Autobiographers From The United States

"Within a week I was again actively testing the chains which tightly bound my individuality like a mummy for burial. The melancholy of those black days has left so long a shadow that it darkens the path of years that have since gone by. These sad memories rise above those of smoothly grinding school days. Perhaps my Indian nature is the moaning wind which stirs them now for their present record. But, however tempestuous this is within me, it comes out as the low voice of a curiously colored seashell, which is only for those ears that are bent with compassion to hear it. (V: IRON ROUTINE)"

"After my first three years of school, I roamed again in the Western country through four strange summers. During this time I seemed to hang in the heart of chaos, beyond the touch or voice of human aid. My brother, being almost ten years my senior, did not quite understand my feelings. My mother had never gone inside of a schoolhouse, and so she was not capable of comforting her daughter who could read and write. Even nature seemed to have no place for me. I was neither a wee girl nor a tall one; neither a wild Indian nor a tame one. This deporable situation was the effect of my brief course in the East, and the unsatisfactory "teenth" in a girl's years. (VI: FOUR STRANGE SUMMERS)"

"My heart and I lie small upon the earth like a grain of throbbing sand."

"At this stage of my own evolution, I was ready to curse men of small capacity for being the dwarfs their God had made them. In the process of my education I had lost all consciousness of the nature world about me. Thus, when a hidden rage took me to the small white-walled prison which I then called my room, I unknowingly turned away from my one salvation. Alone in my room, I sat like the petrified Indian woman of whom my mother used to tell me. I wished my heart's burdens would turn me to unfeeling stone. But alive, in my tomb, I was destitute! For the white man's papers I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit. For these same papers I had forgotten the healing in trees and brooks. On account of my mother's simple view of life, and my lack of any, I gave her up, also. I made no friends among the race of people I loathed. Like a slender tree, I had been uprooted from my mother, nature, and God. I was shorn of my branches, which had waved in sympathy and love for home and friends. The natural coat of bark which had protected my oversenstive nature was scraped off to the very quick."

"With the strong, happy sense that both great and small are so surely enfolded in His magnitude that, without a miss, each has his allotted individual ground of opportunities, I am buoyant with good nature."

"Finally resuming the chair at my desk I feel in keen sympathy with my fellow-creatures, for I seem to see clearly again that all are akin. The racial lines, which once were bitterly real, now serve nothing more than marking out a living mosaic of human beings. And even here men of the same color are like the ivory keys of one instrument where each resembles all the rest, yet varies from them in pitch and quality of voice. And those creatures who are for a time mere echoes of another's note are not unlike the fable of the thin sick man whose distorted shadow, dressed like a real creature, came to the old master to make him follow as a shadow. Thus with a compassion for all echoes in human guise, I greet the solemn-faced "native preacher" whom I find awaiting me. I listen with respect for God's creature, though he mouth most strangely the jangling phrases of a bigoted creed."

"The greatest gift in life is consciousness. Not positions, not the dollar, but that the Almighty Spirit gives us life and we have a rational mind with which to see all the wonders of the universe."

"Now we are meeting a civilization from a race that came from Europe. We have to meet it each day — there is no dodging, and it is not easy. It is going to take courage; it is going to test your strength. It is going to test your faith in the Greatest of All. It is going to be hard, but let us stand the test, true to the Indian blood. Let us do that. Let us teach our children to be proud of their Indian blood and to stand the test bravely."

"my mother said to me. “You must learn the white man’s language so when you grow up you will talk for us and for the Indian and the white man will have a better understanding.” I said, “I will.” It has not always been easy, but I said, “I am going to do the best I can and then I am going to let the Great Spirit do the rest.”"

"The first time you stand up for right and it is refused you, shall you quit? Then you do not believe in it. We must continue speaking and claiming our human rights to live on this earth that God has made, so that we may think our thoughts and speak them — that we may have our part in the American life and be as any other human beings are."

"Let it be remembered, before condemnation is passed upon the Red Man, that, while he burned and tortured frontiersmen, Puritan Boston burned witches and hanged Quakers, and the Southern aristocrat beat his slaves and set bloodhounds on the tracks of him who dared aspire to freedom. The barbarous Indian, ignorant alike of Roman justice, Saxon law, and the Gospel of Christian brotherhood, in the fury of revenge has brought no greater stain upon his name than these."

"Though I burned with indignation upon discovering on every side instances no less shame-ful than those I have mentioned, there was no present help. Even the few rare ones who have worked nobly for my race were powerless to choose workmen like themselves. To be sure, a man was sent from the Great Father to inspect Indian schools, but what he saw was usually the students' sample work made for exhibition. I was nettled by this sly cunning of the workmen who hookwinked the Indian's pale Father at Washington."

"we must all work for this thing — that the American Indian must have a voice. He must say what is in him and by exchanging opinions, we are going to grow."

"The invasion of his broad dominions by a paler race brought no dismay to the hospitable Indian. Samoset voiced the feeling of his people as he stood among the winter-weary Pilgrims and cried "Welcome, Englishmen." Nor did the Indian cling selfishly to his lands; willingly he divides with Roger Williams and with Penn, who pay him for his own. History bears record to no finer examples of fidelity. To Jesuit, to Quaker, to all who kept their faith with him, his loyalty never failed."

"I'm careful about what I write. I don't want to hurt or alienate anyone, but I feel there are some things that have to be said. When Gertrude Bonnin Simmons wrote about the young Indian men who went to college, returned and sold out their own people, cheated elderly people off the land, I'm sure she was unpopular for speaking it, but she told the truth."

"I enlisted to fight against foreign and domestic enemies. The average protestor on the streets is not an enemy, not a terrorist. That's not the job of the 101st Airborne or the Green Berets or other military units. As a civilian, seeing that being considered or threatened is scary. I think about some of the tactics we used overseas, and I can't understand how anyone would consider using them here in this country."

"I've been pulled over multiple times for the same taillight that is not burned out. I've been paid one-third less for television appearances and other work in that industry than my white counterparts with less experience. I've been told by TV people that when I had dreadlocks, I should cut them out because my appearance was sending a negative message. Some of this stuff happened as recently as two weeks ago. So it happens. And as a black man, you take it. Not all the time, but most of the time because you grow up aware of the consequences of not taking it. And recently, as a veteran, I've watched and listened as there's been talk of having our active duty military people being called in to help quiet unrest and arrest lawbreakers. I couldn't imagine doing that. Not to black people. Not to white people."

"I'm sad about the state of this nation right now. I really am. I remember how people rallied around the flag after 9/11. We were all on the same page. We felt unified for a while. I am proud of what I did in fighting the Global War on Terror. I'm glad I served, but in a way, with what's going on now in this country and how divided we are, it's almost like what our Vietnam veterans faced in coming home. We aren't physically being spit on and degraded, but it is an enormous sign of disrespect for our efforts to come back home from war to have another one going on here. Especially since we can fix this."

"I've never really talked about this openly. I was too scared and too uncomfortable. Given what's happened recently with the death of George Floyd and the response to that, I've been asked about these issues more. The simple answer is that yes, in the military, I was discriminated against. It wasn't always open, so it was often subtle, but I felt it was there. Some people made assumptions about me just because of the color of my skin."

"The truth is, when I left the military, and even at times when I was home from deployment, that badass mentality was too much for me to deal with. I felt like I had to live up to being a badass and I was scared to death that I really wasn't that way. It's hard enough living one life, but when you're living two or being two different people, things get complicated. So, I just tried to continue being that badass, and drinking a lot helped to do that and to forget the fear of not being a badass. That's a lose-lose proposition I can see now. Plus, the Reaper was my identity. I'd served six deployments overall. My whole identity to that point was wanting to be a soldier, a sniper, and then being those two things. And I was good at it, too. I was known for being good at it. Being that guy, that badass, that Reaper was how I was able to survive and how I was able to function in this world. I was molded by having such life-changing experiences as being in combat and serving as a sniper. And coming back home after having been all that and figuring out a way to still be all that while in the civilian arena was hard."

"Truth is, I did know how it was. Truth is, in the military, I was treated better as an adult than I am as a civilian. I didn't really experience much racism as a kid. I realize now, that I was pretty naïve.I remember my dad having "the talk" with me. Not the one about the birds and the bees, but the one about how I should conduct myself when I am forced to have an encounter with a law enforcement officer. I thought everybody got that talk from their fathers. I now realize they don't, just minority parents talking to minority kids about what o do so they don't end up arrested, roughed up, or dead. When I told Jess that down the line I was going to have to have that talk with my son, she was totally confused. What? Why? You mean..."

"If I could tell everyone in this country one thing that I learned it would be this: We need to have an open ear and an open mind. We need to have leaders that are willing to listen, to accept feedback, and adjust. We also need to remember that we still have men and women overseas who are fighting and dying to preserve and protect the principles that we're all supposed to have bought into as Americans. And remember that if you do have respect for a veteran, and the vast majority of people do, that means that you should have respect for yourself and for other Americans. We are all there fighting, black guys, white guys, Hispanic guys. So, if you want to say thank you for your service, then stop the fighting here, stop the discrimination among races and classes. That can start with being an open ear. Listen. As a leader, it isn't about issuing commands. You have to listen, accept feedback, and make changes."

"I think that a lot of people have this misconception about what it means to be a sniper. A lot of people are fascinated with the long-distance kill. That's kind of the romanticized version of the lone gunman out there stalking his prey. Guys do that, and that's important, but that's not the only kind of sniping that gets done. Direct-action sniping is different. You're in a firefight. Chaos is going on all around you. I saw a mix of both kinds and they required a different skill set- not entirely, but to a degree- and a different mindset. But a lot of people don't understand that as a sniper, 90 percent of your job is relaying information back to the other guys and teams and command personnel behind you. You're out in front and can see things they can't but need to. The way I looked at it, that first 90 percent was about helping save lives. The same with the 10 percent."

"I look back now, and I'm completely amazed at a lot of things we all did. I was scared every time we went outside the gate. Every single time. Every single firefight. That last deployment in Helmand Province I was convinced I was going to die. Maybe it was superstition, but on your last deployment after you'd made the decision to leave the military, you know that you were either going to get shot or killed. We were experiencing way too much contact with the enemy, way too many ambushes, way too many close calls. At that point, Marjah was the Wild West. The only thing that kept me going was the guys to my left and to my right."

"Sergeant Nick "the Reaper" Irving earned his reputation and nickname on a remarkable tour of duty in 2009 while serving primarily as a direct action sniper in Helmand Province. While serving with the 3rd Ranger Battalion, in a period of three months he established a record by accounting for the confirmed deaths of thirty-three enemy combatants. He was the first African American sniper to serve in his battalion, and proudly followed in the footsteps of his parents, both of whom were in the Army. Nick admits to having a bad case of "SEAL-itis" as a kid, as a result of his exposure to the Charlie Sheen film Navy Seals. He went so far as to attend, and pass, the Navy Sea Cadet SEAL camp in Florida following his senior year in high school. It was only because a pre-induction physical revealed his color-blindness that he was forced to give up his long-held dream. Post 9/11, the military was in need of qualified candidates, and an army recruiter sought him out after a nurse cheated for him on the color vision test, convincing him that the Army's elite Ranger Regiment was essentially, as he put it, SEALs without the water."

"Nick was already a well-practiced and highly-skilled marksman before entering the military, but he had to overcome a serious obstacle before he could join the Ranger Battalion- his fear of heights. Completing airborne training was a major challenge, and to this day, Nick marvels at the fact that some people leap out of airplanes for enjoyment. Despite that fear, he was able to join the Rangers, and he credits his father and father's military training for straightening him out. He admits to being an angry and sometimes wayward young man who often lacked discipline and focus, except when it came to precision marksmanship and working toward his early goal of becoming a SEAL. Early on, he discovered John Plaster's influential book, The Ultimate Sniper. Though a few birds and a neighbor's window paid the price of his early interest in weaponry, he refined his skills and came to liken sniping to chess, with its emphasis on anticipation, prediction, and analysis. He used those high-level critical thinking skills in serving with great distinction for six years."

"I always told my guys that they should call me "Irv." I never wanted them to call me "Sergeant." Even though I'd earned the nickname and the reputation as the Reaper, I wanted everyone to operate on the same level playing field. I wasn't any better than anyone. That didn't mean that I didn't carry myself with confidence, but I remained humble. One thing is for sure, if you ever say anything in the battalion that sounds like a brag, you'll never hear the end of it. Also, that was just how I was raised. Lead by example. Don't ever be your own cheerleader."

"It would be false to say that Zitkala-Ša launched an American Indian literary tradition, but it is possible, in examining the cameo of her life and literature, to say that she struggled toward a vision of wholeness in which the conflicting parts of her existence could be reconciled. That she did not fully succeed is evident in her work, which is a model of ambivalences, of oscillations between two diametrically opposed worlds, but is also a model of retrieved possibilities, a creative, human endeavor that stands at the beginning of many such endeavors eventually to culminate in the finely crafted work of contemporary American Indian writers."

"Dear Zitkala-Sa: I thank you for your book on Indian legends. I have read them with exquisite pleasure. Like all folk tales they mirror the child life of the world. There is in them a note of wild, strange music. You have translated them into our language in a way that will keep them alive in the hearts of men. They are so young, so fresh, so full of the odors of the virgin forest untrod by the foot of white man! The thoughts of your people seem dipped in the colors of the rainbow, palpitant with the play of winds, eerie with the thrill of a spirit-world unseen but felt and feared. Your tales of birds, beast, tree and spirit can not but hold captive the hearts of all children. They will kindle in their young minds that eternal wonder which creates poetry and keeps life fresh and eager."

"Since leaving the military, he has enjoyed a career as an author of two highly regarded memoirs and a series of military action novels, as a television personality, and as an instructor at HardShoot. The last one is at a precision shooting company where he instructs individuals, including Olympic marksmen, in the fine art and hard science of shooting. Along with his wife, Jessica, and his son, Kaden, he resides in Texas."

"As a sniper, you have the power to end the most precious thing on the planet without that person even being aware of your existence. It takes a certain type of individual to deal with having that kind of power."

"Poets sing of a coming federation of the world, and we applaud. Idealists dream that in this commonwealth of all humanity the divine spark in man shall be the only test of citizenship, and we think of their dream and future history."

"We clasp the warm hand of friendship everywhere. From honest hearts and sincere lips we hear the hearty welcome and Godspeed."

"Today the Indian is pressed almost to the farther sea. Does that sea symbolize his death?"

"To take the life of a nation during the slow march of centuries seems not a lighter crime than to crush it instantly with one fatal blow."

"During the Progressive era, Native Americans also began to serve as public advocates for their people. A generation educated in white institutions had gained familiarity with the dominant culture and acquired the political skills needed to speak for themselves. Their goal was to undo the economic and political dependency that had resulted from late nineteenth-century Indian policy. Gertrude Simmons Bonnin was the leading woman in this first generation of modern Indian activists. Known by her Yankton Sioux name Zitkala-Ša, she advocated both preserving Native culture from destruction and securing full rights of citizenship for Native peoples. She became the secretary of the first secular national pan-Indian reform organization established by Native peoples, the Society of American Indians."

"Not only did slavery play a major role in the historical development of the U.S., but the wealth and power of the U.S. rests today on a worldwide system of imperialist exploitation that ensnares hundreds of millions, and ultimately billions, of people in conditions hardly better than those of slaves. Now, if this seems like an extreme or extravagant claim, think about the tens of millions of children throughout the Third World who, from a very, very early age, are working nearly every day of the year—as the slaves on the southern plantations in the United States used to say, “from can’t see in the morning, till can’t see at night”—until they’ve been physically used up, with their lives literally passing, bit by bit, day after day, from them into the machinery on which they’re working (or which, in a real sense, is working on them, wearing their lives away) and into the products which they are producing through this labor. These are conditions very similar to outright slavery, and they often go along with superstructural expressions which are very close to slavery—ways in which, through customs and traditions, and sometimes even formal codes, the lives of these children, and others in these conditions, are controlled, confined and degraded. This includes overt sexual harassment of women, and many other degradations as well. All this is the foundation on which the imperialist system rests, with U.S. imperialism now sitting atop it all."

"Now, of course, slavery was not the only factor that played a significant part in the emergence of the U.S. as a world power, whose economic strength underlies its massive military force. A major historical factor in all this was the theft of land, on a massive scale, from Mexico as well as from native peoples. But, in turn, much of that conquest of land was, for a long period of time up until the Civil War, largely to expand the slave system. “Remember the Alamo,” we are always reminded. Well, many of the “heroes” of the Alamo were slave traders and slave chasers... And expanding the slave system was a major aim of the overall war with Mexico, although that war also led to the westward expansion of the developing capitalist system centered in the northern United States."

"Look at all these beautiful children who are female in the world. And in addition to all the other outrages which I have referred to, in terms of children throughout the slums and shantytowns of the Third World, in addition to all the horrors that will be heaped on them—the actual living in garbage and human waste in the hundreds of millions as their fate, laid out before them, yes, even before they are born—there is, on top of this, for those children who are born female, the horror of everything that this will bring simply because they are female in a world of male domination. And this is true not only in the Third World. In "modern" countries like the U.S. as well, the statistics barely capture it: the millions who will be raped; the millions more who will be routinely demeaned, deceived, degraded, and all too often brutalized by those who are supposed to be their most intimate lovers; the way in which so many women will be shamed, hounded and harassed if they seek to exercise reproductive rights through abortion, or even birth control; the many who will be forced into prostitution and pornography; and all those who—if they do not have that particular fate, and even if they achieve some success in this "new world" where supposedly there are no barriers for women—will be surrounded on every side, and insulted at every moment, by a society and a culture which degrades women, on the streets, in the schools and workplaces, in the home, on a daily basis and in countless ways."

"There is a place where epistemology and morality meet. There is a place where you have to stand and say: It is not acceptable to refuse to look at something—or to refuse to believe something—because it makes you uncomfortable. And: It is not acceptable to believe something just because it makes you feel comfortable."

"Here I want to bring up a formulation that I love, because it captures so much that is essential. Soon after September 11 someone said, or wrote somewhere, that living in the U.S. is a little bit like living in the house of Tony Soprano. You know, or you have a sense, that all the goodies that you've gotten have something to do with what the master of the house is doing out there in the world. Yet you don't want to look too deeply or too far at what that might be, because it might upset everything—not only what you have, all your possessions, but all the assumptions on which you base your life."

"There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth."

"This takes us back to the very important point from "The End of a Stage—The Beginning of a New Stage" about unresolved contradictions under socialism. What is said there is another way of expressing the understanding that the struggle for the complete emancipation of women will be a crucial part of "the final revolution." In other words, it will be a crucial component in propelling and driving forward not only the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the rule of capitalism-imperialism but to continue the revolution, within the new, socialist society itself, in order to advance on the road toward the final aim of communism. The point is that, among the unresolved contradictions which will remain in socialist society, and which can be a driving force propelling that revolution forward, the continuing ways in which the emancipation of women will need to be fought for and fought through will be one of the most decisive aspects and expressions of that."

"The interests, objectives, and grand designs of the imperialists are not our interests—they are not the interests of the great majority of people in the U.S. nor of the overwhelming majority of people in the world as a whole. And the difficulties the imperialists have gotten themselves into in pursuit of these interests must be seen, and responded to, not from the point of view of the imperialists and their interests, but from the point of view of the great majority of humanity and the basic and urgent need of humanity for a different and better world, for another way."

"We are not going to have, and there never will be, a proletarian revolution that is made with “pure proletarians,” especially as conceived of with an economist outlook and approach (reducing the workers and the scope of their struggle to merely the economic sphere, reducing the struggle of the working class to immediate concerns involving wages and related questions, or in any case limiting it to the economic sphere, with the highest expression of that being something like a general strike). Revolution is not going to be a general strike, as the Trotskyites and others with essentially the same viewpoint and approach think—if they even think about revolution. But, beyond that, it’s not going to be a neat unfolding of something where, in direct proportion and mechanical relation to how many proletarians there are, that much more powerful will be the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. It’s going to be much more contradictory and complex than that, in some ways acutely so."

"Reality is like a fire, like a burning object, and if you want to pick up that burning object and move it, you have to have an instrument with which to do it. If you try to do it bare-handed, the result is not going to be good. That's another way of getting at the role of theory in relation to the larger world that needs to be transformed, in relation to practice, and in particular revolutionary practice, to change the world."

"What are we communists? We are not, to refer to Eldridge Cleaver’s phrase, “the baddest motherfuckers on the planet earth”—at least not quite in the sense that he meant it. We are a reflection, we are the conscious expression, of this fundamental contradiction of capitalism—of how it is tending, and of the need for the world-historic struggle to resolve this contradiction in the interests of the masses of people through proletarian revolution and the advance to communism, worldwide. That is what we communists are. We are the conscious expression of that."

"In advancing toward and in finally realizing communism, the objective and the approach is not, and must not be, to “flatten everything out”—it is to continue to advance toward overcoming social inequality and, beyond that, to move beyond calculations of equality and inequality by realizing and implementing the principle of “from each according to their ability to each according to their need.”"

"There cannot be a proletarian revolution if there are no class-conscious proletarians striving for that revolution."

"American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People's Lives"