Settler Quotes & Sayings

These findings stand in sharp contrast to the belief in "American exceptionalism" that once dominated US sociology, according to which social mobility in the United States was exceptionally high compared with the class-bound societies of Europe. No doubt the settler society of the early nineteenth century was more mobile. As I have shown, moreover, inherited wealth played a smaller role in the United States than in Europe, and US wealth was for a long time less concentrated, at least up to World War I. Throughout most of the twentieth century, however, and still today, the available data suggest that social mobility has been and remains lower in the United States than in Europe. — Thomas Piketty

A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper. — Henry David Thoreau

A mother can have no secrets in a settler's hut but she cannot so much as break wind and all her children must hear what she has done but now she were far away from Fifteen Mile Creek and no longer could I guess her life. I were told she took laundry and perhaps she did but I am sure she only did what she must do. She had a mother and father and brothers and sisters but in the end she were a poor widow and she had 7 children and all of them was alarmed and unsettled by their lives. — Peter Carey

In 1846 the prairie town of Oak River existed only in a settler's dream. — Bess Streeter Aldrich

The Vikings could have been saved if they had borrowed survival strategies from the Inuit, but the only record we have of contact between the two peoples is the remark from a Viking settler that the Inuit bleed a lot when stabbed - an observation that hardly indicates a willingness to learn from their northern neighbors. — Johnjoe McFadden

The status of 'native' is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent. — Jean-Paul Sartre

No matter how many times we prove otherwise, the men don't seem to believe we can take care of ourselves." "Which is ridiculous," Rosa agreed, "Especially when you consider how many settler women over there on their frontier are doing just that. — Mercedes Lackey

I wondered just how much of her I'd invented. Had I only mastered some skill for awing myself? Or would this creature, Camilla, like a settler's incessant New World, keep increasing my capacity not only to marvel but to marvel at myself in the face of her? — Nick Fowler

Later traded to Jacques Caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named Hans Zimmerman; being used by him as a beer-stein until one day, under the spell of its contents, he suffered it to roll from his front stoop to the prairie path before his home - where, falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery upon his awaking. — H.P. Lovecraft

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism - the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Settler colonialism, which is what this is, is by far the worst kind of imperialism, because it gets rid of the native population. Other kinds of imperialism exploit them, but settler colonialism eliminates them, "exterminates" them, to use the words of the Founding Fathers. — Noam Chomsky

Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series is a national treasure, beloved by generations. But what I love most is the peek it provides into the planting, harvesting, hunting, and preparing of the foods that America's settler families ate in the late 1800s. — Isabel Gillies

affinities under the crust of colonialism. This brief overview of precolonial North America suggests the magnitude of what was lost to all humanity and counteracts the settler-colonial myth of the wandering Neolithic hunter. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time. Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on January 3, 1891, he wrote, "The Pioneer [sic] has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

If you want to play this game, then so be it," he snapped. "We'll play settler until you finally learn what a miserable, hardscrabble life it really is!" He'd swept his hat off his head, and when he slapped it against his thigh, dust flew. "You mean you're going to marry me?" Lily dared to ask, coughing. "Hell, no!" Caleb retorted in a raspy whisper. "I wouldn't marry a stubborn, sneaky little chit like you for anything!" Lily might have slapped him if she hadn't been so aware that Wilbur and the others were looking on, no matter how disinterested they might pretend to be. "Well, I know I'm stubborn," Lily admitted grudgingly. "But sneaky?" "Yes, sneaky!" Caleb hissed, whacking his hat against his leg again. "I turn my back for a week, and here you are, charming my men into building your damned house for you!" Lily — Linda Lael Miller

In 1694 a law was passed "that every settler who deserted a town for fear of the Indians should forfeit all his rights therein." But now, at any rate, as I have frequently observed, a man may desert the fertile frontier territories of truth and justice, which are the State's best lands, for fear of far more insignificant foes, without forfeiting any of his civil rights therein. Nay, townships are granted to deserters, and the General Court, as I am sometimes inclined to regard it, is but a deserters' camp itself. — Henry David Thoreau

Jews and Muslims 'dialoguing' has nothing to do with Palestine. The problem is settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation, not religion. — Remi Kanazi

Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren't looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

He is someone who is involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a fundamental way. Let's start with who Dani Dayan is. He was the former head of one of the main settler councils, the Yesha Council, which is a kind of umbrella organization for settlements in the occupied West Bank. Now, you know, for some countries this might not be an issue, but Brazil has made a point of its policies on the Israeli-Palestinian issue — Lourdes Garcia-Navarro

Similar forms of trickery eventually evolved into a ritual of drunken trade negotiations that often ended with Native Americans giving away huge tracts of land for little in return. Years later, one settler put it bluntly: "When the object is to murder Indians, strong liquor is the main article required, for when you have them dead drunk, you may do to them as you please, without running the risk of losing your life. — Reid Mitenbuler

When not protected by law, by popular favor or superstition, or by other special circumstances, [birds] yield very readily to the influences of civilization, and, though the first operations of the settler are favorable to the increase of many species, the great extension of rural and of mechanical industry is, in a variety of ways, destructive even to tribes not directly warred upon by man. — George Perkins Marsh

Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who'd been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons. — Hunter S. Thompson

The colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say with the help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces. — Frantz Fanon

I perceive that I am neither a planter of the backwoods, pioneer, nor settler there, but an inhabitant of the Mind, and given to friendship and ideas. The ancient society, the Old England of New England, Massachusetts for me. — Amos Bronson Alcott

In 1947, the U.N. offered the Palestinians 45 percent of historic Palestine. After the 1948 war, Palestinians were confined to 22 percent of the territory. Since the 1967 war, Israeli settlements, along with the separation wall and settler-only roads, have shrunk the Palestinian remnant to an even smaller fraction. — Anonymous

As autom, Ehrsul had neither rights nor tasks, but so far as it was understood an owner, a settler of some previous generation, had died intestate, and she'd never become anyone else's property. There were variants of salvage laws by which someone might theoretically have tried to claim her, but by now it would have seemed abominable. — China Mieville

Awareness of the settler-colonialist context of US history writing is essential if one is to avoid the laziness of the default position and the trap of a mythological unconscious belief in manifest destiny. The — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother-country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves. — Frantz Fanon

How much more respectable is the life of the solitary pioneer or settler in these, or any woods - having real difficulties, not of his own creation, drawing his subsistence directly from nature - than that of the helpless multitudes in the towns who depend on gratifying the extremely artificial wants of society and are thrown out of employment by hard times! — Henry David Thoreau

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man , more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
'How do you get to West Egg village?' he asked helplessly.
I told him. Ans as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He has casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Water is a pioneer which the settler follows, taking advantage of its improvements. — Henry David Thoreau

A sematary," I say. "A what?" Viola says, looking round at all the square stones marking out their graves. Must be a hundred, maybe two, in orderly rows and well-kept grass. Settler life is hard and it's short and lotsa New World people have lost the battle.
"It's a place for burying dead folk," I say.
Her eyes widen. "A place for doing what?"
"Don't people die in space?" I ask.
"Yeah," she says. "But we burn them. We don't put them in holes." She crosses her arms around herself, mouth and forehead frowning, peering around at the graves. "How can this be sanitary? — Patrick Ness

The state is not only repressive; it is also educative - shaping common sense through ideological state apparatuses (such as the academy) that normalize the rule of settler colonialism. — Audra Simpson

I am against the fact that a settler minority should impose an entire system of values on an indigenous people. — Steven Biko

Dunbar-Ortiz strips us of our forged innocence, shocks us into new awareness, and draws a straight line from the sins of our fathers-settler-colonialism, the doctrine of discovery, the myth of manifest destiny, white supremacy, theft and systematic killing-to the contemporary condition of permanent war, invasion and occupation, mass incarceration, and the constant use and threat of state violence. — Bill Ayers

And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. — F Scott Fitzgerald

deep-seated hatred between the cattlemen and the settler."40 This should come as no shock; the only surprise is that the big cattlemen would sometimes deny their attitude toward settlers. A settler who exercised his perfect right to 160 acres along a stream could significantly impair a big cowman's range; if several did so, the range would be lost altogether, as happened, for example, along Shell Creek in the Big Horn Basin. — John W. Davis

I tell you now, Andy," said Sam, with awful superiority, "don't yer be a talkin' 'bout what yer don't know nothin' on; boys like you, Andy, means well, but they can't be spected to collusitate the great principles of action."
Andy looked rebuked, particularly by the hard word collusitate, which most of the youngerly members of the company seemed to consider as a settler in the case, while Sam proceeded. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social services and quality public education; the gross profits of corporations, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individualism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun violence. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

I, for one, thought this would be something good for Settlers to know from the get-go. With so much risk, why did SA feel the consequences of exposure were something to be concealed until there was not choice but to drag people like Monica and me into their secret beige meeting room and scare us half to death after we'd screwed up? It made about as much sense as extremely conservative parents not telling their daughters about the consequences of sex until after they were already pregnant. Shutting the barn door after the horse was loose, much?
But then, I was beginning to think SA wasn't nearly as smart as they believed themselves to be. Our remaining undiscovered for so long seemed due more to humanity's tendency not to see things they didn't want to see, rather than cleverness on the part of Settler's Affairs. — Stacey Jay

Jodi Byrd writes: "The story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime." It is necessary, she argues, to start with the origin of the United States as a settler-state and its explicit intention to occupy the continent. These origins contain the historical seeds of genocide. Any true history of the United States must focus on what has happened to (and with) Indigenous peoples - and what still happens. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

...many of us know deep down, whether we choose to admit it or not, a number of simple truths: the global capitalist economy is incompatible with life. As numerous environmentalist authors... have noted, the global economy effectively creates infinite demand and no natural community can support infinite demand, especially when nothing beneficial is given back. A global economy is extractive, it gives nothing back, but follows the ecocidal pattern of a genocidal machine converting raw materials into power at the expense of living things and living systems. — Damien Short

To put this even more bluntly, one might think about the difference between adding traditional and contemporary Indigenous art to the National Gallery of Canada's historical Canadian wing and imagining the entire gallery curated from an Indigenous perspective of what a "National Gallery of Canada" might mean.37 Put slightly differently, the project of Indigenous representation in the gallery in Canada has been defined as "bringing aboriginal art in to the history of Canadian art" rather than of incorporating settler history into the history of Aboriginal art.38 Would such reimaginings mean, for example, a move away from the primacy of a liberal politic and of the artist genius as a cultural application of that politic? — Lynda Jessup

A Canadian settler hates a tree, regards it as his natural enemy, as something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any means. — Anna Brownell Jameson

In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man's values. — Frantz Fanon

For those dependent on their gardens for fresh food, it was often a case of feast or famine ... (One settler wrote), "Strawberries were now so plentiful that ... I made 287 lbs of jam ... " — Bee Dawson

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had seen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch. — George Eliot

ARE YOU A SETTLER, DRIVER, OR REBEL? — Darrin Patrick

The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages. — Theodore Roosevelt

He carried the Bible; the soldier carried the gun; the administrator and the settler carried the coin. Christianity, Commerce, Civilization: the Bible, the Coin, the Gun: Holy Trinity. — Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

The conflict between secular Zionism and the settler movement did not appear overnight following Israel's conquests in the 1967 war, for there was an argument that bridged the gap: security. — Elliott Abrams

A "race to innocence" is what occurs when individuals assume that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and oppression.25 This concept captures the understandable assumption made by new immigrants or children of recent immigrants to any country. They cannot be responsible, they assume, for what occurred in their adopted country's past. Neither are those who are already citizens guilty, even if they are descendants of slave owners, Indian killers, or Andrew Jackson himself. Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

She liked a very particular kind of plot: the sort where the pirate kidnaps some virgin damsel, rapes her into loving him, and then dispatches lots of seamen while she polishes his cutlass. Or where the Highland clan leader kidnaps some virginal English Rose, rapes her into loving him, and then kills entire armies Sassenachs while she stuffs his haggis. Or where the Native American warrior kidnaps a virginal white settler, rapes her into loving him, and then kills a bunch of colonists while she whets his tomahawk. I hated to get Freudian on Linda, but her reading patterns suggested some interesting insight into why she is such a bitch. — Nicole Peeler