An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States Quotes
"Exploring the borderlands between action and narration—between what happened and what is said to have happened—Dunbar-Ortiz strips us of our forged innocence."
"Indigenous peoples have persevered against actions and policies intended to exterminate them, whether physically, mentally, or intellectually."
"The American Indians’ perspective has been absent from colonial histories for too long, leaving continued misunderstandings of our struggles for sovereignty and human rights."
"Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is a fiercely honest, unwavering, and unprecedented statement."
"It is truly an Indigenous peoples’ voice that gives Dunbar-Ortiz’s book direction, purpose, and trustworthy intention."
"An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States provides an essential historical reference for all Americans."
"This may well be the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime."
"Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz challenges readers to rethink the myth that Indian lands were free lands and that genocide was a justifiable means to a glorious end."
"The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life."
"The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism—the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy."
"Our nation was born in genocide... We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population."
"To find ourselves and country betrayed to our enemies and divided between the Spaniards and Americans is cruel and ungenerous."
"The gross infernal breach of faith which they [the Cherokees] have been guilty of shuts them out from every pretension to mercy."
"The Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support."
"It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice."
"They do what they please. They enslave those who are not of their color, although created by the same Great Spirit who created us."
"We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them."
"The same road led straight through the heart of America."
"By 1781, after three seasons of the Indian war, New York’s frontier had become a no-man’s-land."
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
"To extend a defensive and efficient protection to so extensive a frontier, against solitary, or small parties of enterprising savages, seems altogether impossible." - Secretary of War Henry Knox
"Your warriors will be slaughtered, your towns and villages ransacked and destroyed, your wives and children carried into captivity."
"The safety of the persons and property of this frontier can never be effectually secured, but by the breaking up of the combination formed by the Shawnee Prophet on the Wabash." - Petition to President James Madison
"The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history." - Walt Whitman
"War will cost the United States much money, and some lives, but it will destroy the existence of your people, as a nation, forever." - Warning to the Chickamauga villages
"The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them." - US Army general Thomas S. Jesup on the Seminoles
"The colonization of North America has been the decisive fact of the modern world." - Otto von Bismarck
"We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power." - President Barack Obama
"We are aware that some persons suppose it will be for our advantage to remove beyond the Mississippi. We wish to remain on the land of our fathers." - Cherokee Nation on removal
"The United States can conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us." - Ralph Waldo Emerson on the Mexican-American War
"The purpose of the garrison was twofold: to protect the mission from Indigenous inhabitants whose territory the Spanish were usurping and to round up those same people and force them to live and work for the Franciscan friars at the mission."
"The history symbolized by that artifact is not dead and buried with the generations of Indigenous bodies buried under the California crust."
"They would do anything for it. They left families, homes, everything behind; they sailed for eight months aboard leaky, smelly ships to reach California."
"The greatest object of their lives seems to be to acquire possessions—to be rich. They desire to possess the whole world."
"There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead."
"The buffalo saw that their day was over. They could protect their people no longer."
"Industrial civilization justified exploitation and destruction of whole societies and expansion without regard for the sovereignty of peoples."
"It was business as usual in the name of 'Manifest Destiny.'"
"Kill the Indian and save the man" was Pratt’s motto.
"Discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession."
"We know the laws given to us by the Creator. It is an obligation. It is a duty. It is the future of our [children’s] children."
"The Indigenous concept of nation and sovereignty is quite distinct from the Western model of the state as the final arbiter of decision making, based on police enforcement."
"Violence directed systematically against noncombatants through irregular means, from the start, has been a central part of Americans’ way of war."
"We the Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation in order to secure an inherent and essential sovereignty, to promote traditions of liberty, justice, and peace."
"Survivance is an active presence: it is not absence, deracination, or ethnographic oblivion."
"That the continued colonization of American Indian nations...provides the United States the economic and material resources needed to cast its imperialist gaze globally."
"The Doctrine of Discovery is dissolving in light of these profound acts of sovereignty."
"By the turn of the twenty-first century the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth."
"Rather than bestowing the status of prisoner of war on the detainees, they were designated as ‘unlawful combatants.’"
"The Pentagon divided the planet into five area commands—similar to the way that the Indian Country of the American West had been divided."
"The Chagos Archipelago...forcibly removed the indigenous inhabitants of the islands to create a major US military base."
"The United States operated more than 900 military bases around the world."
"Jodi Byrd writes: ‘The story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime.’"
"There is continuous migration from reservations to cities and border towns and back to the reservations, so that half the Indian population at any time is away from the reservation."
"Relocation is not permanent and resembles migratory labor more than permanent relocation."
"The incident and the government’s response briefly focused national and international attention on northern New Mexico."
"The Alianza claimed that colonialism had robbed resources, depopulated communities in northern New Mexico, and impoverished the people."
"In 2001, following more than a century of struggle by Hispanic land grantees, the US General Accounting Office began a study of the New Mexico land grants."
"The American Indian Movement convened a meeting in June 1974 that founded the International Indian Treaty Council."
"The IITC participated in the UN Conference on Desertification in Buenos Aires, March 1977."
"It also led the organizing for the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) Conference on Indigenous Peoples of the Americas."
"The IITC participated in establishing the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations."
"There is a continuous struggle for self-determination and recognition of Indigenous rights."