Sound Bites -- Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio commentary)

11-20 of 333 Sound Bites. [show all]

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11) To recognize the Indian ownership of the limitless praries and forests of this continent -- that is, to consider the dozen squalid savages who hunted at long intervals over a territory of a thousand square miles as owning it outright -- necessarily implies a similar recognition of the claims of every white hunter, squatter, horse-thief, or wandering cattle-man. (Theodore Roosevelt, Winning of the West. New York, 1889, vol 1: 331-35. )

12) A complete list of the events that occurred when the Requirement formalities ordered by King Ferdinand were carried out in America, more or less according to the law, might tax the reader's patience and credulity, for the Requirement was read to trees and empty huts when no Indians were to be found.  Captains muttered its theological phrases into their beard on the edge of sleeping Indian settlements, or even a league away before starting the formal attack, and at times some leather-lunged Spanish notary hurled its sonorous phrases after the Indians as they fled into the mountains.  Once it was read in camp before the soldiers to the beat of the drum.  Ship captains would sometimes have the document read from the deck as they approached an island, and at night would send out enslaving expeditions, whose leaders would shout the traditional Castilian war cry "Santiago!" rather than read the Requirement before they attacked the near-by villages.  Sometimes Indian messengers were sent to "require" other Indians. (Lewis Hanke, qtd. in Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest.  New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 92. )

13) The universe is made up of stories, not atoms. (Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977. )

14) But as Homi Bhabha reminds us, a nation's existence is also dependent on "a strange forgetting of the history of the nation's past: the violence involved in establishing the nation's writ.  It is this forgetting -- a minus in the origin -- that constitutes the beginning of the nation's narrative." (Cecilia Elizabeth O' Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism.  Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999: 5. )

15) Most of the promotional literature aimed at selling the English on America can be traced to the most prolific compilers and earnest advocates of England's involvement in the New World during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the two Richard Hakluyts.  The cousins, the elder a lawyer and the younger a cleric, began actively promoting English colonial expansion in the first decade of the reign of Elizabeth I and would later become the major promoters of Raleigh's Roanoke venture. (Susan Schmidt Horning, "The Power of Image: Promotional Literature and Its Changing Role in the Settlement of Early Carolina."  North Carolina Historical Review 70.4 [1993]: 366. )

16) Meeting the European princes on equal terms, negotiating with them as an equal power, the popes themselves became princes.  This was perhaps the most conspicuous development of the later fifteenth century. (Geoffrey Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy.  London: Thames and Hudson, 1968: 189. )

17) Thus in a few days more men were converted by this method [conquest] to faith in Christ, and more safely, than were converted by preaching alone in 300 years.  (Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Apology for the Book On the Just Causes of War.  Trans. and ed. Lewis D. Epstein.  Bowdoin College: 1973: 26. )

18) That the Caribs were cannibals justified, in Columbus's view, his selling them into slavery, and the human sacrifice practiced by the Aztec required, in the opinion of Sepúlveda and other Spaniards, the forced labor of all Indians.  In fact, the whole debate among the Spanish over the nature of the Indian can be viewed as a dispute among colonists, clergy, and crown officials about the proper method of exploiting the native, for the consequences of the arguments benefited some groups at the expense of others. (Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present.  New York: Vintage Books, 1978: 119. )

19) You know, most clement son, that, although you take precedence over all mankind in dignity, nevertheless, you piously bow the neck to those who have charge of divine affairs and seek from them the means of your salvation. (Pope Gelasius I argues for the primacy of papal power in a letter to Emperor Anastasius I: Robert A.Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest.  New York: Oxford UP, 1990: 16. )

20) The American frontier has been mythologized and romanticized – for this to happen, the Native Americans must be seen as props on the terrain, no different from the rocks or the trees which stand in the way of our dreams of independence and expansion.   However, should this be our only perception about the settlers of Jamestown?  No, because the formidable spirit the colonists displayed in the face of disease, starvation, and hardships is admirable, and their hopes to create a New Eden displays the potential of the imperialist endeavor. (Mehnaz Choudhury, Lehigh University )