34 Quotes by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America—"from California . . . to the Gulf Stream waters"—are interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American Indians. They cry out for their stories to be heard through their descendants who carry the memories of how the country was founded and how it came to be as it is today. [opening lines of the Introduction; ellipsis sic].

[Theodore] Roosevelt referred to [Emilio] Aguinaldo as a "renegade Pawnee" and observed that Filipinos did not have the right to govern their country just because they happened to occupy it.

Reconciling empire and liberty - based on the violent taking of Indigenous lands - into a usable myth allowed for the emergence of an enduring populist imperialism. Wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing could be sold to "the people" - indeed could be fought for by the young men of those very people - by promising to expand economic opportunity, democracy, and freedom for all.

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism – the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft.

Passionate, organized hatred is the element missing in all that we do to try to change the world. Now is the time to spread hate, hatred for the rich.

Columbus Day is still a federal holiday despite Columbus never having set foot on any territory ever claimed by the United States.

The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.

A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: “I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”34.

The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Settler colonialism is a genocidal policy.