Quotes About Indigenous

To make the country ours, before and after the American Revolution, we had to displace or annihilate the indigenous people who had lived here for thousands of years. We had expanded by using deception and force, by military forays into Florida to persuade Spain to "sell" that to us (no money changed hands), by invading Mexico and taking almost half its land.

A little study of history was instructive. To make the country ours, before and after the American Revolution, we had to displace or annihilate the indigenous people who had lived here for thousands of years. We had expanded by using deception and force, by military forays into Florida to persuade Spain to "sell" that to us (no money changed hands), by invading Mexico and taking almost half its land.

For a while, the English tried softer tactics. But ultimately, it was back to annihilation. The Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus came would ultimately be reduced to less than a million.

Widely dispersed over the great land mass of the Americas, they numbered approximately 75 million people by the time Columbus came, perhaps 25 million in North America.

The United States government had signed more than four hundred treaties with Indians and violated every single one.

So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.

Half of the indigenous people living in Palestine were driven out, half of their villages and towns were destroyed, and only very few among them ever managed to return.

When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy.

I think we learned a lesson and paid a bitter price when we put troops on the ground on a long-term basis in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us support a homegrown, indigenous, and locally inspired effort to bring stability to the region.

Because the time has come, well and truly come, for all peoples of our great country, for all citizens of our great commonwealth, for all Australians - those who are indigenous and those who are not - to come together to reconcile and together build a new future for our nation.

The truth is nobody can own anything. That was an unheard-of concept among indigenous people. We invented that.

The Apology opened the opportunity for a new relationship based on mutual respect and mutual responsibility between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. Because without mutual respect and mutual responsibility, the truth is we can achieve very little.

There have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, 'Well, I don't want those folks,' even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.

as Marcos reminds us, "When Mexican government officials say land, they precede the word with an 'I buy' or 'I sell,' since for the powerful land is just a commodity. When the Indigenous say land, no word recedes it, but with it they also mean nation, mother, home, school, history, wisdom.

What we cannot expect is that the people least responsible for this crisis will foot all, or even most, of the bill. Because that is a recipe for catastrophic amounts of carbon ending up in our common atmosphere. Like the call to honor our treaties and other land-sharing agreements with Indigenous peoples, climate change is once again forcing us to look at how injustices that many assumed were safely buried in the past are shaping our shared vulnerability to global climate collapse.

Indeed the offset market has created a new class of green human rights abuses, wherein peasants and Indigenous people who venture into their traditional territories (reclassified as carbon sinks) in order to harvest plants, wood, or fish are harassed or worse...The added irony is that many people being sacrificed for the carbon market are living some of the most sustainable, low-carbon lifestyles on the planet.

Pieces of a living city cannot be auctioned off without taking into consideration that there are indigenous traditions, even if they seem odd to foreigners … . But these are our traditions and our city. For a long time we lived under the dictatorship of the Communists, but now we have found out that life under the dictatorship of business people is no better. They couldn't care less about what country they are in. —Grigory Gorin, Russian writer, 19931

No one has more legal power to halt the reckless expansion of the tar sands than the First Nations living downstream whose treaty-protected hunting, fishing, and trapping grounds have already been fouled, just as no one has more legal power to halt the rush to drill under the Arctic's melting ice than Inuit, Sami, and other northern Indigenous tribes whose livelihoods would be jeopardized by an offshore oil spill. Whether they are able to exercise those rights is another matter.

Worldwide, companies pushing for vast new coal mines and coal export terminals are increasingly being forced to similarly reckon with the unique legal powers held by Indigenous peoples.

a new form of democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn from Indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and the interconnection of all life, appears to be humanity's best shot at collective survival.

Kahnawake April 20, 1704 Temperature 56 degrees Mercy's only hope for friendship was Nistenha's cousin's daughter, Snow Walker, who was a frequent visitor and pleasant enough. But Indians were less likely to talk for the sake of talk and Snow Walker hardly talked at all. Snow Walker for a friend would be like a fence post for a friend.

We're addicted to this concept of civilization - we can't imagine living outside of it because we've had it for 10,000 years, all of what we call history. But according to archaeologists, humanity has been on this planet for millions of years in indigenous form.

Quibbles about the fact that some other European explorers touched the hemisphere earlier, or that the Indians knew it was here all along, trivialize this turning point in the history of the world.

Perhaps most valuably of all, in the document that has come to be known as the Annals of Juan Bautista, we have the voluminous words of a group of indigenous artisans, church painters, and scribes who had close connections to both pipiltin (noble families) and macehualtin (commoners). These preserved their own thoughts, as well as many statements that others made in their hearing. They crafted a full work of history, a xiuhpohualli, as they understood the term.