Quotes About Colonization

None of Europe's modern nations are genuinely native.

Native American activists have been present as long as the Europeans have been working to colonize us.

It's bad enough . . . when a country gets colonized, but when the people do as well! That's the end, really, that's the end.

Nyasha . . . became quite annoyed and delivered a lecture on the dangers of assuming that Christian ways were progressive ways. 'It's bad enough, she said severely, 'when a country gets colonised, but when the people do as well! That's the end, really, that's the end.

If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie. Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were moral. We didn't lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn't think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did.

In other words, America was founded by a nutty religious cult.

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

The Requerimiento and Its Interpreters" by Lewis Hanke in Revista de Historia de América.

American natives were thought to be a simple, malleable people who, once they came to understand the benefits of European faith and civilization, would embrace them.

These people who came west to "civilize" the heathen—what made them decide to do that? To me it's completely irrational to go into somebody else's country and try to tell them how to think, how to pray, how to live, how to raise their children. —Roberta Conner, director, Tamástslikt Cultural Institute

In those days, when Indians killed whites, it was a "massacre"; it was a "battle" when whites killed Indians.

Realising that Mauritius could be a valuable port of call for Dutch ships Heemskerck put a rooster and some hens ashore and planted orange and lemon seeds, invoking 'the Almighty God's blessing that He may lend His power to make them multiply and grow for the benefit of those who will visit the island after us'.

Nadie puede decir cuál habría sido nuestra historia si tanta tribu no hubiese sido aniquilada. Los españoles decían que debían civilizarnos, hacernos abandonar la barbarie. Pero ellos, con barbarie, nos dominaron, nos despoblaron. En pocos años hicieron más sacrificios humanos que nosotros en el tiempo largo que transcurrió desde las primeras festividades.

Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India—which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, "It could have been worse—he could have thought he was in Turkey.

Clearly, Columbus never "discovered" America, in either sense of that word. The people who knew it were already here.

The space age is thirty thousand years old. Men have moved from star to star in search of wealth and glory; the Gaean Reach encompasses a perceptible fraction of the galaxy. Trade routes thread space like capillaries in living tissue; thousands of worlds have been colonized, each different from every other, each working its specific change upon men who live there. Never has the human race been less homogenous.

The white settlers of St. Louis nicknamed their settlement "Mound City" in recognition of the twenty-six Indian mounds they found there, but those mounds have since been cleared away to make room for the modern city.

Tobacco was the first of the New World drugs to be widely accepted in the Old World, and the European zest for it played a major role in opening North America to colonization. Contemporary civic mythology of the United States overlooks this role of America as drug supplier to the world.

When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.

Thursday's great event was Aimé Cesaire's speech in the afternoon, dealing with the relation between colonization and culture.

In them days, it was just still not illegal to kill an Indian. If you killed an Indian, you'd be very unfortunate if you got probation - most of them were released immediately.

Civilized men arrived in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible.

Man, the cutting edge of terrestrial life, has no rational alternative but to expand the environmental and resource base beyond Earth.

We did not know there were other people besides the Indian until about one hundred winters ago, when some men with white faces came to our country.