Top 50 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism – the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

2. “The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Settler colonialism is a genocidal policy.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

3. “Columbus Day is still a federal holiday despite Columbus never having set foot on any territory ever claimed by the United States.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

4. “Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

5. “The ideology of white supremacy was paramount in neutralizing the class antagonisms of the landless against the landed and distributing confiscated lands and properties of Moors and Jews in Iberia, of the Irish in Ulster, and of Native American and African peoples.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

6. “The Cherokee Nation took a case against Georgia to the US Supreme Court. With Chief Justice John Marshall writing for the majority, the Court ruled in favor of the Cherokees. Jackson ignored the Supreme Court, however, in effect saying that John Marshall had made his decision and Marshall would have to enforce it if he could, although he, Jackson, had an army while Marshall did not.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

7. “Having had nothing, I will not settle for crumbs.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

8. “A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: “I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”34.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

9. “Passionate, organized hatred is the element missing in all that we do to try to change the world. Now is the time to spread hate, hatred for the rich.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

10. “Awareness of the settler-colonialist context of US history writing is essential if one is to avoid the laziness of the default position and the trap of a mythological unconscious belief in manifest destiny. The.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

11. “It’s not that Jackson had a “dark side,” as his apologists rationalize and which all human beings have, but rather that Jackson was the Dark Knight in the formation of the United States as a colonialist, imperialist democracy, a dynamic formation that continues to constitute the core of US patriotism.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

12. “Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Britain, the latter the colonial administrator, forcibly removed the indigenous inhabitants of the islands, the Chagossians. Most of the two thousand deportees ended up more than a thousand miles away in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they were thrown into lives of poverty and forgotten. The purpose of this expulsion was to create a major US military base on one of the Chagossian islands, Diego Garcia.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

13. “European institutions and the worldview of conquest and colonialism had formed several centuries before that. From the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, Europeans conducted the Crusades to conquer North Africa and the Middle East, leading to unprecedented wealth in the hands of a few.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

14. “The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

15. “North America in 1492 was not a virgin wilderness but a network of Indigenous nations, peoples of the corn. The link between peoples of the North and the South can be seen in the diffusion of corn from Mesoamerica.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

16. “There are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous communities and nations, comprising nearly three million people in the United States. These are the descendants of the fifteen million original inhabitants of the land, the majority of whom were farmers who lived in towns.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

17. “Corn Dance remains strongest among the Muskogee people. The elements of the ritual dance are similar to those of the Valley of Mexico. Although the dance takes various forms among different communities, the core of it is the same, a commemoration of the gift of corn by an ancestral corn woman. The peoples of the corn retain great affinities under the crust of colonialism.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

18. “Jamestown military leader John Smith threatened to kill all the women and children if the Powhatan leaders would not feed and clothe the settlers as well as provide them with land and labor.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

19. “Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard.26 The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

20. “The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples – not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal of extinction.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

21. “The global Indigenous cause reached a major milestone in 2007 when the UN General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Only four members of the assembly voted in opposition, all of them Anglo settler-states – the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

22. “The continuity between invading and occupying sovereign Indigenous nations in order to achieve continental control in North America and employing the same tactics overseas to achieve global control is key to understanding the future of the United States in the world. The.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

23. “The most revered presidents – Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, both Roosevelts, Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama – have each advanced populist imperialism while gradually increasing inclusion of other groups beyond the core of descendants of old settlers into the ruling mythology.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

24. “Independent radical women often live lonely lives if they expect equality.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

25. “Corporal punishment was unknown in Indigenous families but was routine in the boarding schools. Often punishment was inflicted for being “too Indian” – the darker the child, the more often and severe the beatings. The children were made to feel that it was criminal to be Indian.26.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

26. “Settler colonialism, as an institution or system, requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

27. “Condemned to death, the Delawares spent the night praying and singing hymns. In the morning, Williamson’s men marched over ninety people in pairs into two houses and methodically slaughtered them.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

28. “The English government paid bounties for the Irish heads. Later only the scalp or ears were required. A century later in North America, Indian heads and scalps were brought in for bounty in the same manner. Although the Irish were as “white” as the English, transforming them into alien others to be exterminated previewed what came to be perceived as racialist when applied to Indigenous peoples of North America and to Africans.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

29. “These men, often elevated to the status of local heroes, served as the most violently effective tool of a democracy aroused against Native Americans: citizen-soldiers engaged in acts of self-interest disguised as self-preservation.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

30. “They slaughtered all the game they could find and so muddied the rivers and creeks with silt that the once plentiful salmon couldn’t survive. The herds of elk and deer, the food source for Native Americans, were practically wiped out in one summer.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

31. “Cultural appropriation is especially egregious when it involves the co-optation of spiritual ceremonies and the inappropriate use of lands deemed sacred by Native peoples.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

32. “The establishment of the missions and presidios from San Diego and Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to Carmel, San Francisco, and Sonoma, traces the colonization of California’s Indigenous nations. The five-hundred-mile road that connected the missions was called El Camino Real, the Royal Highway.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

33. “During the harsh deportation of the Micronesians in the 1970s, the press took some notice. In response to once reporter’s question, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said of the Micronesians: “There are only ninety thousand people out there. Who gives a damn?” This is a statement of permissive genocide.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

34. “Above all, the majority of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas had healthy, mostly vegetarian diets based on the staple of corn and supplemented by wild fish, fowl, and four-legged animals. People lived long and well with abundant ceremonial and recreational periods.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

35. “As a birthplace of agriculture and the towns and cities that followed, America is ancient, not a “new world.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

36. “In language reminiscent of that used to condemn witches, they quickly identified the Indigenous populations as inherently children of Satan and “servants of the devil” who deserved to be killed.7 Later the Salem authorities would justify witch trials by claiming that the English settlers were inhabiting land controlled by the devil.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

37. “Andrew Jackson was the implementer of the final solution for the Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi. Andrew.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

38. “In 1904 Roosevelt pronounced what has come to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It mandated that any nation engaged in “chronic wrong-doing” – that is, did anything to threaten perceived US economic or political interests – would be disciplined militarily by the United States, which was to serve as an “international police power.”8.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

39. “The United States is not unique among nations in forging an origin myth, but most of its citizens believe it to be exceptional among nation-states, and this exceptionalist ideology has been used to justify appropriation of the continent and then domination of the rest of the world.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

40. “Surviving genocide, by whatever means, is resistance: non-Indians must know this in order to more accurately understand the history of the United States.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

41. “Reconciling empire and liberty – based on the violent taking of Indigenous lands – into a usable myth allowed for the emergence of an enduring populist imperialism. Wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing could be sold to “the people” – indeed could be fought for by the young men of those very people – by promising to expand economic opportunity, democracy, and freedom for all.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

42. “That one of the most impoverished communities in the Americas would refuse a billion dollars demonstrates the relevance and significance of the land to the Sioux, not as an economic resource but as a relationship between people and place, a profound feature of the resilience of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

43. “Yet the Leatherstocking’s positive twist on genocidal colonialism was based on the reality of invasion, squatting, attacking, and colonizing of the Indigenous nations. Neither Filson nor Cooper created that reality. Rather, they created the narratives that captured the experience and imagination of the Anglo-American settler, stories that were surely instrumental in nullifying guilt related to genocide and set the pattern of narrative for future US writers, poets, and historians.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

44. “Ranging, looting, and scalp hunting continued.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

45. “The ancient Irish social system was systematically attacked, traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and the remainder brutalized. A “wild Irish” reservation was even attempted. The.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

46. “Another weapon of war was alcohol, accelerating in the eighteenth century.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

47. “Actions and local occurrences said to indicate witchcraft included nonpayment of rent, demand for public assistance, giving the “evil-eye,” local die-offs of horses or other stock, and mysterious deaths of children. Also among the telltale actions were practices related to midwifery and any kind of contraception.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

48. “Wars continued for another century, unrelentingly and without pause, and the march across the continent used the same strategy and tactics of scorched earth and annihilation with increasingly deadly firepower. Somehow, even “genocide” seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country’s manifest destiny.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

49. “The Bureau of Indian Affairs, without Indigenous peoples’ consent, invested Indigenous funds in railroad companies and various municipal and state bonds. For instance, the Cherokee national fund and the Muskogee Creek Orphan Fund were so invested. Indigenous leaders were well aware of these practices but were powerless to stop them.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

50. “The publication arc of the Leatherstocking Tales parallels the Jackson presidency. For those who consumed the books in that period and throughout the nineteenth century – generations of young white men – the novels became perceived fact, not fiction, and the basis for the coalescence of US American nationalism.”

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz