Paul Keating 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.

Treat the native as a child and withdraw the franchise.

It seems as though you white folks bring poison to us Indians. Sickness comes with you, and hundreds of us die.

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.

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

American Indian and Alaska Native people suffer from unacceptable and disproportionately high levels of violence, which can have lasting impacts on families and communities.

I cannot forget a conversation that I had with an elderly couple from the tribe. They asked me whether I would kill them after I had finished. When I asked them why they asked that, they replied, Because you white men always do!

Plans are all based on the assumption that the land belongs to the white man and that the native was designed to be the settler’s servant.

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.

No acid ever worked more mechanically on a vegetable fiber than the white man acted on the Indian. As the line of American settlements approached, the nearest Indian tribes withered away.

The biggest of all Indian problems is the white man.

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.

They are like any other class of people. They like to defend their rights. I think the Indians have been more sinned against than they have sinned.

We shall never be able to think rationally about our own survival until we have the courage to say, in our own minds: We are Americans, White men of the West. This is our country because we took it from the Indians. And we have an unquestionable right to this country so long as we have the power and will to defend it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Cherokees tried to do everything within the law and wished only to live in peace on their own lands. Yet they were cheated out of their birthright and treated as if they were less than human.

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.

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

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.

Violence and irrationality were so long and thoroughly cultivated among the Irish, and so perfectly ingrained into their nature, that modern civilization has as yet been unable to extract the virus.