Ishmael Reed Quotes

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 search for more good cotton-­growing soil in areas that today are such states as Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma was a powerful incentive to force Native Americans off their traditional lands and onto reservations, another form of violence by the “military-cotton complex”..

Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.

They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.

A people once numerous, powerful, and truly independent, found by our ancestors in the quiet and uncontrolled possession of an ample domain, gradually sinking beneath our superior policy, our arts, and our arms, have yielded their lands by successive treaties, each of which contains a solemn guarantee of the residue, until they retain no more of their formerly extensive territory than is deemed necessary for their comfortable subsistence.

By the latter part of the last century, the Indians finally realized that … treaties were real-estate deals designed to separate them from their lands.

Brothers, the white men are not friends to the Indians: at first, they only asked for land sufficient for a wigwam; now, nothing will satisfy them but the whole of our hunting grounds, from the rising to the setting sun. Brothers, the white men want more than our hunting grounds; they wish to kill our old men, women, and little ones.

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.

The occupation of America (and Columbus's arrival quite clearly was an occupation, no one can deny that) meant that the entire history of the Native Americans was rendered invisible. The land could only be occupied if it was first defined as empty. So it was defined as a wilderness, even though it had been used by native people for millennia.

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

It is amazing to me that so little is still known about the Trail of Tears or the lives of the Cherokees themselves.

I honestly think I was an Indian living in the time of the Trail of Tears. Something like that. Every time I read books about back then, I get so devastatingly sad, so, so... I feel such a deep connection to it.

When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?

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.

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.

A Century of Dishonor

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.

The red man must leave the land of his youth and find a new home in the west. The armies of the white are without number, like the sand of the sea, and ruin will follow all tribes that go to war with them.

I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization. Their rights invaded, their morals corrupted, their lands wrested from them, their customs changed, and therefore lost to the world; and they at last sunk into the earth, and the ploughshare turning the sod over their graves, and I have flown to their rescue--not of their lives or of their race (for they are "doomed" and must perish), but to the rescue of their looks and their modes, at which the acquisitive world may hurl their poison and every besom of destruction, and trample them down and crush them to death

Why does not the Great Father put his red children on wheels, so he can move them as he will?

Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.

Native American activists have been present as long as the Europeans have been working to colonize us.

The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. ...[I]t is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.