Lemn Sissay Quotes

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.

Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.

Exploitation was rampant before statehood, and various factions actively tried to eradicate the roots of Hawaiian culture in the process of converting the natives to European religious beliefs. Some of the results can never be undone. We try to honor what is left.

The hostility to all Indian ways and culture that characterized so much of Government policy now appears to have been a mistake.

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

What colonialism does is cause an identity crisis about one's own culture.

When someone tries to take over a country or a culture, they destroy the art.

I hate the anglicanisation of culture, the idea that culture is genteel. It's not genteel.

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

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.

Among our many crimes as an imperialistic exploiter of other nations' cultures, stealing their movies ranks lower than selling them cigarettes but higher than killing their game. If you've seen big stupid American versions of France's 'Three Men and a Cradle' or, recently, Japan's 'Shall We Dance?,' you can only mutter: 'Guilty, guilty, guilty.'

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

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

We have not invaded anyone. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them.

Step by step a powerful and enterprising race has driven them back from the Atlantic to the West until at last there is scarcely a spot of ground upon which the Indians have any certainty of maintaining a permanent abode.

The history of colonisation cannot disappear.

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.

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.

We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture.

The native American has been generally despised by his white conquerors for his poverty and simplicity.

I have met Aborigines younger than me who used to hide every time anyone official came round their camp for fear of being taken away.

I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.

You get people talking about being worried about their art, and dances... their culture being wiped out or taken over, and yet these same people are taking advantage of their people to use them as cheap labour.

White domination is so complete that even American Indian children want to be cowboys. It's as if Jewish children wanted to play Nazis.

To look upon the massacre of our fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, and if we speak we are called savages ….