Chiparopai Quotes

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

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

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?”

Secularism is the experience of the Western culture and thought. Insisting on spreading it to places where the underlying intellectual background, and the political and social reasons for its appearance are lacking, is clearly a mistake, regardless of being desirable or not.

There must be in their [the Indian's] social bond, something singularly captivating, and far superior to anything to be boasted among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans.

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

No like Indian school for my people. Indian boy go to Indian school, stay like Indian; go to white school, he like white man. Me want white school so my children get educated like whites.

I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. … I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.

We have taken so much from your culture, I wish you had taken something from ours...For there were some beautiful and good things within it. Perhaps now that the time has come, We are fearful that what you take will be lost.... I shall grab the instruments of the white man's success: His education, his skills, and society.

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.

It is urgently necessary that we recognize our own limitations as a moral and ideological force among the Asiatic peoples. Our political philosophy and our patterns for living have very little applicability to masses of people in Asia. They may be all right for us, with our highly developed political traditions running back into the centuries and with our peculiarly favorable geographic position; but they are simply not practical or helpful, today, for most of the people in Asia.

Our brother (many of the Jews of the Middle East) has gone to Europe and to the West [and] come back a Russified Jew, a Polish Jew, a German Jew, an English Jew. He has come back with a totally different conception of things. Western and not Eastern…, coming back with imperialistic ideas, with reactionary or revolutionary ideas… he is not the old cousin, and we do not extend to him a very good welcome

I cannot see that everything the white man does is to be copied.

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.

Having uncritically accepted [Western] culture in everything, we now find we have lost our hold on the autonomous ideals of the Japanese race.

[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.

What will remain of our cultural identity if audiovisual Europe consists of ... sitting in front of Japanese TV sets showing American programs.

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.

Europe, mourning the loss of its century-old supremacy, either resorts to insulation (by quotas and “cultural exception” clauses) or seeks solace in the disparagement of American culture as vulgar, inauthentic, or stolen.

Indians should associate with English youths in a mixed school, and should be removed entirely from native influences.

Identity politics includes the assertion of difference from ‘the West’, and the defenses against cultural invasions and ‘pollution’ by Western styles. The insistent emphasis on this theme is accompanied by its flagrant but largely unacknowledged subversion in everyday activity and styles, from dress, to food to music and entertainment, to media consumptions, to public spaces and general consumption patterns. While McDonald’s is boycotted because it is American, native fast food chains emerge which are direct imitations; the boycott of Coca Cola spawns Mecca Cola.

I am not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture - rule of law, universal suffrage - is preferable to Arab culture. That's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic.

To those who say derogatory things about colonialism, I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing.

Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization--one for home consumption and one for the heathen market?