Politics & Power Quote by Ezra Stiles

A Protestant clergyman sorting human beings into tidy bins is never just doing anthropology; he is drafting a moral map that makes empire feel legible. Ezra Stiles frames his claim with the soothing modesty of Enlightenment method: "a few scattered accounts", "collected and combined". It sounds cautious, even empirical. The trick is that the hedging serves as a gateway drug to certainty. From fragments and travel reports, he arrives at "two certain conclusions" that flatten an entire hemisphere into a single "kind of people" and then tether that category to northeast Asia.

The intent is classificatory, but the subtext is administrative: if Indigenous nations can be rendered as one homogeneous population with a distant origin, they become easier to narrate, evangelize, and dispossess. Stiles is writing in an era when educated colonial elites were hungry for origin stories that reconciled Biblical frameworks, emerging natural history, and the practical project of settlement. By proposing an Asian connection, he gestures toward a migration hypothesis that would later become mainstream; in his mouth, though, it doubles as a distancing maneuver. "Same as" quietly dilutes claims to deep, particular belonging in North America by relocating Indigeneity into a story of elsewhere.

Notice what the sentence refuses to see: languages, sovereignties, and histories are erased before they can complicate the premise. The rhetorical force sits in its numerated finality - two conclusions, both "certain" - which performs authority while leaning on secondhand sources. It's a snapshot of how knowledge-making, in colonial hands, becomes a technology: not only to describe people, but to reduce them to something governable.