Native American Oppression Quotes

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

It was like a complicit - there was complicity between the churches and the state in taking care of the 'Indian problem,' solving the 'Indian problem,' and trying to change who we were.

In Texas, the rangers were established on an ad hoc basis in the 1820s to protect the settlers making inroads into Spanish borderlands. Soon, Mexicans and Mexican Americans replaced Native Americans as the prime target of ranger repression.

The Americans will never solve the Indian problem till the Indian is extinct. They have treated them after a fashion which has intensified their treachery and 'devilry' as enemies, and as friends reduces them to a degraded pauperism, devoid of the very first elements of civilization.

In the past 190 years, the U.S. government has tried every possible way to get rid of the troublesome Indian problem he feels he has on his hands. First the government tried extinction through destruction – where money was paid for the scalps of every dead Indian. Then the government tried mass relocation… Then the government tried assimilation… The termination was tried by issuing forced patents in fee to Indian land owners – land was taken out of the trust relationship with the U.S. government and an unrestricted patent in fee was issued to the Indian whether he wanted it or not or whether he understood it or not.

Take any country that has laws against hate crimes, inspiring hatred and genocide and so on. The first thing they would do is ban the Old Testament. There's nothing like it in the literary canon that exalts genocide, to that extent. And it's not a joke either. Like where I live, New England, the people who liberated it from the native scourge were religious fundamentalist lunatics, who came waving the holy book, declaring themselves to be the children of Israel who are killing the Amalekites, like God told them.

I see, or at least it appears to me, that there is some concerted effort to discredit them, and categorize the American Indian Movement as some adverse entity, as opposed to it being a manifestation of the desperations of a whole race of people.

Is a citizen of the United States to remain under the barbarous lash of cruel and unrelenting savages?

Your God loves your people and hates mine; he folds his strong arms lovingly around the white man and leads him as a father leads his infant son, but he has forsaken his red children; he makes your people wax strong every day, and soon they will fill the land; while my people are ebbing away like a fast-receding tide, that will never flow again. The white man's God cannot love his red children or he would protect them. They seem to be orphans who can look nowhere for help.