Timothy

“federal lawmakers expelled California Indians from mainstream colonial California society and relegated them to a shadowy legal and social status between man and beast. This was not preordained. In each phase of legislation, anti-Indian views prevailed over more sympathetic voices, each time pushing Indians farther beyond the bounds of citizenship and community. Through a succession of laws, legislators slowly denied California Indians membership in the body politic until they became landless noncitizens, with few legal rights and almost no legal control over their own bodies. Indians became, for many Anglo-Americans, nonhumans. This legal exclusion of California Indians from California society was a crucial enabler of mass murder.”
― Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873

“The first exodus comes in the midst of a plot that should be familiar to anyone who has read the garden story in Genesis. The people of Israel are fruitful and multiply and fill the land, but the serpent-like king is tricksy, and he attacks the women, with a view to destroying their male descendants. Yet in contrast to the garden story, the women outmaneuver him.”
― Alastair J. Roberts, Echoes of Exodus: Tracing Themes of Redemption through Scripture

“a letter, published in the Daily Alta California, on January 14, 1851, “To the People of California, residing in the vicinity of the Indian Troubles,” in which they argued: “As there is now no farther west, to which they can be removed, the General Government and the people of California appear to have left but one alternative in relation to these remnants of once numerous and powerful tribes, viz: extermination or domestication.” The Daily Alta California agreed. On May 31, 1851, its editors predicted that the alternative to treaties would be, “a war . . . of extermination, long, tedious, cruel and costly.” The article then reiterated that without treaties, “subduing and keeping them quiet . . . could be done [only] by a war of extermination.”
― Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873

“by linking God with mission, missio Dei appears to be a theological veil, a way to justify talk about ourselves with talk about God.”
― Michael W Stroope, Transcending the Modern Mission Tradition