Jennifer Raff > Quotes

“this usage is generally an attempt to avoid the term Indian, which was coined by Christopher Columbus in a vain attempt to support his initial claim that he had arrived in India.”
― Jennifer Raff, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

“By the 18th century, the Mound Builder hypothesis had become firmly entrenched in public opinion as the leading explanation of North American prehistory (13). Scholars and antiquarians continued to debate the identity of the Mound Builders into the 19th century, with the majority agreeing that they were not the ancestors of Native Americans. President Andrew Jackson explicitly cited this hypothesis as partial justification for the Indian Removal Act of 1830, barely 40 years after Jefferson published his book. In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the west, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disappeared, to make room for the existing savage tribes (14). Thus did the idea of Manifest Destiny become inexorably linked with concepts of racial categories. When someone asks me why I get so incensed about the concepts of “lost civilizations” and “Mound Builders” that are promoted by cable “history” shows, I simply remind them of this: In the years that followed Jackson’s signing of the Indian Removal Act, over 60,000 Native Americans were expelled from their lands and forcibly relocated west of the Mississippi River. Thousands of people—including children and elders—died at the hands of the US government, which explicitly cited this mythology as one of its justifications.”
― Jennifer Raff, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

“There is a lot of exciting work currently being done in the field of ancient dog DNA, and this is a topic to watch with interest.”
― Jennifer Raff, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

“The question of whether Native Americans were human was settled—at least as far as the Catholic Church was concerned—by Pope Paul III in his 1537 encyclical Sublimis Deus. Catholics were informed that Indians and other “unknown” peoples not specifically mentioned in the Bible were “truly men” and should not be enslaved. It was essential instead that they should be converted to the faith by any means necessary. This did not mean that they were treated humanely by colonizers, who committed countless atrocities against Indigenous peoples, including enslaving them anyway.”
― Jennifer Raff, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

“With some notable exceptions, Native Americans preserved their histories in oral, rather than written, stories. European colonists did not view these oral traditions as equivalent to their own histories.”
― Jennifer Raff, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas