities of poverty, jurisdictional neglect, and federal overreach. The line isn’t anti-government so much as anti-illusion. It argues that sovereignty begins as an internal posture: the decision to stop auditioning for rescue and start building power that outsiders can’t revoke.