Henry Adams 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.

To-day, by reason of the immense augmentation of the American population, and the extension of their settlements throughout the entire west, covering both slopes of the Rocky Mountains, the Indian races are more seriously threatened with a speedy extermination than ever before in the history of the country.

Brothers, the white men are not friends to the Indians: at first, they only asked for land sufficient for a wigwam; now, nothing will satisfy them but the whole of our hunting grounds, from the rising to the setting sun. Brothers, the white men want more than our hunting grounds; they wish to kill our old men, women, and little ones.

I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

It is presumed that humanity dictated the original policy of the removal and concentration of the Indians in the West to save them from threatened extinction. But today, by reason of the immense augmentation of the American population, and the extension of their settlements throughout the entire West, covering both slopes of the Rocky Mountains, the Indian races are more seriously threatened with a speedy extermination than ever before in the history of the country

The aboriginal inhabitants of these countries I have regarded with the commiseration their history inspires. Endowed with the faculties and the rights of men, breathing an ardent love of liberty and independence, and occupying a country which left them no desire but to be undisturbed, the stream of overflowing population from other regions directed itself on these shores. Without power to divert or habits to contend against, they have been overwhelmed by the current or driven before it. Now reduced within limits too narrow for the hunter's state, humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts, to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence and to prepare them in time for that state of society which to bodily comforts adds the improvement of the mind and morals.

The United States has always had little sympathy for the native and has always seen settlements as a positive and civilizing force….they saw the native as a squatter with no rights.

The red man must leave the land of his youth and find a new home in the west. The armies of the white are without number, like the sand of the sea, and ruin will follow all tribes that go to war with them.

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

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

The whites didn’t really steal the land, because the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves

Indigenous peoples was messed over. It was like a tradition here. We broke every treaty with them that ever was written. I think Andrew Jackson wanted to wipe them out.

Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.

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.

This land was our land; it was taken from us illegally …. John Smith did not bring a civilization here. There was already civilization here…. We should have burned the boat and killed them. all.

They seem to me to leave the Indians in a worse condition than they found them in.

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

A people once numerous, powerful, and truly independent, found by our ancestors in the quiet and uncontrolled possession of an ample domain, gradually sinking beneath our superior policy, our arts, and our arms, have yielded their lands by successive treaties, each of which contains a solemn guarantee of the residue, until they retain no more of their formerly extensive territory than is deemed necessary for their comfortable subsistence.

The tribes which occupied the countries now constituting the Eastern States were annihilated or have melted away to make room for the whites.

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.

By the latter part of the last century, the Indians finally realized that … treaties were real-estate deals designed to separate them from their lands.

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.

The search for more good cotton-­growing soil in areas that today are such states as Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma was a powerful incentive to force Native Americans off their traditional lands and onto reservations, another form of violence by the “military-cotton complex”..

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.

Land of opportunity, land for the huddled masses where would the opportunity have been without the genocide of those Old Guard, bristling Indian tribes?