indigenous-rights-activists

"The jungle is our home, our pharmacy, our market, our temple."

"The tide of history canonizes the fait accompli, harnessing the diplomatic niceties of the law of nations to the maverick rapine of the squatters’ posse."

"When invasion is recognized as a structure rather than an event, its history does not stop—or, more to the point, become relatively trivial—when it moves on from the era of frontier homicide. Rather, narrating that history involves charting the continuities, discontinuities, adjustments, and departures whereby a logic that initially informed frontier killing transmutes into different modalities, discourses and institutional formations as it undergirds the historical development and complexification of settler society."

"Rather than something separate from or running counter to the colonial state, the murderous activities of the frontier rabble constitute its principal means of expansion."

"With no external threat to necessitate maintaining the formalities of international diplomacy, settler discourse seeks to shift Native Affairs out of the realm of international relations and reconstitute it internally as a depoliticised branch of the welfare bureaucracy. To this end, post-frontier settler policy typically favours assimilation, a range of strategies intended to separate individual Natives from their collective sovereignties and merge them irrecoverably into the settler mainstream."

"Settler colonialism is an inclusive, land-centred project that coordinates a comprehensive range of agencies, from the metropolitan centre to the frontier encampment, with a view to eliminating Indigenous societies."

"Natives have been subjected to a recurrent cycle of inducements – allotment (held out as personal endowment), citizenship, tribal enrolment, termination (held out as individual freedom), and self-determination – each of which has sought to present domination as empowerment and thereby assert Natives’ consent to their own dispossession."

"Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event."

"Why should ostensibly sovereign nations, residing in territory solemnly guaranteed to them by treaties, decide that they are willing, after all, to surrender their ancestral homelands? More often than not (and nearly always up to the wars with the Plains Indians, which did not take place until after the civil war), the agency which reduced Indian peoples to this abjection was not some state instrumentality but irregular, greed-crazed invaders who had no intention of allowing the formalities of federal law to impede their access to the riches available in, under, and on Indian soil."

"Acts—usually violent and secret—that have been carried out by people who were not officially commissioned to carry them out ... have generally occurred behind the screen of the frontier, in the wake of which, once the dust has settled, the irregular acts that took place have been regularized and the boundaries of White settlement extended. Characteristically, officials express regret at the lawlessness of this process while resigning themselves to its inevitability."

"We are, and always have been, a race of voyagers, scientists, gardeners, lovers, poets, composers, philosophers, artists, orators, mathematicians, dancers, astronomers, builders and healers. We were peacemakers and keepers as much as warriors – and in many cases more so."

"While every New Zealand election is customarily (and also unacceptably) characterised by race-baiting politics and the throwing of whānau Māori under the colonial bus for the sake of majority votes, this year we’ve seen multiple lines crossed that indicate a mainstreaming of extreme, violent anti-Māori rhetoric."

"The myth of the violent, brutish, immature, dependent warrior race is one such tool, used to hold up the structure of colonisation. It does this by legitimising the need for a parent state to oversee us, correct us, and dominate us. The truth of the matter is that there is no such thing as a genetic disposition towards warfare and violence. There is no “warrior gene”. Conflict was, as with all peoples, just one dimension of our complex reality."

"The trope of the savage indigenous man is one that is capitalised upon by media and state in a way that is harmful and diminishing."

"The 2023 New Zealand elections have arguably been the most racialised in our nation’s history."

"In the tens of thousands, New Zealanders are showing up to call for an end to the collective punishment, the indiscriminate killing, the unjust occupation, and to rightfully name these acts for what they are: crimes against humanity."

"Colonisation does not uphold itself voluntarily. Like any structure, with time, if neglected, it will begin to crumble."

"Whereas diverse genders have a home and a history here, on and from this whenua and in this region of the globe – transphobia does not. It was brought here on a boat, along with white supremacy, and is rallying now, alongside its sibling of white supremacy, for its survival."

"The fires of colonization robbed us of so much."

"We are not a warrior race."

"Not one more acre."

"Dame Whina was very strong willed and believed in fighting for things that benefited Maori. She didn't care who was in power, but believed that not one more acre of land should be alienated from Māori without Māori consent."

"Let us all remember that the Treaty was signed so that we could all live as one nation in Aotearoa."

"She was the person that galvanised all the array of different issues, opinions, claims, angsts that different communities had had around alienation of land, loss of authority and she really encapsulated that into the march and the term not one more acre."

"The Mexic Amerindian woman has inherited the sexism instituted by dominant Mexican and U.S. society compounded by the sexism within certain oppressed indigenous cultures. In neither the creative literature nor the ethnographic documentation, did I hear her speak for herself. Only in 1992, the quincentenary of European conquest, was the world delivered the voice of one Mesoamerican woman, the Mayan Rigoberta Menchu who received the Nobel Peace Prize for her ongoing activism on behalf of her people's human rights."

"One of the most interesting classes I took, "Europe and the Americas," detailed the systematic and brutally efficient decimation of indigenous peoples and cultures. One of the required books, I, Rigoberta Menchú, recounted the struggle of indigenous Guatemalans. Later on, in "Imagining the Holocaust," I heard the horrific account of what happened to Jews during World War II. At Stanford I was forced to pull back from my tight community and understand how a common thread ran through so many other cultures around the world where people had to fight for their rights."

"Rigoberta Menchu lives on as a symbol of defiant survival."

"I think in some ways Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel Peace Prize winner-a Guatemalan human-rights activist-may be a good rallying force for all of us. She represents to me the very best of what native womanhood is about. I am awestruck by her life and accomplishments, as are many other native people in Central, South, and North America"

"I think that it’s very important, and what’s really crucial here is the memory of the victims and the search for the truth, and also the commitment to substantiate the truth. So the truth is foremost, because they accused us of being liars. They tried to denigrate the memory of the victims."

"I don’t want to be controversial, but I do see that under Ronald Reagan and Bush’s administration there was a fantasy created of a third World War. And this fantasy really damaged the mentality of the military in Guatemala and Guatemalan fascists, and they still believe that communism exists. I don’t know what they’re referring to, but the truth is that here in Guatemala, women were raped, girls were raped, they strangled children, they assassinated and wiped out entire indigenous peoples, just because they thought they were so-called subversives and communists. So humanity really has to look into what occurred."

"It’s clear that there is no peace without justice. There is no peace without truth."

"I trust in God; I drink, mate, and use protection. God knows why we have come to Earth, and He knows when we are going to leave. There are many people I know who have taken care of themselves, but they left. There are people who don't take care of themselves, get sick, and recover."

"... [he who] does not speak his native language is not indigenous; he is a false indigenous..."

"I want there to exist—respecting cultures—a single society. That both the k'ara and the Indian recognize each other as equals; enough of confrontation, enough of remembering the 500 years... There must be forgiveness between us... As long as we live in confrontation, it will be a second-class Bolivia, underdeveloped, and that is why my first pillar is to live among equals; it is the first thing."

"If you have to go to jail for denouncing corruption, I'm going to go."

"I don't want to be president because to be president is to be a prisoner of the transnationals, of the llunkus, to be a prisoner of a colonial state..."

"...those of us who comply with the Constitution... fear nothing; [I] fear only God... and my wife."

"I am a believer in Pachamama, but I also believe in God. They both merge. Leaving the house, we pray to God, but at the moment when you pass a large mountain—which for us are the wak'as, the sacred places—we pray to Pachamama."

"I am the pitita that unites the k'aras with the Indians, East and West. We have to be one. The goal is one, the welfare of the other. Enough left and right..."

"We thought that [Evo Morales] represented hope, we identified with him. He won, we gave him all the power. But the process has given us nothing. It has been all discourse, no application. He speaks of Mother Earth, and he is the foremost violator of Mother Earth."

"My mother was a very wise woman; she had the fundamental principles of respect for life, respect for our nature, for the worldview; she was a great believer in nature, in the wacas, in the illas; she guided me in the life of our peoples."

"[Our party] must [have] a renewal of leadership; new people in politics in this country... professionals, middle class, and Indians; the Indians cannot be on the sidelines."

"I do striking things, but I do them so that the people understand... in a didactic way what is happening in the country."

"The message you give to people is better accepted with humor."

"If for helping my brothers, for handing out surgical masks, for guiding, they have to remove me, let them remove me."

"The impact of this find was devastating. It’s hard to overstate the effects and impact it’s had on our nation. It’s triggered so many hurts and wounds. We have a lot of grieving members right now."

"We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify."

"Today is about making some positive steps forward and rectifying a mistake. We wanted to ensure that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited what we refer to as a sacred site. It was a long awaited moment to receive a personal hand of recognition and sympathy regarding this horrific confirmation of unmarked graves from the Canadian head of state."

"“She reached out, she said ‘please come, listen and learn and we will walk this path together and that is why I’m here,’” he [Justin Trudeau] said."

"Ideologies of US settler colonialism directly informed Australian settler colonialism. South African apartheid townships, the kill-zones in what became the Philippine colony, then nation-state, the checkerboarding of Palestinian land with checkpoints, were modeled after U.S. seizures of land and containments of Indian bodies to reservations. The racial science developed in the U.S. (a settler colonial racial science) informed Hitler’s designs on racial purity (“This book is my bible” he said of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race)."