Native Exploitation Quotes

Went to the White drawing-room to receive three Chiefs from Bechuanaland,…. One of their chief objects in coming was to obtain a permit from the Government to suppress strong drink, which demoralises and kills the poor natives. Alas! everywhere this terrible evil, which has such a fatal effect on the population, seems to follow civilization!

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.

See them coming into our towns with their rum! See them offering it to us with persuasive kindness. Hear them cry, “Drink! Drink!” and when we are drunk, and act like the crazed, behold these good white, these man of a benevolent race, standing by, laughing among themselves, and saying, “Oh, what fools! What great fools the Shawanese are!” But who made them fools? Who are the cause of their madness?

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

What is still more to our shame as civilized Christians, we debauch their morals already too prone to vice, and we introduce among them wants and perhaps disease which they never before knew and which serve only to disturb that happy tranquility which they and their forefathers enjoyed. If anyone denies the truth of this assertion, let him tell me what the natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.

The white traders keep these poor Indians continually under the force of liquor. They entirely estrange the affections of the Indians from the English.

When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

To say that certainly America was very lucky to get a large amount of land, and the native Indians were extremely unlucky to have white men coming over here, is one thing. But to say that the whole of the American prosperity was based on exploiting the indigenous population would be a great mistake.

Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.