Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz famous quotes

Investors, monarchies, and parliamentarians devised methods to control the processes of wealth accumulation and the power that came with it, but the ideology behind gold fever mobilized settlers to cross the Atlantic to an unknown fate. Subjugating entire societies and civilizations, enslaving whole countries, and slaughtering people village by village did not seem too high a price to pay, nor did it appear inhumane. The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.
-- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#Country #Fate #Civilization

In the present, the way benevolence is expressed is in conceptualizing the Native as a historical relic; US people have to be constantly reminded that there are still existent Indigenous peoples and communities in North America, but whether left or right, recent immigrant or descendants of settlers, even descendants of enslaved Africans, the Native presence is not a consideration in the day to day life of individuals and municipal, state and national governments.
-- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#America #Government #People

The objective of US authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples - not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.
-- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#Definitions #Modern #Genocide

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

#Hate #Missing #Hatred

The caste system, in all its various forms, is always based on identifiable physical characteristics - sex, color, age.
-- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#Sex #Color #Racism

How will the family unit be destroyed? ...[T]he demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare.
-- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#Jobs #Husband #Independent

Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities.
-- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#Community #Historical #May

The importance of the term "genocide" for many Indigenous Peoples is that it is more than a term or an accusation; it is a word created in the wake of the Shoah in Europe to describe what happens when a people are targeted by a government for extermination, as were the Jews of Europe, and which is the term used in the most important international law related to concerned Indigenous Peoples, as the only international human rights law that pertains specifically to collectivities of people rather than individuals.
-- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#Rights #Government #Europe

The term "genocide" is often incorrectly assumed to mean extreme examples of mass murder associated with war, with the death of millions of individuals, as, for instance in Cambodia. Although clearly the Holocaust was the most extreme of all genocides, the bar set by the Nazis is not the bar required to be considered genocide. Most importantly, genocide does not have to be complete to be considered genocide.
-- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#War #Mean #Holocaust

I think in this country we're committed to developing plays, and many plays I've seen have been rewritten too much. The scenes are tight, the play ends at the right time, you know exactly what the scene is about, but it seems flat; you can almost see that too many hands have been on the play. The individual voice is gone.

Even if my country remains in war with yours. . .remember. . . i am not your enemy.

Arthur V. Berger commenting on the music of Aaron Copland: Here is at last an American that we may place unapologetically beside the great recognized creative figures of any other country.

Our fates are in the hands of An Almighty God, to whom I can with pleasure confide my own; he can save us, or destroy us; his Councils are fixed and cannot be disappointed, and all his designs will be Accomplished.

A child is a person who is going to carry on what you have started ... the fate of humanity is in his hands.

Hey Nana, If Cinderella's glass slipper fits so perfectly, I wonder why it fell off along the way? I can't help but think that it was on purpose, to attract the prince's affections. No matter what I do, I'll still have the fate of a girl who just keeps getting hurt, wondering if she can be happy in this pointless, one man show?

America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.

The human race has improved everything, but the human race.

To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization.

Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.