Settler Colonialism Quotes

“If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale”
― Refaat Alareer

“If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself–

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale”
― Refaat Alareer, If I must die

“...many of us know deep down, whether we choose to admit it or not, a number of simple truths: the global capitalist economy is incompatible with life. As numerous environmentalist authors... have noted, the global economy effectively creates infinite demand and no natural community can support infinite demand, especially when nothing beneficial is given back. A global economy is extractive, it gives nothing back, but follows the ecocidal pattern of a genocidal machine converting raw materials into power at the expense of living things and living systems.”
― Damien Short, Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide

“The racist conscience of America is such that murder does not register as murder, really, unless the victim is white. And it was only when the newspapers and magazines started carrying pictures and stories of white demonstrators being beaten and maimed by mobs and police that the public be-gan to protest. Negroes have become so used to this double stan-dard that they, too, react differently to the death of a white. When white freedom riders were brutalized along with blacks, a sigh of relief went up from the black masses, because the blacks knew that white blood is the coin of freedom in a land where for four hundred years black blood has been shed unremarked and with impunity. America has never truly been outraged by the murder of a black man, woman, or child. White politicians may, if Negroes are aroused by a particular murder, say with their lips what they know with their minds they should feel with their hearts-but don't.”
― Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice

“In early-colonial Australia, invading colonisers regularly marvelled at the local environment’s park-like aspect, counting themselves multiply blessed that ‘nature’ (including divine providence) should have come to furnish them with ready-made grazing runs. In fact, the Australian landscape’s benign aspect was the cumulative consequence of millennia of Indigenous management, in particular the use of fire to reduce undergrowth and to contain spontaneous conflagrations within local limits. Within a few years of Europeans taking over the country and discontinuing Native fire-management practices, the current cycle of massive bushfire disasters was set in train. The land that settlers seize is already value-added. There is no such thing as wilderness, only depopulation.”
― Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race

“Grieving requires softening your self-protective defense mechanisms enough to feel: getting beyond the denial, numbness, righteousness, apathy, and other obstacles we have put In place to avoid the depths of pain. The humanity that was previously made invisible must be made visible again.”
― Edgar Villanueva, Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance

“In 1858 Engels sarcastically described the tamed
British workers in the bluntest terms: "The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so
that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming
ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and
a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a na- tion which exploits the whole world this is to a certain ex- tent justifiable." (2) Britain was the Imperial Rome, the
Amerikan Empire of that day - a nation which "feasted"
on the exploitation of colonies around the entire world.
Engels, as a communist, didn't make lame excuses for the
corrupted English workers, but exposed them. He held the
English workers accountable to the world proletariat for
their sorry political choices.”
― J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

“But there is a great difference between Fanon's bloody knives and Sartre's bloody scalpel. True decolonization movements, from the American Patriots of the 1770s to the FLN in the 1950s, used actual violence to drive out their oppressors. Intellectuals who use the language of settler colonialism to critique their own society, in contrast, have no mass movement at their back. That has been the predicament of the ideology of settler colonialism from the beginning: everyone knows that calls to "eradicate," "kill," or "cull" settlers can only be metaphorical, so there is no need to put a limit on their rhetorical ferocity.

But what if there were a country where settler colonialism could be challenged with more than words? Where all the evils attributed to it--from "emptiness" to "not-enoughness" to economic inequality, global warming, and genocide--could be given a human face? Best of all, what if that settler colonial society were small and endangered enough that destroying it seemed like a realistic possibility rather than a utopian dream? Such a country would be a perfect focus for all the moral passion and rhetorical violence that fuels the ideology of settler colonialism. It would be a country one could hate virtuously--especially if it were home to a people whom Western civilization has traditionally considered it virtuous to hate.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“There is no shortage of [American] Indians today, only an apparent surplus of miseducated settler colonists.”
― Timothy H. Ives, Stones of Contention

“Guilt, in principle, is simply not among the things baby humans can inherit. However, white settler colonial guilt is a horse of a different color.”
― Timothy H. Ives, Stones of Contention

“The remarkable idea of a privileged socioracial group benevolently lifting a less privileged one should always be met with remarkable skepticism. If this were so when the Massachusetts Bay Colony put the words "Come Over and Help Us" in an Indian's mouth, perhaps things would be different today.”
― Timothy H. Ives, Stones of Contention

“Archaeology's calling card - the masonry trowel - does not necessarily inspire joy among people who see it routinely used to systematically dissect their ancestral places. In such contexts, it is not at all difficult to see archaeology as an instrument of settler colonial oppression.”
― Timothy H. Ives, Stones of Contention

“I call this brand of racial paranoia white settler colonial guilt. Its rise in recent years may superficially resemble karma or poetic justice to those with leftist sensibilities. But anyone concerned with the well-being of society should recognize that it is merely yet another mechanism by which human individuality is suppressed and group preconceptions are reinforced.”
― Timothy H. Ives, Stones of Contention

“Parklands are often positioned as apolitical, as “common” or public land that somehow eludes examination amidst the grit of property markets and land-use battles, but it is critical to understand parks as a central feature of colonial land logics, as aggressively regulating and disciplining land and its occupations.”
― Matt Hern, On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land

“In many discourses, parks are posited as the best of urbanity, as an unmitigated “good” that represents all that cities can and should be. Parks are purportedly natural salves for the disordered immorality and filth of urban life, pools of respite, beauty and virtue. But those complicated and complicating claims make multiple contradictory and dubious arguments for human social and political life that are not easily dislodged or disentangled. Those claims are always bound up with rationalities of whiteness and colonial ordering: parks bring structured comprehensibility and access to the otherwise unruly “wilds,” cleansed of any savage and uncooperative residents, and disallow any activities that do not adhere to certain orders. A huge amount of work is expended on park design to ensure that they adhere exactly to settler colonial re-orderings of occupation.”
― Matt Hern, On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land

“When we talk about any particular park, or city parks in general, what we are really talking about is how urban space could and should be allocated and used. Entwined within those conversations are presumptions about how human relationships with the other-than-human world can and should be mediated and controlled. The notion that parks are “good for people,” whether they are immense national parks far from cities or small urban parks set amidst dense residential, commercial and industrial activity, rests on highly questionable ideologies that tend to obscure far more than they illuminate. Claims to “diversity” habitually feign a commitment to commonality. When we talk about any particular park, or city parks in general, what we are really talking about is how urban space could and should be allocated and used. Entwined within those conversations are presumptions about how human relationships with the other-than-human world can and should be mediated and controlled. The notion that parks are “good for people,” whether they are immense national parks far from cities or small urban parks set amidst dense residential, commercial and industrial activity, rests on highly questionable ideologies that tend to obscure far more than they illuminate. Claims to “diversity” habitually feign a commitment to commonality without asking after the rationalities that structure the subjects of those commons: who is allowed in and under what conditions? without asking after the rationalities that structure the subjects of those commons: who is allowed in and under what conditions?”
― Matt Hern, On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land

“That particular situation was problematic enough, but it is emblematic of much larger and more entrenched questions and conflicts around who speaks for parks, who speaks for land. The claim that parks should be accessible to “all” is a performatively liberal stance, one that undercuts any agonistic claims and becomes atheoretical and depolitical in the hands of state bureaucracies. All land is saturated with stories and histories, much of it beautiful and honourable, and some awful and violent. Claiming land to be “common” or to be commonly held does not wipe history clean. We live among the accumulating ruins of colonial rationalities, and stating that parks should “benefit all” willfully ignores history and obscures the highly political choices that are being made all around us. Any claim that parks are “open to all” is a naked lie — a lie that is designed to buttress colonial rationalities.”
― Matt Hern, On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land

“For both Christians and Jews, therefore, the colonization of Palestine was seen as an act of return and redemption. The coincidence of the two impulses produced a powerful alliance that turned the anti-Semitic and millenarian idea of transferring the Jews from Europe to Palestine into a real project of settlement at the expense of the native people of Palestine.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Zionism was a settler colonial movement, similar to the movements of Europeans who had colonized the two Americas, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“It may seem paradoxical that opposing what one scholar calls "the slow violence of settler colonialism" should lead people to celebrate the quick violence of terrorism. But part of the appeal of radical ideologies, of the right and the left, is that they make violence virtuous. And October 7 marked the moment when settler colonialism emerged into public view as the watchword of a new ideology, one that is already influencing the way many Americans think about their country and the world.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“گوٗنگی گواہی

رنگ مَنچ روشن ہے،

سائے گہرے ہیں۔

درندگی کا تماشا ہے،

ڈراؤنے سے چہرے ہیں۔


ناظر ہے ہر انسان لیکن،

اخبار میں حرف سُنہَرے ہیں۔

ہر مظلوم ہے خوف زدہ،

ریاست کے جو پَہرے ہیں۔


کہیں ساحل سے ٹکراتی ہوئی،

نَنّھی لاشوں کی لہریں ہیں۔

کہیں وادیوں میں چیختی ہوئی،

بہتے لہو کی نہریں ہیں۔


کہیں تارِ قفس میں قید ہے قصبہ،

کہیں شہر در شہر قبضہ گاروں کے بسیرے ہیں۔


جہاں خون بہنا اَب باقی ہے،

وہاں غُنڈے گھات میں ٹھہرے ہیں۔

کہیں نسل پر سوال،

کہیں مذہب کا وبال۔

دین و ایمان کا ٹھکانا نہیں،

پَرچَمِ وطن تلے یہ لُٹیرے ہیں۔


‎نہ اخلاقی مقصد، نہ نیک اسباب،

‎نہ عَقلی دلیل کا کوئی جواب۔

‎حکمرانوں کے پَرَست ہیں بس،

‎خود تو اَیرے غَیرے ہیں۔


ان کی پہچان بھی اُدھار کی،

ان کے رَہبَر بھی بازار کے۔

عقل سے ہیں یہ اَندھے،

ہدایت سے یہ بَہرے ہیں۔


آج بھلے ان کے سر پر،

سلطنت کے سِہرے ہیں۔

تاریخ گواہ ہے — سب ظالم،

عذاب میں تِیرے ہیں۔”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan