34 Quotes by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Hawkins' mission was to instill Euro-American values and practices in Indigenous peoples - including the profit motive, privatization of property, debt, accumulation of wealthy by a few, and slavery - allowing settlers to gain the land and assimilate the Muskogees.

Having had nothing, I will not settle for crumbs.

The global Indigenous cause reached a major milestone in 2007 when the UN General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Only four members of the assembly voted in opposition, all of them Anglo settler-states - the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

When Sauk leader Black Hawk led his people back from a winter stay in Iowa to their homeland in Illinois in 1832 to plant corn, the squatter settlers there claimed they were being invaded, bringing in both Illinois militia and federal troops. The "Black Hawk War" that is narrated in history texts was no more than a slaughter of Sauk farmers. The Sauks tried to defend themselves but were starving when Black Hawk surrendered under a white flag.

The establishment of the missions and presidios from San Diego and Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to Carmel, San Francisco, and Sonoma, traces the colonization of California's Indigenous nations. The five-hundred-mile road that connected the missions was called El Camino Real, the Royal Highway.

Of a thousand Red Stick and allied insurgents, eight hundred were killed. [Andrew] Jackson lost forty-nine men.

Once elected president, Jackson lost no time in initiating the removal of all Indigenous farmers and the destruction of all their towns in the South.

With traumatized Navajos watching, government agents shot sheep and goats and left them to rot or cremated them after dousing them with gasoline. At one site alone, thirty-five goats were shot and left to rot. One hundred fifty thousand goats and fifty thousand sheep were killed in this manner. Oral history interviews tell of the pressure tactics on the Navajos, including arrests of those who resisted, and express bitterness over the destruction of their livestock.

Independent radical women often live lonely lives if they expect equality.