Mark Twain Quotes

The pressure that has been brought to bear upon the native people, since the cessation of armed conflict, in the attempt to force conformity of custom and habit has caused a reaction more destructive than war, and the injury has not only affected the Indian, but has extended to the white population as well.

I once thought that I was the only man who persevered to be the friend of the white man, but since they have come and cleaned out our lodges, horses, and everything else, it is hard for me to believe the white man anymore.

Many have passed idly through the Indian schools during the last decade, afterward to boast of their charity to the North American Indian. But few there are who have paused to question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization

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.

The white people … are trying to make us over into their image

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

The aboriginal inhabitants of these countries I have regarded with the commiseration their history inspires. Endowed with the faculties and the rights of men, breathing an ardent love of liberty and independence, and occupying a country which left them no desire but to be undisturbed, the stream of overflowing population from other regions directed itself on these shores. Without power to divert or habits to contend against, they have been overwhelmed by the current or driven before it. Now reduced within limits too narrow for the hunter's state, humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts, to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence and to prepare them in time for that state of society which to bodily comforts adds the improvement of the mind and morals.

I had been preserved from the spirit-breaking Indian schools… My psychology, therefore, had not been shot to pieces by that cheap attitude of the Indian service, whose one aim was to “civilize” the race youth, by denouncing his parents, his customs, his people wholesale, and filling the vacuum they had created with their vulgar notions of what constituted civilization.

There is a perception of the general irrelevance of aboriginal culture….We haven't gone anywhere. We still exist. …. Get the hell out of our lives and give us our land back.

The hostility to all Indian ways and culture that characterized so much of Government policy now appears to have been a mistake.

We Indians only know that schools will make our children like white people, and some of us do not like white people and their ways.

The white man expelled the Indian, took his possessions, developed the unexplored resources, and now he devotes a portion of his accumulations to establish institutions where the red man learn the secret and method of his power.

[There is] no Indian problem as created by the Indian himself. Every problem that exists today in regard to the Indian population is due to the white man’s cast of mind.

dominating populations suppress the history of their victims, destroy the practice of the culture of their victims, prevent the victims from coming to understand themselves as a part of a cultural family, teach systematically the ideology of white supremacy, control the socialization process, control the accumulation of wealth, and perform segregation and apartheid.

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

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.

I disapprove... of the proposal to subject the Indians to our laws without their consent,... It is so little in concord with our principles of government.

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 whites introduced among them [the Indians] the fatal and exterminating conditions of modern life.

[Describing the Croatan Indians the English explorers met in Sir Walter Raleigh's first expedition to Virginia: ... very handsome and goodly people, and in their behavior as mannerly and civil as any in Europe.

An Indian who is as bad as the white men could not live in our nation.... The white men do not scalp the head; but they do worse. They poison the heart.

I will say that I like an Indian better dead than living. I have never in my life seen a good Indian (and I have seen thousands) except when I have seen a dead Indian.

The decimation of the mighty bison herds, the use of poison alcohol to destroy mind and body, and the cowardly killing of women and children made for tragedy on a scale so ghastly that it cannot be dismissed as merely the consequence of the clash of competing ways of life.

Sober-thoughted men, far from the scenes of danger, in the security of cities and populous regions, can talk of exterminating measures, and discuss the policy of extirpating thousands… in a little while, the remaining tribes will go the way that so many have gone before. They will vanish like a vapor from the face of the earth – their very history will be lost in forgetfulness.

We eat the white man’s food, and it makes us soft: we wear the white man’s heavy clothing and it makes us weak…Yes – we know when you come, we die