Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

"This idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the United States is a screen that obscures the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources, reducing the Indigenous population, and forcibly relocating and incarcerating them in reservations. The fundamental unresolved issues of Indigenous lands, treaties, and sovereignty could not but scuttle the premises of multiculturalism for Native Americans."

"The US polity has been trying to rid itself of Indigenous nations since first settlement. Four hundred years later, multiculturalism is the mechanism for avoiding acknowledgment of settler colonialism."

"The United States has never been "a nation of immigrants." It has always been a settler state with a core of descendants from the original colonial settlers, that is, primarily Anglo-Saxons, Scots Irish, and German. The vortex of settler colonialism sucked immigrants through a kind of seasoning process of Americanization, not as rigid and organized as the "seasoning" of Africans, which rendered them into human commodities, but effective nevertheless."

"A revolutionary working class must be able to acknowledge its enemy and eschew not only capitalism but also colonialism and imperialism."

"Lack of imagination also indicates lack of commitment for figuring it out."

"The United States will not decolonize until it is forced to do so. And unless colonization and imperialism are understood to be inherent in the very founding and all US institutions, we cannot begin to dismantle the fiscal-military state."

""Colonization," "dispossession," "settler colonialism," "genocide"-these are the terms that drill to the core of US history, to the very source of the country's existence. (Author's Note)"

"Surviving genocide, by whatever means, is resistance: non-Indians must know this in order to more accurately understand the history of the United States. (Author's Note)"