Indigenous History Quotes

“Saying you're the 'first person' to do anything in an indigenous country is insulting.”
― Gayle Kabloona

“colonialism benefits from dispossessing indigenous people of their land and writing us out of history”
― Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona

“...archaeologists have a peculiar love-hate relationship with Moore. We love him for all that information he left us, but we hate him for digging up all those sites before the modern era of archaeology brought new field methods that would have greatly enhanced his reports.”
― Jerald T. Milanich, Famous Florida Sites: Mt. Royal and Crystal River

“The danger is going back with this colonial attitude and disseminating information like the Inuit don't have history there.”
― Gayle Kabloona

“Around the world other countries have laws to protect their archaeological heritage...We continue to do a very bad job of preserving and managing our own heritage, a heritage that also belongs to the Native Americans who preceded us here.”
― Jerald T. Milanich, Famous Florida Sites: Mt. Royal and Crystal River

“During the period of Jackson's military and executive power, a mythology emerged that defined the contours and substance of the US origin narrative, which has weathered nearly two centuries and remains intact in the early twenty-first century as patriotic cant, a civic religion invoked in Barack Obama's presidential inaugural address in January 2009 :

"In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.

Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things-some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor-who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of
the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of
our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today."

Spoken like a true descendant of old settlers. President Obama raised another key element of the national myth in an interview a few days later with Al Arabiya television in Dubai. Affirming that the United States could be an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said: "We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power."

The affirmation of democracy requires the denial of colonialism, but denying it does not make it go away.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States