Quotes About Indians

Deerfield, Massachusetts February 29, 1704 Temperature 0 degrees In a dark and twisted grove of spruce, a place Eben would have avoided in summer at high noon, the Indians stopped for the night. If he had ever seen a place where an evil spirit would dwell, this was it.

So dominant did the Indians become over vast regions of East Africa that the rupee became the prevailing currency in much of that region.

Indians had been both demonized and romanticized in twentieth-century American lore, but it had taken the protest culture of the '60s to bring them to the fore as a group of Americans who had long been denied their land, their heritage and their basic civil rights.

Cave paintings done by Indians in America seem to clearly depict a dinosaur. Since scientists accept the mammoth drawings done by Indians, why not the dinosaur-like drawings? However, the evolutionary indoctrination that man didn't live at the same time as dinosaurs preclude evolutionary scientists even considering these drawings as dinosaurs that lived at the same time as the Indians.

There is a dignity about the social intercourse of old Indians which reminds me of a stroll through a winter forest ." — Frederick Remington

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

Indians hate to drive with license plates on their cars and would like to remove them, presumably so they'll get fewer speeding tickets (although many Indians ignore all tickets on the grounds that they are not valid documents, having never been agreed to by treaty).

I related my impressions of La Paz, its purple mountains, its hermetic Indians, and its air, so thin that your lungs are always on the verge of filling with foam and your mind with hallucinations.

Having now reached a point where danger might be reasonably apprehended from strolling war parties of Indians, spies were kept in advance and strict diligence observed in the duty of sentinels.

I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit.

Atrocities were expected in both European and Native conflicts. And yet, the English had to admit that compared to what was typical of European wars, the Indians had conducted themselves with surprising restraint.

The biggest advantage of the area was that it had already been cleared by the Indians. And yet nowhere could they find evidence of any recent Native settlements. The Pilgrims saw the eerie vacancy of this place as a miraculous gift from God. But if a miracle had indeed occurred at Plymouth, it had taken the form of a holocaust almost beyond human imagining.

When the rivers receded, they exposed a wide strip of bottomland. Into this land a group of Indians coalesced sometime before 800 A.D. Nobody knows what these people called themselves or which language they spoke. They were not "Cahokians

In the past, they had shaped the landscape mainly with fire; the ax came out only for garden plots of marshelder and little barley. As maize swept in, Indians burned and cleared thousands of acres of land, mainly in river valleys. As in Cahokia, floods and mudslides rewarded them.

Within a few centuries, the Indians of the eastern forest reconfigured much of their landscape from a patchwork game park to a mix of farmland and orchards. Enough forest was left to allow for hunting, but agriculture was an increasing presence. The result was a new "balance of nature.

Amazonia was not a dead end where the environment ineluctably strangled cultures in their cradles. It was a source of social and technological innovation of continental importance. By about four thousand years ago the Indians of the lower Amazon were growing crops—at least 138 of them, according to a recent tally. The staple then as now was manioc (or cassava, as it is sometimes called), a hefty root that Brazilians roast, chop, fry, ferment, and grind into an amazing variety of foods.

Sahagún is known as the first American anthropologist, for he labored for decades to understand the Indians he sought to convert. With other missionaries, he amassed an archive on the Mexica and their neighbors—dynastic histories, dictionaries of native languages, descriptions of customs, collections of poetry and drama, galleries of paintings and sculpture—unequaled by that on any other Indian group, even the Inka.

Noble Savage. Positive or negative, in both images Indians lacked what social scientists call agency—they were not actors in their own right, but passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way.

Indians as people who never changed their environment from its original wild state. Because history is change, they were people without history.

Like Las Casas, Bancroft believed that Indians had existed in societies without change—except that Bancroft regarded this timelessness as an indication of sloth, not innocence.

Four decades later, Samuel Eliot Morison, twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, closed his two-volume European Discovery of America with the succinct claim that Indians had created no lasting monuments or institutions.

In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.

In Deloria's opinion, archaeology is mainly about easing white guilt. Determining that Indians superseded other people fits neatly into this plan. If we're only thieves who stole our land from someone else, Deloria said, then they can say, 'Well, we're just the same. We're all immigrants here, aren't we?

after the war Massachusetts sold more than a thousand Indians into slavery—perhaps one out of every ten native adults in the region.