Guilt may be good for contemporary American souls; but guilt, as much as pride, is a way of asserting one’s own version of history. The current liberal preoccupation with the conquest of America as a scenario of the triumph of white greed over red innocence too often serves merely to cast the Indian as a straw man of defeated virtue. One does not have to learn about the Indian himself; it is enough to find out that our grandfathers killed him and then go off to feel sorry for it. – Stefan Jovanovich (From the introduction to Adolf Bandelier’s The Delight Makers.)
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