Elisa R. Sawyer

“It seemed he couldn’t take his eyes from me. “You went alone!? And those… those men, just like that, they let you take the women from them?” “I had guns,” I said, wondering if he had missed that the first time. He didn’t seem to know what to say when he turned to Farwell. “She went against my orders,” my husband said, and when I looked at him, I saw his face was flushed. Irvine turned back to me, frowning. “You went against your husband’s orders?” I shrugged. “My husband gives orders to white men. I am Crow.”
― Kathleen Grissom, Crow Mary

“In the first two centuries of colonization, the border between natives and newcomers was porous, almost nonexistent. The two societies mingled in a way that is difficult to imagine now. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John Adams recalled the Massachusetts of his youth as a multiracial society. “Aaron Pomham the Priest and Moses Pomham the Kind of the Punkapaug and Neponsit Tribes were frequent Visitors at my Father’s House …,”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“They had such unbelievably fixed minds, fixed ideas—strong, unchangeable beliefs that there was just this one life; no understanding that the mind can exist without the body. Their thinking was unbelievably gross. People like this needed something external to break their concepts and enable them to see things more deeply.”
― Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Practicing the Unmistaken Path: Lamrim Teachings from Kopan 1991 (volume 1)

“With its federal government that can supersede state and local law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather than consensus, its bicameral legislature (members of one branch being elected at fixed intervals), and its denial of suffrage to women, slaves, and the unpropertied, the Constitution as originally enacted was sharply different from the Great Law. In addition, the Constitution’s emphasis on protecting private property runs contrary to Haudenosaunee traditions of communal ownership. But in a larger sense, it seems to me, the claim is correct. The Framers of the Constitution, like most North American colonists, lived at a time when Indians were large presences in their lives—ones that naturally influenced their ideas and actions.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus