Politics & Power Quote by Charles Eastman

A quiet sentence that lands like an indictment, Eastman’s line turns the usual colonial self-flattery inside out. “Despised” is doing the heavy lifting: it’s not just that Native people were conquered, but that the conquerors needed contempt to make conquest feel righteous. Poverty and simplicity become the chosen evidence, as if material lack were a moral failing rather than the engineered outcome of dispossession. The quote exposes a familiar imperial trick: define your victim as inferior, then treat your own violence as destiny.

Eastman’s specific intent is surgical. He isn’t romanticizing Native life or pleading for pity; he’s naming the emotional fuel of U.S. expansion - a social permission slip that let “civilization” frame itself as benevolent while dismantling other ways of living. “Generally” matters too. It’s a historian’s hedge and a writer’s trap: he’s not accusing every individual, he’s describing a system, a prevailing attitude that became policy’s shadow.

Context sharpens the blade. Eastman lived at the hinge of eras: born in Dakota territory, educated in U.S. institutions, writing during the late-19th and early-20th century push for assimilation, boarding schools, and the Dawes Act’s breakup of tribal lands. He knew how “simplicity” could be weaponized: first as a slur, then as a justification for “uplift” programs that demanded cultural surrender. The subtext is bleakly modern: when a dominant culture can’t admit it wants land, it claims it’s rescuing people from the very poverty it imposed.