Short list:
Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians. Ward Churchill. 1992.
“The white man made us many promises, but he kept only one. He promised to take our land, and he took it”. Red Cloud, Oglala Lakota, 1882.
Land, as Red Cloud and myriad others have noted, is the absolutely essential issue defining viable conceptions of Native America, whether in the past, present or future. A deeply held sense of unity with particular geographical contexts has provided, and continues to afford, the spiritual cement allowing cultural cohesion across the entire spectrum of indigenous American societies. Contests for control of territory have also been the fundamental basis of Indian/non—Indian interaction since the moment of first contact, and underlie the virtually uninterrupted (and ongoing) pattern of genocide suffered by American Indians over the past half-millennium.
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Struggle For The Land: Indigenous Resistance To Genocide Ecocide And Expropriation In Contemporary North America. Ward Churchill. 1993.
The underlying motivation prompting the genocide of Native Americans, the lust for their territories and the resources within them, is typically hidden behind a rhetoric extolling the “settlement” of essentially vacant and “undiscovered” lands. To admit otherwise risks revealing that the past motive for genocide exists as much today, and in some ways more so.
The destruction of indigenous peoples through the expropriation and/or destruction of their land bases is very much an ongoing phenomenon in both the United States and Canada. The processes are not simply genocidal; they are increasingly ecocidal in their implications. Not only the people of the land are being destroyed, but, more and more, the land itself. The nature of native resistance to the continuing onslaught of the invading industrial culture is shaped accordingly. It is a resistance forged in the crucible of a struggle for survival.
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Basic Call To Consciousness. By Akwesasne Notes Mohawk Nation. 1978.
The Haudenosaunee, more commonly known as the Iroquois Confederacy, are an ancient people of North America. Our tradition states that our people originate in the northeastern woodlands of North America. There are no stories within that tradition concerning migration across frozen lands to the area we occupy. We have been and continue to be the original inhabitants of these lands. From: The Hau De No Sau Nee Address to the Western World, Geneva, Switzerland, 1977.
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