Native Oppression Quotes

I do not admit... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race... has come in and taken its place.

In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man's values.

The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them.

They tell us they want to civilize us. They lie. They want to kill us.

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

In Brazil, the history of the interaction between blancos and indios - whites and Indians - often reads like an extended epitaph. Tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated.

Bolivia's majority Indian population was always excluded, politically oppressed and culturally alienated. Our national wealth, our raw materials, was plundered. Indios were once treated like animals here. In the 1930s and 40s, they were sprayed with DDT to kill the vermin on their skin and in their hair whenever they came into the city.

I am against the fact that a settler minority should impose an entire system of values on an indigenous people.

The Indians had to be either killed, or herded into reservations, which were essentially concentration camps, and forgotten. Their history had to be absolutely obliterated so that we could believe that we were living on virgin soil.

Plans are all based on the assumption that the land belongs to the white man and that the native was designed to be the settler’s servant.

The Ocaina and many of the other indigenous peoples of the Amazon were nearly wiped out during the rubber boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Outsiders came into the jungle, enslaved the tribes to harvest the rubber and killed those that resisted.

Later, a large band of Christians mounted an attack on this native lord, butchering him along with vast numbers of his people and taking all the survivors into slavery, where they duly perished, so that today not a trace remains of what was previously a community with dominion over an area of some thirty leagues.

Meanwhile “our” troops during the past month, have been again at their congenial occupation of slaughtering native children and burning villages

I am one of the forgotten (in this land), one of the faceless ones, a Native American. I am One from whom this Land was stolen through the use of Deceit, through Lies, through Ravage, through Rape, through Pillage. I am one of those who knows the degradation continues...

Paris is in a tranquil state; the infernal cabal that besieges me appears guided by foreigners. This idea consoles me, for nothing is so painful as being persecuted by one's own fellow-citizens.