Sound Bites -- Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio commentary)
201-210 of 333 Sound Bites. [show all]
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201) If we look to the whole course of treatment by this country of the Indians, from the year 1775, to the present day, when dealing with them in their aggregate capacity as nations or tribes, and regarding the mode and manner in which all negotations have been carried on and concluded with them; the conclusion appears to me irresistible, that they have been regarded, by the executive and legislative branches of the government, not only as sovereign and independent, but as foreign nations or tribes, not within the jurisdiction nor under the government of the states within which they were located. (Justice Smith Thompson's Dissent to The Cherokee Nation vs. The State of Georgia, 1831)
202) The total record of his [Ralph Lane's] dealings with the Indians is not, so far as the evidence (chiefly historical) goes, a wholly unfavorable one. It is that of a military man, estimating his opponent's strengths and weaknesses and exploiting them to his own advantage. His attitudes toward the Indian population were not aggressive...he took them as he found them. (David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985: 219. )
203) And by how much they, upon due considerations, shall find our manner of knowledge and crafts to exceed theirs in perfection, and speed for doing or execution, by so much the more is it probable that they should desire our friendship and love, and have the greater respect for pleasing and obeying us. (From Thomas Hariot's Briefe and True Report, found in David B. Quinn, ed., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612. Vol. 3. New York: Hector Bye, 1979. )
204) Earlier writers of North Carolina and colonial American history have tended to put the people who inhabited the areas first touched by the settlers into the background as if they were a part of the landscape [...] the Indians were the occupiers and owners of the land into which the English intruded. They had a highly developed society going far back in time and developing over long periods before the European discovery of America. The inroads that they had made into the wilderness that was America enabled the Europeans to follow in their tracks, to learn their way of growing crops, which were new to the settlers, to discover new ways of catching fish and game, and above all to confront new concepts of belief and of the relationship between man and his environment. (David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, The First Colonists: Documents on the Planting of the First English Settlements in North America, 1584-1590. Raleigh: North Carolina Dept.of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and History, 1982: iv. )
205) . . . M'Intosh is best explained as one element of a calculated, rational, unemotional effort to obtain Indian lands at the least cost. This analysis rejects the kindness imputed to Marshall . . . by the benevolent school, and the truculence imputed by the malevolent school. The working assumption is that such a sweeping national policy to transfer wealth must be understood, at bottom, in terms of selfishness (economics), not benevolence or malevolence (morality or lack thereof). (Eric Kades, "The Dark Side of Efficiency: Johnson v. M'Intosh and the Expropriation of American Indian Lands." U. of PA Law Review 148.1065 [April 2000]: 1065-1190. Lexis-Nexis. 23 Sep. 03. )
206) [Hakluyt] celebrates Protestant England's self-avowed moral superiority to Catholic Spain by yoking the latter with Babylon. Specifically, Babylon serves Hakluyt as a multifaceted and overt symbol of Spain's corruption and fosters what becomes known as the Black Legend – the allegation of Spain's habitual cruelty and treachery, which Englishmen widely used to justify the claim of their own nation's election. Thus, through images invoking the many sins, the prophesized doom, and finally even the punitive role of the Babylonians, Hakluyt castigates his nation's rival and celebrates, though cautiously, England's virtue and deservedness. (Jennifer Bess, "Hakluyt's Discourse of Western Planting." Explicator 55.1 [1996]: 3.)
207) The mention of the nakedness of the Indians is typical; to a ruling class obsessed with the symbolism of dress, the Indians' physical appearance was a token of a cultural void. In the eyes of the Europeans the Indians were culturally naked. (Stephen Greenblatt, qtd. in Juan E. Tazón, "The Evolution of a Stereotype: The Indian in English Renaissance Promotional Literature." Beyond Pug's Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice. Ed. C.C. Barfoot. Rodopi, 1997: 129. )
208) The most diligent and systematic translator of colonial expansion was the clergyman Richard Hakluyt, whose collections of travel narratives, the Divers Voyages Touching the Discoveries of America of 1582 and the Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation of 1589, greatly contributed to inaugurating the Elizabethan colonial project. (Gesa Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1997: 22. )
209) When therefore, it is a sweete smelling sacrifice, to propagate the name of Iesus Christ, when the Babylonish Inchantresse . . . hath compassed sea, and land, to make, sixe, eight, or ten millions, of Romish proselites. When there is no other, mixt, moderate, course, to transport the Virginian soules to heauen. Where there hath beene a reall concession from their rurall Emporour, that hath licensed vs to negociate among them, and to possesse their countrie with them. When there is more vnpeopled continent of earth, than wee and they . . . can ouerburden with multitude. . . . (A True Declaration of the Estate in Virginia, 1610 )
210) In effect, the Requerimiento enabled the Spanish to occupy the Americas by employing a legal ritual that allowed them to adhere to the letter of Innocent IV's opinion on infidel dominium while missing its spirit. (James Muldoon, The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994: 27. )
