Ward Churchill

"As to those in the World Trade Center… True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent?… They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of Americas global financial empire—the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved—and they did so both willingly and knowingly.… If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, Id really be interested in hearing about it."

"You carry the weapon. Thats how they dont see it coming. Youre the one. They talk about color blind or blind to your color. You said it yourself. You dont send the Black Liberation Army into Wall Street to conduct an action. You dont send the American Indian Movement into downtown Seattle to conduct an action. Who do you send? You. With your beard shaved, your hair cut close and wearing a bankers suit. Theres probably a whole lot more to it, you know that, but there is where you start. Who carries the front-end? Why is it always people of color carrying the weight on this, when people who are much more proximate in terms of acceptability to the centers of power, professing solidarity and principled nonviolence on the one hand, and critiquing the practice of those who are carrying the weight on the other. Why is that?"

"Among the worst examples is that of the Alberni Indian Residential School where, during the 1920s, children caught "talking Indian" suffered the hideous ordeal of having sewing needles pushed through their tongues."

"By 1970, approximately two-thirds of the marriages of those on the tribal rolls were to people who were not, with the result that only 59 percent of births reflected a situation in which both parents registered themselves as possessing any Indian blood at all; U.S. Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare, A Study of Selected Socio-Economic Characteristics of Ethnic Minorities Based on the 1970 Census, Vol. 3: American Indians (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974) pp. 74, 78. For effects in terms of the "blood quantum" criteria by which native identity is officially defined in the U.S., see Thorton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival, pp. 174-5. The implications are clear: "Set the blood quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed as it [has] and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence"; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest; The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York; W.W. Norton, 1987) p. 338."

"White domination is so complete that even American Indian children want to be cowboys. Its as if Jewish children wanted to play Nazis."

"And why, by the way, did it take Arabs to do what people here should have done a long time ago?"