Sherman Alexie Quotes

I think for a lot of so-called post-colonial peoples, there's a feeling of not being quite legitimate, of not being pure enough.

Like all of Latin America, Mexico after independence in 1821 turned its back on a triple heritage: on the Spanish heritage, because we were newly liberated colonies, and on our Indian and black heritages, because we considered them backward and barbaric. We looked towards France, England and the U.S., to become progressive democratic republics.

Filipinos are not worse than any other colonized people except that our colonization was a little longer, and the independence movement was always dictated in political terms, never in social ones. We borrowed terms, but we didn't understand them.

Part of the process of colonization (cultural conquest and domination) is the replacement of the celebrated drugs of the colonized with the celebrated drugs of the colonizer.

I would rather die as an Indian than live as a white man.

Mistaken identity, of course, has been the province of much postcolonial fiction. An important feature of this writing is the manner in which misrecognition has haunted all cognition.

I wanted to write a story about colonization and about Hawaii. I went to college right at the height of identity politics, and that's how I always read 'The Tempest,' for example.

And so I'm saying that, yes, colonialism was terrible, and I describe it as a legacy of wars, but we ought to be moving away from that by now.

Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.

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.

Personally, I regard myself as an intellectual 'rebel,' kicking against the 'old colonialism-imperialism paradigm' which has landed Africa in a conundrum.

We French are colonized by the cruelest master of all. We are colonized by our past.

Then came the conquest. We were conquered people, our hearts set on surviving in some small way on a continent that had become Anglo-Saxon.

These white people think this country belongs to them—they don't realize that they are only in charge right now because there's more of them than there are of us. The whole country changed with only a handful of raggedly-ass pilgrims that came over here in the 1500s. And it can take a handful of raggedy-ass Indians to do the same, and I intend to be one of those raggedy-ass Indians.

The thing that is being lost is heritage. In Africa, religion and advertisement and television and media hype have gotten Africans to where they are convinced psychologically that their own heritage is heathen, pagan, barbaric, savage, primitive.

If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans.

The easiest way to subjugate a people is to erase a culture. I've seen it in war zones.

The status of 'native' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.

In Scotland, we're a colony in more ways than one. So when directors come up to work, there's a very particular way they want Scotland to look like and to behave like.

The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization.

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.

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.

I always see America as really belonging to the Native Americans. Even though I'm American, I still feel like a visitor in my own country.

When I was growing up, I despised Irishness. I felt our music, our television and our books were just poor imitations of what came out of Britain and America. I was all set to abandon it entirely.

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.