Politics & Power Quote by Dee Brown

Dee Brown writes like a prosecutor who knows the jury has been fed myths for a century. The line turns on a blunt contrast: Indigenous people understand life as inseparable from land, while the newcomers behave as if land is an inert stage set to be stripped, fenced, and sold. By framing America as a "paradise", Brown doesn’t indulge nostalgia so much as weaponize the nation’s own self-image. If this place was Eden, why did the so-called civilizers arrive with a talent for turning abundance into scarcity?

The verb choice does the real work. "Intruders" refuses the neutral language of "settlers" and "pioneers", insisting on an ethical account of entry. "Determined" signals ideology, not accident: destruction isn’t collateral damage from progress, it’s policy-level commitment. Brown’s subtext is that conquest required more than taking territory; it demanded erasing the systems of meaning that made the land intelligible as shared life rather than private property. "All that was Indian" isn’t only people, it’s governance, kinship, ecology, and spirituality - a total way of being.

The sentence also captures the tragic asymmetry of comprehension. The Indians "could not comprehend" not because they were naive, but because the depth of the violence exceeded ordinary human expectation. Brown, writing in the wake of mid-century revisionist history and the rising visibility of Native activism, is pressing readers to see colonization as self-sabotage: in trying to eliminate Indigenous America, the invaders also set about degrading America itself.