Leon Redbone Quotes

I already knew, from church, that this place was raped and pillaged by Spaniards and the Pilgrims. "Don't sit here and try to tell me that they broke bread together, brother.

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization.

The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

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.

The native American has been generally despised by his white conquerors for his poverty and simplicity.

The whole westward expansion myth is seen as romantic. But it's a joke, a blot on American history.

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 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.

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

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

All these shortcomings stem from the laziness of the Cambodians [Khmer]… teach them agriculture. As for language, they should be taught to speak Vietnamese. Our dress and table manners must also be followed. If there is any out-dated or barbarous custom that can be simplified or repressed, then do so.

We came to a region that was inhabited by Arabs, and we set up a Jewish state. In many places, we purchased the land from Arabs and set up Jewish villages where there had once been Arab villages. You don't even know the names of the previous Arab villages and I don't blame you, because those geography books aren't around anymore. Not only the books, the villages aren't around...

Now we already know that the white supremacist Western scholars are going to object and oppose any evidence that shows an Afrikan influence on Greek civilization, or any other part of Europe. Their basic premise is to give Afrikan people credit for nothing

The altering of African facial features and the lightening of the skin colors of painted reliefs inside the tombs are central aspects of the conspiracy to destroy the memory of classical African civilizations. The two main conspirator groups carrying out these acts are European and American research teams, and local Arab government workers.

The thing that is being lost is heritage. In Africa, religion and advertisement and television and media hype have gotten Africans to where they are convinced psychologically that their own heritage is heathen, pagan, barbaric, savage, primitive.

Those that clamor loudest for Columbus to be erased from the pages of American history do so far more because of their hatred for America than their love of the Indians.

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

When someone tries to take over a country or a culture, they destroy the art.

I hate the anglicanisation of culture, the idea that culture is genteel. It's not genteel.

Though many non-Native Americans have learned very little about us, over time we have had to learn everything about them. We watch their films, read their literature, worship in their churches, and attend their schools. Every third-grade student in the United States is presented with the concept of Europeans discovering America as a "New World" with fertile soil, abundant gifts of nature, and glorious mountains and rivers. Only the most enlightened teachers will explain that this world certainly wasn't new to the millions of indigenous people who already lived here when Columbus arrived.

Part of the main plan of imperialism... is that we will give you your history, we will write it for you, we will re-order the past...What's more truly frightening is the defacement, the mutilation, and ultimately the eradication of history in order to create... an order that is favorable to the United States.

Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people. But they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.

It is chilling to think that the same people who persecuted the wise women and men of Europe, its midwives and healers, then crossed the oceans to Africa and the Americas and tortured and enslaved, raped, impoverished, and eradicated the peaceful, Christ-like people they found. And that the blueprint from which they worked, and still work, was the Bible.

Indigenous people in films, it's all, like, nose flutes and panpipes and, you know, people talking to ghosts... which I hate.