My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain...There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.

The speaker laments Indigenous depopulation and dispossession, contrasting a once-abundant presence “cover[ing] the land” with the present condition of being “few,” like isolated trees after a storm. The imagery of waves over a shell-strewn shore evokes an older, natural plenitude—life integrated with place—while the “mournful memory” of vanished tribal greatness underscores historical rupture. The passage functions as elegy and indictment: it registers grief for lost communities and implicitly points to the forces (disease, warfare, forced removal, settler expansion) that reduced them. Its tone is collective rather than personal, framing survival as precarious and history as a landscape of erasure.