Chiparopai Quotes

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

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.

Whenever the white man treats an Indian as they treat each other, then we will have no more wars.

Simply put, 'Redskins' is offensive to Indian people. Whether it is considered offensive by non-Indians is not the issue. It is offensive to us.

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.

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.

It is indispensably necessary that they be placed in positions [reservations] where they can be controlled and finally compelled by sheer necessity to resort to agricultural labor or starve. Considering, as the untutored Indian does, that labor is a degradation, and that there is nothing worthy of his ambitions but prowess in war, success in the chase, and eloquence in council, it is only under such circumstances that his haughty pride can be subdued, and his wild energies trained to the more ennobling pursuits of civilized life.

These fears, held by indigenous Fijians, must not be ridiculed but understood and addressed. In the final analysis it will be counterproductive to impose democracy on people who have yet to fully understand how it will sit against everything they believe in.

If I agree to dispose of any part of our land to the white people I would feel guilty of taking food away from our children's mouths, and I do not wish to be that mean.

The white people should go back to Europe, and the country should be returned to the American Indians. This is the future I would like to see for the so-called United States.

I don't like this romanticization of Indian people in which Indian people are looked at as spiritual saviors, as people who have always taken care of the land. We're human beings. But I think different cultures have developed different aspects of humanness.

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

We owe the Aboriginal peoples a debt that is four centuries old. It is their turn to become full partners in developing an even greater Canada. And the reconciliation required may be less a matter of legal texts than of attitudes of the heart.

You say, for example, “Why do the Indians till the ground and live as we do?” May we not ask with equal propriety, “Why do not the white people hunt and live as we do?”

But who is it that has made my people drunk? Indians cannot make whiskey. Indians do not sell it. But white people make it and bring it among us. It is they that have brought the evil upon us and we cannot remove it. The white people can remove it and now we call upon them to do it. We ask them to take their whiskey and run away, and leave us sober as they found us.

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.

Convinced of its soundness, I feel it consistent with pure morality to lead the Indians towards becoming citizens, to familiarize them to the idea that it is for their interest to cede lands at times to the United States, and for us to procure gratifications to our citizens from time to time by new acquisitions of land

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 rule of liberty that all government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self government. We govern the Indians without their consent, we govern our territories without their consent, we govern our children without their consent.

The proper treatment of the original occupants of this land—the Indians is one deserving of careful study. I will favor any course toward them which tends to their civilization and ultimate citizenship.

All preceding experiments for the improvement of the Indians have failed. It seems now to be an established fact that they cannot live in contact with a civilized community and prosper.

It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the states; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community …. To save him from this alternative, or perhaps utter annihilation, the general government kindly offers him a new home, and proposes to pay the whole expense of his removal and settlement.

They [the American Indians] have claims on the magnanimity and, I may add, on the justice of this nation which we must all fill. We should become their real benefactors; we should perform the office of their Great Father, the endearing title which they emphatically give to the Chief Magistrate of our Union.

Even though our non-Indian friends may cherish (the Declaration of Independence), I would say that we probably meet it with some mixed emotions among the Indian people. I would hope that during my lifetime, that people of all races would live up to the statements in the document.

[Let us] Hope that no unjust means are used to deceive and mislead the Indians in a matter of so much interest to them.