Wilma Mankiller Quotes

I already knew, from church, that this place was raped and pillaged by Spaniards and the Pilgrims. "Don't sit here and try to tell me that they broke bread together, brother.

The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

Haven't two hundred years of failed missionary work overseas taught anybody anything? You can't convert people to anything - whether religion, or something as inane as our flicks.

My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture.

The white race seems to me to blame in saying that all the reason for its interference in Africa is the improvement of the native African, and then to start on altering African institutions without in the least understanding them. It seems to me that the leading men among the European educated Africans have depended too much on the religious side of the question.

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

People in the Middle East do not hate us for our freedom. They do not hate us for our lifestyle. They hate us because we have spent many years attempting to force them to emulate our lifestyle.

History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder, so when you read that, for example, David Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls, you might be forgiven for thinking that there was nobody around the Falls until Livingstone arrived on the scene

So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed, educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land.

I'm sure you're gonna be taught, if you haven't already, that the people that were here, the Native Americans were beautiful, they were wonderful, they were at one with nature, and these evil white Europeans like Columbus came in and killed them and took them, imprisoned them, stole what was theirs, took it for ourselves.

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.

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.

Americans intentionally deride what people in the Old World hold sacred.

[Describing the Croatan Indians the English explorers met in Sir Walter Raleigh's first expedition to Virginia: ... very handsome and goodly people, and in their behavior as mannerly and civil as any in Europe.

The white people … are trying to make us over into their image

Unlike more traditional conquerors, we are not content merely to subdue others: We insist that they be like us.

When you start exporting ideas, philosophy, behavior, products, ways of living, it becomes an assault on the culture. Americans have to understand that.

... there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them.

All these shortcomings stem from the laziness of the Cambodians [Khmer]… teach them agriculture. As for language, they should be taught to speak Vietnamese. Our dress and table manners must also be followed. If there is any out-dated or barbarous custom that can be simplified or repressed, then do so.

We must save America from the missionary idea that you must get the whole world on to the American way of life. This is really a big world danger.

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.

Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at understanding the people they were governing.

So ubiquitous is Western influence that most of the time it is no longer seen as an alien element intruding into non-Western societies. It is an influence that has become integrated into the mind and body, the heart and soul of the non-Western human being. Western dominance, in other words, has become normal, it has become natural. By making it so natural and so normal to be 'Western', the centres of power in the West have achieved their ultimate triumph.

Now we already know that the white supremacist Western scholars are going to object and oppose any evidence that shows an Afrikan influence on Greek civilization, or any other part of Europe. Their basic premise is to give Afrikan people credit for nothing

...They [Indians] should be made familiar with the lives of great and good men and women in American history, and be taught to feel a pride in all their great achievements. They should hear little or nothing of the 'wrongs of the Indians,' and of the injustice of the white race. If their unhappy race is alluded to, it should be to contrast it with the better future that is within their grasp.