Sound Bites -- Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio commentary)
211-220 of 333 Sound Bites. [show all]
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211) Hakluyt's Discourse reveals him to be one of the first English colonial promoters to realize that the representations of England's colonial adventures could prove as crucial to their success as any single voyage or expedition. He seems implicitly to have grasped one of the most significant differences between the colonialism practiced by the English and that practiced by other European powers, namely the fact that English colonial endeavor, because it was never centrally funded or directed, would literally have to be sold to the English people. Moreover, Hakluyt was the first colonial writer to give voice to the idea that England's colonial efforts could serve its national interests, a simple notion that appeared nowhere as obvious to his contemporaries as it does to us today. (Thomas Scanlan, Colonial Writing and the New World: 1583 – 1671. London, Cambridge UP, 1999: 32. )
212) The Indians we speak of, and all other peoples who later come to the knowledge of Christians, outside the faith though they be, are not to be deprived of their liberty or the right to their property. They are to have, to hold, to enjoy both liberty and dominion, freely, lawfully. They must not be enslaved. Should anything different be done, it is void, invalid, of no force, no worth. And those Indians and other peoples are to be invited into the faith of Christ by the preaching of God's word and the example of a good life. (Pope Paul III, "Sublimis Deus," 1537. New Iberian World: A Documentary History of the Discovery and Settlement of Latin America to the Early 17th Century. Vol. I. Eds. John H. Parry and Robert G. Keith. New York: Times Books, 1984. )
213)
She [Mrs. Scott] said she hoped to goodness they would have no trouble with Indians. Mr. Scott had heard rumors of trouble. She said, "Land knows, they'd never do anything with this country themselves. All they do is roam around over it like wild animals. Treaties or no treaties, the land belongs to folks that'll farm it. That's only common sense and justice."
She did not know why the government made treaties with Indians. The only good Indian was a dead Indian. The very thought of Indians made her blood run cold. She said, "I can't forget the Minnesota massacre. My Pa and my brothers went out with the rest of the settlers, and stopped them only fifteen miles west of us. I've heard Pa tell often enough how they--"
Ma made a sharp sound in her throat, and Mrs. Scott stopped. Whatever a massacre was, it was something that grown-ups would not talk about when little girls were listening.
After Mrs. Scott had gone, Laura asked Ma what a massacre was. Ma said she could not explain that now; it was something that Laura would understand when she was older.
(Laura, her mother Caroline, and a neighbor talk about the Native Americans who live nearby in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie )214) The sixteenth-century writings of the two Richard Hakluyts, the detailed descriptions of the region by Thomas Hariot, and the maps and drawings of John White generated compelling themes and images of the New World that may have failed to save Raleigh's proposed colony but nevertheless found resonance in later promotional tracts that formed an integral component in the settlement process. (Susan Schmidt Horning, "The Power of Image: Promotional Literature and Its Changing Role in the Settlement of Early Carolina." North Carolina Historical Review 70.4 [1993]: 366. )
215) With all cruel immanity [sic], contrary to all natural humanity, they subdued a naked and yielding people, whom they sought for gain, and not for any religion or plantation of a commonwealth, over whom, to satisfy their most greedy and insatiable covetousness, did most cruelly tyrannise, and most tyrannically and again the course of all human nature did so scorch and roast them to death, as by their histories doth appear. (John Hooker on the Spanish, qtd. in H.C. Porter, The Inconstant Savage. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co, 1979: 223. )
216) The Church's interest in enforcing the Crusading obligations resulted in the extension of its power through increasingly sophisticated techniques of surveillance. (Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 39. )
217) The Revolution resolved the question of political independence only for the Americans. It did not affect the posture of other European nations toward Indian tribes. After the war the British conducted several treaty councils with the tribes of the Ohio and Great Lakes Country. British trading companies dominated the fur trade of the interior and Great Lakes area for several decades. The Spanish quickly made treaties with the strong southestern tribes, most notably the Creek and Choctaw, and in 1785 made an important treaty with the Comanche, which had to be conducted at several locations in the Southwest because the tribe controlled nearly one thousand miles of territory considered by the Spanish to be their borderlands. Russian trading companies made treaties with the California tribes to secure their title to land. And following the Mexican Revolution in 1820, the new Mexican government immediately began making treaties with tribes who resided primarily in the area later settled by the United States, and continued to do so until the 1870s. (Vine Deloria, Jr., & David E. Wilkins. Tribes, Treaties, & Constitutional Tribulations. Austin: U of Texas P, 1999: 9-10. )
218) Who does not know that kings and princes derive their origin from men ignorant of God who raised themselves above their fellow men by pride, plunder, treachery, murder—in short, by every kind of crime—at the instigation of the Devil, the prince of this world, men blind with greed and intolerable in their audacity? If, then, they strive to bend the priests of God to their will, to whom may they more properly be compared than to him who is chief over all the sons of pride? (Gregory VII, qtd. in Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 25. )
219) They were to prove, in this area at least, well-disposed toward each other. And the spontaneous attraction that drew each to each demonstrated that whatever previous views the English had about the savagery of savages, these people were human and humane, even if very different in their level of cultural and material equipment from themselves. (David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985: 34. )
220) The Indians probably saw the Bible as a means of physical rather than spiritual salvation. Along with their Bibles the Europeans brought to America Old World pathogens for which the Indians, long isolated from such diseases, had failed to develop antibodies [...] they may well have considered the Bible a kind of protective talisman. (Susan Schmidt Horning, "The Power of Image: Promotional Literature and Its Changing Role in the Settlement of Early Carolina." North Carolina Historical Review 70.4 [1993]: 379. )
