Sound Bites -- Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio commentary)
261-270 of 333 Sound Bites. [show all]
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261) Hakluyt invoked Las Casas in 1584, repeating the story of the fifteen million exterminated Indians; one of the objectives of the English would be to liberate the Indians still oppressed by Spain. (H.C. Porter, The Inconstant Savage. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co, 1979: 200. )
262) The English colonial movement for America in the beginning was not particularly sympathetic towards the Amerindian, and that when the English proponents of American colonization did develop such a sympathy, it was only temporary, and more a response to necessity than to philosophic commitment. (Loren Pennington, "The Amerindian in English Promotional Literature." The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650. Ed. K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1978: 176. )
263) The intentional derivativeness of Carleill's "Brief and Summary Discourse" bears witness to the emergence of a distinctively English colonizing discursive practice at a relatively early stage of England's Discovery era. Carleill's pamphlet set out to recapitulate [...] fundamental legitimating arguments supporting English colonization of other peoples' lands [...] Exploitation of the natives was to be the basis of trade. (Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 161. )
264) In prudence, talent, virtue, and humanity they [Native Americans] are as inferior to the Spaniards as children to adults, women to men, as the wild and cruel to the most meek, as the prodigiously intemperate to the continent and temperate, that I have almost said, as monkeys to men. (from Sepúlveda Demócrates Segundo, qtd. in Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation Between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1974: 84.) (hear commentary by Anne DeLong)
265) What the rights of property in the Cherokee nation are, may be discovered from the several treaties which have been made between the United States and that nation between the years 1785 and 1819. It will be unnecessary to notice many of them. They all recognize, in the most unqualified manner, a right of property in this nation, to the occupancy at least, of the lands in question. It is immaterial whether this interest is a mere right of occupancy, or an absolute right to the soil. The complaint is for a violation, or threatened violation, of the possessory right. And this is a right, in the enjoyment of which they are entitled to protection. (Justice Smith Thompson's Dissent to The Cherokee Nation vs. The State of Georgia, 1831 )
266) And also have occasion, to set poor men's children, to learn handy crafts, and thereby to make trifles and the like, which the Indians and those people do much esteem: By reason whereof, there should be none occasion, to have our country encumbered with loiterers, vagabonds, and such like idle persons. (Sir Humphrey Gilbert, A Discourse of a Discovery for a New Passage to Cataia, 1576, reprinted in David B. Quinn, The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Vol. 1. London: Glasgow UP, 1940: 161. )
267) Solórzano said that he himself did not possess a copy of Sepúlveda's book, because Philip II had banned its circulation. The stated reason for this censorship, curious in that the author provided a strong defense of the conquest, was that the book had not been printed at the royal press. The real reason, according to Solórzano, was that Sepúlveda's work contained material that was not suitable for the general public to hear. (James Muldoon, The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994: 27. )
268) [In regard to Justice Reed's majority opinion in Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. The United States (1954-55)], the Indian . . . was to depend on the generosity and the grace of his despoilers. (Wilcomb E. Washburn, "The Moral and Legal Justifications for Dispossessing the Indians." Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History. Ed. James Morton Smith. New York: Norton, 1972: 30. )
269) While the various papal bulls, royal commissions, and accounts of their voyages by the discoverers all proclaimed that one of their purposes was to extend the power and ambit of the Church, implying that this aim justified their overlordship of the Indians, Vitoria contended that so long as the faith had not been preached to them, so that their ignorance was "invincible," there was no basis to assault them, nor did he consider that they were in mortal sin if they did not accept Christianity immediately upon hearing it expounded. (L.C. Green and Olive P. Dickason. The Law of Nations and the New World. Alberta: U of Alberta P, 1989: 41. )
270) America had to be planted so that subhumans could be made human. (Roy Harvey Pearce, 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. )
