Dan Maffei Quotes

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.

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.

We’re [Native Americans] portrayed as either the noble savage or the ignoble savage. In most people’s minds, we only exist in the 19th century.

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!

Indigenous peoples was messed over. It was like a tradition here. We broke every treaty with them that ever was written. I think Andrew Jackson wanted to wipe them out.

Native Americans' families experience living surrounded, living in increasingly small reservations surrounded by the society that destroyed their civilization, and are still stigmatized. For decades and decades, for hundreds of years except in Indian schools, they weren't allowed to speak their language. That stigma takes a terrible toll.

It's a bit of a sore spot, the Thanksgiving in Indian country.

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

America is so accustomed to some depiction of native people that is entirely racist, and there's a perception that that is okay.

The Native American side was tragic. It's just unbelievable what has happened to them.

I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

Here's the reality. The image of a white Jesus has been used to justify enslavement, conquest, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples. There are literally millions of human beings whose lives have been snuffed out by people who conquered under the banner of a white god.

White domination is so complete that even American Indian children want to be cowboys. It's as if Jewish children wanted to play Nazis.

I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.

The United States has always had little sympathy for the native and has always seen settlements as a positive and civilizing force….they saw the native as a squatter with no rights.

[We must defend ourselves] against all Indians in generall, for that they are all Enemies

If you have got to wear golden slippers to enter the white man's heaven no Indian will ever get there, as the whites have got the Black Hills and with them all the gold.

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

Millions of dollars have been expended to excavate and transport to museums the tools, weapons, and other artifacts of Indians--but scarcely a penny has been spent to save the living descendants of those who made them

No one who knew the true nature of the Indian felt any regret that they were driven off their hunting grounds. This attitude was found wherever the Whites came in conflict with them and explains why they were scarcely regarded as human beings.

They [Native Americans] should not be allowed to come into the settlements, for every visit an Indian makes to a town, it is more or less injury to him.

Whites looking for gold kill Indians just as they would kill bears and pay no regard for treaties.

American popular culture has long been marked by an absence of empathy for American Indians. Westerns doubled as a campaign against so-called savages in a way that desensitized us to the savages we'd become.

Native Americans have faced centuries of atrocities to their people, their land, and their culture - all under various presidents who took an oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.