""Indian policy" has now been brought down upon the American people, and the American people are the new Indians of the 21st Century"
About this Quote
Means doesn’t reach for metaphor here; he reaches for a reversal meant to sting. By putting “Indian policy” in quotation marks, he signals a cold bureaucratic category - not a neutral set of laws but a historical machinery: dispossession dressed up as administration, containment sold as protection, forced dependency marketed as “aid.” The pivot is the provocation: the same playbook, he argues, is being scaled up and redeployed against everyone.
The intent is double-edged. On one hand, Means is indicting the U.S. state as a consistent actor across centuries: when power wants land, labor, or obedience, it invents policy languages that make coercion sound inevitable. On the other hand, he’s recruiting a broader audience without letting them off the hook. “The new Indians” is not a bid for sympathy; it’s a demand that non-Native Americans recognize the origin story of modern governance in a colonial experiment conducted on Native nations first.
The subtext is a warning about how normalization works. If you can relocate communities, break treaties, police movement, manage rations, and control schooling for one targeted population, you’ve built a template. Means suggests that surveillance, economic precarity, and political disenfranchisement aren’t glitches in American democracy; they’re exportable features of a system that learned early how to manage “problem populations.”
Context matters: Means spoke from Red Power-era militancy into late-20th/early-21st-century anxieties about federal overreach and corporate capture. The line is intentionally incendiary, risking a flattening of Native specificity, but its rhetorical force lies in refusing the comforting myth that conquest ended - it just changed paperwork.
The intent is double-edged. On one hand, Means is indicting the U.S. state as a consistent actor across centuries: when power wants land, labor, or obedience, it invents policy languages that make coercion sound inevitable. On the other hand, he’s recruiting a broader audience without letting them off the hook. “The new Indians” is not a bid for sympathy; it’s a demand that non-Native Americans recognize the origin story of modern governance in a colonial experiment conducted on Native nations first.
The subtext is a warning about how normalization works. If you can relocate communities, break treaties, police movement, manage rations, and control schooling for one targeted population, you’ve built a template. Means suggests that surveillance, economic precarity, and political disenfranchisement aren’t glitches in American democracy; they’re exportable features of a system that learned early how to manage “problem populations.”
Context matters: Means spoke from Red Power-era militancy into late-20th/early-21st-century anxieties about federal overreach and corporate capture. The line is intentionally incendiary, risking a flattening of Native specificity, but its rhetorical force lies in refusing the comforting myth that conquest ended - it just changed paperwork.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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