Sound Bites -- Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio commentary)
161-170 of 333 Sound Bites. [show all]
< 151-160 161-170 171-180 181-190 191-200 >
161) Truth, knowledge, power -- the three pieces of the puzzle whose prize is empire. (Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 77. )
162) [I]f the happiness of the mass of people can be secured at the expense of a little tempest now and then, or even a little blood, it will be a precious purchase. (Thomas Jefferson, qtd. in Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 266. )
163) [Aristotle is] a gentile burning in Hell, whose doctrine we do not need to follow except in so far as it conforms with Christian truth. (Bartolome de Las Casas, qtd. in Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1959: 16. )
164) [. . .] And We do hereby strictly forbid, on Pain of our Displeasure, all our loving Subjects from making any Purchases or Settlements whatever, or taking Possession of any of the Lands above reserved without our especial leave and Licence for that Purpose first obtained. [. . .] if at any Time any of the Said Indians should be inclined to dispose of the said Lands, the same shall be Purchased only for Us, in our Name, at some public Meeting or Assembly of the said Indians, to be held for that Purpose by the Governor or Commander in Chief of our Colony respectively within which they shall lie [. . .]. (Royal Proclamation of 1763 )
165) What stronger right need the European settlers advance to the country than this? Have not whole nations of uninformed savages been made acquainted with a thousand imperious wants and indispensible comforts, of which they were before wholly ignorant -- Have they not been literally hunted and smoked out of the dens and lurking places of ignorance and infidelity, and absolutely scourged into the right path. Have not the temporal things, the vain baubles and filthy lucre of this world, which were too apt to engage their worldly and selfish thoughts, been benevolently taken from them; and have they not in lieu thereof, been taught to set their affections on things above? (Washington Irving, History of New York. New York: 1809 [Book I, chap v]. )
166) In Johnson v. M'Intosh, Chief Justice Marshall performs ideological alchemy. He "marshals" together all the ingredients of medieval conquest discourse theretofore used to justify removal of native peoples from their U.S. homelands and, recognizing that none, singly or in tandem, truly pass legal muster, applies to them the pressure of manifest destiny to transform them into a "new and different rule" of conquest. He justifies the new rule essentially by paying native peoples the back-handed compliment of being too "brave [. . .] high spirited [and] fierce" to conquer by any legitimate means. Here is where the truly virulent damage of M'Intosh was injected into United States American ideology, for here, Marshall codifies a "new rule" of justifiable deceit. (Patricia Engle, Lehigh University ) (hear commentary by Patricia Engle)
167) Harriot [Thomas Harriot, chief scientist, whose special duty it was to study the Indian culture] was already learning as much Algonquian as he could from Manteo and Wanchese. By the time the expedition reached its destination, he would be in sufficient command of the language to make extensive inquiries among the local people so as to enable him to compile a full discourse on their society and artifacts on his return. (David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985: 49. )
168) [. . . ]the interest of the states in the soil of the Indians within their boundaries [. . . .] [i]s nothing more than what was assumed at the first settlement of the country, to wit, a right of conquest or of purchase, exclusively of all competitors within certain defined limits [. . .]. If the interest in Georgia was nothing more than a pre-emptive right, how could that be called a fee-simple, which was nothing more than a power to acquire a fee-simple by purchase, when the proprietors should be pleased to sell?" (from Justice Johnson's dissent in Fletcher v. Peck, 1810: <http://laws.findlaw.com/us/10/87.html> )
169) The title of the Indians was not treated as a right of property and dominion, but as a mere right of occupancy. As infidels, heathens, and savages, they were not allowed to possess the prerogatives belonging to absolute, sovereign, and independent nations. The territory over which they wandered, and which they used for this temporary and fugitive purposes, was, in respect to Christians, deemed as if it were inhabited only by brute animals. (Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, Commentaries, 152, reprinted in M. Lindley, The Acquisition and Government of Background Territory in International Law 29 [1926]. )
170) The people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead. (Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977: 204. )
