This was the face of Spanish settlement: slavery, subjugation, and extermination.

pain. I have tried to catch us not in the act of dying but, rather, in the radical act of living.

“Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the spread of its power over the entire world,” writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. “Rather, the chief cause was the colonialist settler-state’s willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess

. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.

true. Columbus sailed west for money. The colonists came for money and they stayed for money. Indigenous peoples, for their part, resisted, helped, hindered, played, and constantly negotiated the changes

Columbus returned there for good, never having set foot on the mainland of North America.

that Indians need not accept their position of disenfranchisement, and, even more radical, that simply “being Indian”—choosing to be Indian—constituted a social good.

Despite their later losses, the Plains tribes are, quite likely, around today only because they fought—armed with guns and mounted on horses—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It was an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it. During that time the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed.”