Tom Bissell Quotes

We did not know there were other people besides the Indian until about one hundred winters ago, when some men with white faces came to our country.

We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture.

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

Day and night cannot dwell together. The Red Man has ever fled the approach of the White Man, as the morning mist flees before the morning sun.

This land was our land; it was taken from us illegally …. John Smith did not bring a civilization here. There was already civilization here…. We should have burned the boat and killed them. all.

The whole Indian thing, I always say it's really the American holocaust. It's something we need to look at.

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.

I have four relatively small children, and around fourth grade, they start doing big projects on Native Americas: everything is Native Americans in elementary school. Do you know how many Native American dresses I've sewn, on and on; it's a full yearlong study. And then never again. As journalists, we never even cover Native Americans.

I tell you, in this country, you don't get much of an education. Throughout high school, through junior college, which is all I went, I didn't know anything about the annihilation of all the Indian nations that were here.

'Avatar' imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent.

There must be in their [the Indian's] social bond, something singularly captivating, and far superior to anything to be boasted among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans.

Whole Indian nations have melted away like snowballs in the sun before the white man's advance. They leave scarcely a name of our people except those wrongly recorded by their destroyers.

Civilization or death to all American savages!

The tribes which occupied the countries now constituting the Eastern States were annihilated or have melted away to make room for the whites.

The thesis of the book in your hands is that Native American history merits more than 9 pages.

My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door.

What colonialism does is cause an identity crisis about one's own culture.

We have taken so much from your culture, I wish you had taken something from ours...For there were some beautiful and good things within it. Perhaps now that the time has come, We are fearful that what you take will be lost.... I shall grab the instruments of the white man's success: His education, his skills, and society.

Thanksgiving began in 1621 when Native Americans sat down with a bunch of undocumented pilgrims. They had dinner and the pilgrims never left.

Native Americans are the original inhabitants of the land that now constitutes the United States. They have helped develop the fundamental principles of freedom of speech and separation of powers that form the foundation of the United States Government.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

I wanted to write a story about colonization and about Hawaii. I went to college right at the height of identity politics, and that's how I always read 'The Tempest,' for example.

I think people should look at learning about Native American history the same as visiting Washington, D.C., and seeing the monuments there. It's all part of the package.

Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans.

In the end, there is no absence of irony: the integrity of what is sacred to Native Americans will be determined by the government that has been responsible for doing everything in its power to destroy Native American cultures.