Paul Martin Quotes

What we do to our native Australians, our own indigenous people, is nothing short of horrific.

It was like a complicit - there was complicity between the churches and the state in taking care of the 'Indian problem,' solving the 'Indian problem,' and trying to change who we were.

Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.

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.

Canada, Australia and New Zealand have apologised for their treatment of native peoples.

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.

Most governments in Latin America have failed to recognize the rights of indigenous people and their right to their own traditional territories.

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

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.

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.

Civilization, or extinction, has been the fate of all people who have found themselves in the track of the advancing Whites

For the good of the souls of said cannibals … the greater the number sent over to Spain the better … They [the Caribe Indians] are a wild people, fit for any work, well proportioned and very intelligent, and who … will be better than any other kind of slaves.

The white man says there is freedom and justice for all. We have had "freedom and justice," and that is why we have been almost exterminated. We shall not forget this.

Treat the native as a child and withdraw the franchise.

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.

This present race of Indians will never be converted. It mattereth not whether they kill one another off or if somebody else does it. And as for our sending missionaries among them to convert them, it is of no use

The only good Indian is a dead Indian.

You cannot turn the clock back, you cannot give the island of Manhattan back to the indigenous, but on the other hand, you can ensure that the indigenous can maintain their way of life.

[W]e can be certain that, though preached to more than fifty years, if they [the Aztecs] were now left alone, if the Spanish nation were not to intercede, I am certain that in less than fifty years there would be no trace of the preaching which has been done for them.

If you take a look at the breaches of rights, whether it's the underfunding of education or health care, and all these issues which accentuate the poverty of Canada's indigenous people, and the lack of reaction to them - it becomes clear that if Canadians understood what's at stake, they wouldn't stand for it.

Australians have made a lot of mistakes, we have treated Aboriginal people very badly, and we have our share of racists and bigots.

It is easy to decry the nature of ethnic politics in this country. We are hostages to history and the ethnic compartmentalization that began in the colonial era

In Brazil, the history of the interaction between blancos and indios - whites and Indians - often reads like an extended epitaph. Tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated.

Most Canadians previously had no idea what went on in the residential schools. You tell Canadians the last one closed in 1996, they are appalled. So now that Canadians are aware of residential schools, you'd think there would be a huge impetus for progress. It hasn't, and that's amazing.