Quotes from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Corporal punishment was unknown in Indigenous families but was routine in the boarding schools. Often punishment was inflicted for being "too Indian"—the darker the child, the more often and severe the beatings. The children were made to feel that it was criminal to be Indian.26

Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants.

We can think of the land bridge theory as a master narrative that for a couple of centuries has served multiple ideological agendas, lasting despite decades of growing evidence that casts doubt on the way the story has been perpetuated in textbooks and popular media.

The astronomical number of firearms owned by U.S. civilians, with the Second Amendment considered a sacred mandate, is also intricately related to militaristic culture and white nationalism. The militias referred to in the Second Amendment were intended as a means for white people to eliminate Indigenous communities in order to take their land, and for slave patrols to control Black people.

Thus was born an ideology: the belief in the inherent value of gold despite its relative uselessness in reality.

With traumatized Navajos watching, government agents shot sheep and goats and left them to rot or cremated them after dousing them with gasoline. At one site alone, thirty-five goats were shot and left to rot. One hundred fifty thousand goats and fifty thousand sheep were killed in this manner. Oral history interviews tell of the pressure tactics on the Navajos, including arrests of those who resisted, and express bitterness over the destruction of their livestock.

These are symptoms, and there are many more, of a deeply troubled society, and they are not new.

The late Native historian Jack Forbes always stressed that while living persons are not responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in, which is a product of that past. Assuming this responsibility provides a means of survival and liberation. Everyone and everything in the world is affected, for the most part negatively, by US dominance and intervention, often violently through direct military means or through proxies. It is an urgent concern.

Also part of the Christian colonizers' outlook was a belief in white supremacy. As an 1878 US Protestant evangelical hymn suggests—"Are your garments spotless? / Are they white as snow? / Are they washed in the blood of the lamb?"—whiteness as an ideology involves much more than skin color, although skin color has been and continues to be a key component of racism in the United States.

have grown up with racism all my life. When I was a child, watching cowboys and Indians on TV, I would root for the cavalry, not the Indians. It was that bad. I was that far toward my own destruction."23

Uncle Claudie Windham's life has weathered to the color of wisdom.

When Sauk leader Black Hawk led his people back from a winter stay in Iowa to their homeland in Illinois in 1832 to plant corn, the squatter settlers there claimed they were being invaded, bringing in both Illinois militia and federal troops. The Black Hawk War that is narrated in history texts was no more than a slaughter of Sauk farmers. The Sauks tried to defend themselves but were starving when Black Hawk surrendered under a white flag.

It [this book] aims to confront the violence implicit in U.S. society from the moment of its conception, and the various narratives and forces that have taken shape to deny the consequences of that violence by popularizing and commercializing it.

Washington and the other founders of the United States designed a governmental and economic structure to serve the private property interests of each and all of the primary actors, nearly all of them slavers and land speculators.

The United States was founded as a capitalist state and an empire on conquered land, with capital in the form of slaves, hence the term chattel slavery; this was exceptional in the world and has remained exceptional. The capitalist firearms industry was among the first successful modern corporations. Gun proliferation and gun violence today are among its legacies.

Hawkins' mission was to instill Euro-American values and practices in Indigenous peoples - including the profit motive, privatization of property, debt, accumulation of wealthy by a few, and slavery - allowing settlers to gain the land and assimilate the Muskogees.

So I realized it was crucial to make the reality and significance of indigenous people's survival clear throughout the book. Indigenous survival as peoples is due to centuries of resistance and storytelling passed through the generations and I sought to demonstrate that this survival is dynamic, not passive. Surviving genocide by whatever means - is resistence.

As Cherokees fled, abandoning their towns and fields, the soldiers seized, killed, and scalped women and children, taking no prisoners.51

The Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything

The affirmation of democracy requires the denial of colonialism, but denying it does not make it go away.

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism—the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft.

Our nation was born in genocide.… We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. —Martin Luther King Jr.

Columbus Day is still a federal holiday despite Columbus never having set foot on any territory ever claimed by the United States.

Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities. An example from 1873 is typical, with General William T. Sherman writing, "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children … during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.