Andrew Jackson Quotes

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.

Sober-thoughted men, far from the scenes of danger, in the security of cities and populous regions, can talk of exterminating measures, and discuss the policy of extirpating thousands… in a little while, the remaining tribes will go the way that so many have gone before. They will vanish like a vapor from the face of the earth – their very history will be lost in forgetfulness.

The whites introduced among them [the Indians] the fatal and exterminating conditions of modern life.

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

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

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.

Day and night cannot dwell together. The Red Man has ever fled the approach of the White Man, as the morning mist flees before the morning sun.

'Avatar' imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent.

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.

We’re [Native Americans] portrayed as either the noble savage or the ignoble savage. In most people’s minds, we only exist in the 19th century.

I hope to God you will not ask me to go to any other country except my own. It may turn out to be another Bosque Redondo.

I will say that I like an Indian better dead than living. I have never in my life seen a good Indian (and I have seen thousands) except when I have seen a dead Indian.

Who came to this country first—the white man, didn’t he? That’s who made this country great.

When the white man came we had the land and they had the Bibles; now they have the land and we have the Bibles.

We Beate the Savages outt of the Island burned their howses Ransaked their Temple Tooke down the Corpes of their deade kings from out of their Toambes And caryed away their pearles.... The Salvages still contineweinge their mallice Ageinste us.

Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.

Civilization or death to all American savages!

The Indians were the original occupants of the lands we now posses. They have been driven from place to place ... In many instances, when they had settled down upon lands assigned to them by compact and begun to support themselves by their own labor, they were rudely jostled off and thrust into the wilderness again. Many, if not most, of our Indian wars have had their origin in broken promises and acts of injustice on our part.

White men come in like a river. They told us that they only wanted a little land. But we knew better.

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.

If anyone can say 'go back,' it's Native Americans. My Pueblo ancestors, despite being targeted at every juncture - despite facing famine and drought - still inhabit this country today. But indigenous people aren't asking anyone to go back to where they came from.

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.

'The Secret River' began because, at the age of 50, I suddenly realised I knew nothing about how my own family had got its foothold in Australia.

They weren't immigrating to some existing society; indeed, they often did whatever they could do to destroy whatever existed here in the way of Indian society.

We, as Americans, at least - I mean, I love my country - but we're so self-righteous sometimes, in terms of, like, our nationality, our country. But we're people from somewhere else; the true 'Americans' are the original peoples. It's funny, but we're a very territorial species.