Category Archives: nayra

‘After leaving Harvard in 1668, John Wompas became a sailor, one of the earliest American Indians known to participate in the transatlantic trade. This decision probably also made him one of the most highly educated common sailors in the Atlantic World, one “who could recite and read Latin and Greek, along with a smattering of Syrian, Chaldaic, and Hebrew.”‘

“As shown by the writings of Increase Mather, the colonists attributed the decimation of the Native Americans to God’s providence in clearing the new lands for settlement.”

“I went to one village and saw 100 corpses, then another village and another 100 corpses. No one paid attention to them. People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs had long ago been eaten by the people.”

‘The cover featured photographs of the Auschwitz Orchestra, a group of concentration camp prisoners who were forced to play classical music as people were herded into the gas chambers. The back cover included the text “The moral of this work: the past punishment is the inevitable blindness of the present.”‘

White people must carry an Indian deep inside themselves.
If the interior Indian is male
then he must be a warrior, especially if he is inside a white man.
…
In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written,
all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.

-Sherman Alexie

Wanekia

“He was said to have caused a block of ice to fall out of the sky on a summer day, to be able to end drought with rain or snow, to light his pipe with the sun, and to form icicles in his hands.”

‘When Crazy Horse was alive, he was known for his humility, which is considered a key virtue in Lakota culture. He never dressed elaborately or allowed his picture to be taken. (He is said to have responded, “Would you steal my shadow, too?”)’

…

‘So much of the American story—as it actually happened, but also as it is told, and altered, and forgotten, and, eventually, repeated—feels squeezed into the vast contradiction that is the modern Black Hills. Here, sites of theft and genocide have become monuments to patriotism, a symbol of resistance has become a source of revenue, and old stories of broken promises and appropriation recur. A complicated history becomes a cheery tourist attraction. The face of the past comes to look like the faces of those who memorialize it.’

“That fall [1883], they say, the last of the bison herds was slaughtered by the Wasichus. I can remember when the bison were so many that they could not be counted, but more and more Wasichus came to kill them until they were only heaps of bones scattered where they used to be. The Wasichus did not kill them to eat; they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues; and I have heard that fire-boats came down the Missouri River loaded with dried bison tongues. You can see that the men who did this were crazy. Sometimes they did not even take the tongues; they just killed and killed because they like to do that. When we hunted bison, we killed only what we needed. And when there was nothing left but heaps of bones, the Wasichus came and gathered up even the bones and sold them.

All our people now were settling down in square gray houses, scattered here and there across this hungry land, and around them the Wasichus had drawn a line to keep them in. The nation’s hoop was broken, and there was no center any longer for the flowering tree. The people were in despair. They seemed heavy to me, heavy and dark; so heavy that it seemed they could not be lifted; so dark that they could not be made to see any more. Hunger was among us often now, for much of what the Great Father in Washington sent us must have been stolen by Wasichus who were crazy to get money. There were many lies, but we could not eat them. The forked tongue made promises.”

-Black Elk