Reservation Quotes - page 3
The Sioux had been forced to submit to a series of land grabs and to indignities that are almost unbelievable when read about today. ...they were being systematically starved into submission-by the White Bureaucracy-on the little that was left of their reservation in South Dakota. ...From Rosebud, the Ghost Dance spread like prairie fire to the Pine Ridge Sioux and finally to Sitting Bull's people at Standing Rock. The Sioux rebelled; the result was the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre of the Indians (despite their ghost shirts) at Wounded Knee in 1890.
Peter Farb
In 1863, Colonel Kit Carson was ordered to clear the country of Navajo Indians and to resettle any survivors at Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico, where they could be "civilized." Carson's strategy was the same as that applied against the Plains Indians a little later: He destroyed the Navajo food base by systematically killing their livestock and by burning their fields. Carson's "Long Knives" (his soldiers so named because of their bayonets) also cut off the breast of Navajo girls and tossed them back and forth like baseballs.... Ultimately, about 8,500 Navajos made what they still call the "Long Walk" to captivity at Fort Sumner, three hundred miles away. After they had been there for four years, the Navajo signed a peace treaty that entitled them to a reservation of about 3,500,000 acres, much less than they had held previously.
Peter Farb
Tell people that war is an evil, and they will laugh; for who does not know it? Tell them that patriotism is an evil, and most of them will agree, but with a reservation. "Yes," they will say, "wrong patriotism is an evil; but there is another kind, the kind we hold." But just what this good patriotism is, no one explains.
Leo Tolstoy
I am wedded to India because I owe my all to her. I believe absolutely that she has a mission for the world. She is not to copy Europe blindly, India's acceptance of the doctrine of the sword will be the hour of my trial. I hope I shall not be found wanting. My religion has no geographical limits. If I have a living faith in it, it will transcend my love for India herself. My life is dedicated to service of India through the religion of nonviolence which I believed to be the root of Hinduism.
Meanwhile I urge those who distrust me, not to disturb the even working of the struggle that has just commenced, by inciting to violence in the belief that I want violence I detest secrecy as a sin. Let them give nonviolence non co-operation a trial and they will find that I had no mental reservation whatsoever.
Mahatma Gandhi
The white man, or the American government, has a way of saying they are sorry, which is to pay you. That's pretty much their approach. Now what our elders have said in our reservation and in Indian country in general is that actually the only compensation for land is land. That you cannot pay us with money that you took, that you made off of our land. That's kind of the analysis that goes behind that. Because the only thing that is actually of value to our community is the land itself. It is not the compensation.
Winona LaDuke
There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism. Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it means a story with a sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest opinions of the human animal.
For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.
Arthur Miller
Many societies just take affirmative action for granted. India has a system called reservation, which was instituted back in the 1940s in an attempt to overcome deep-seated caste and gender inequities. Any such system imposes hardships on some in order, one hopes, to develop a more equitable and just society. But to a large extent I think the attack on affirmative action is an attempt to justify the kinds of discriminatory and oppressive patterns that existed in the past. On the other hand, such systems should certainly be designed so that they don't harm poor people who happen not to fit the categories designated for support. This can be done. There have been very effective applications of affirmative action - in the universities, for example, and the public-service industries. If you look in detail you find plenty of things to criticize, but the main thrust of the program is humane and appropriate.
Noam Chomsky
