"The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits"
About this Quote
Burroughs goes for the jugular with a definition of murder that doesn’t need blood: you can end a person, or a people, by starving the future. It’s a line that carries his trademark cynicism about “civilization” as a system of control. The shock isn’t just in the phrase “kill a nation,” but in the mechanism he names: not bullets, but the administrative, cultural, and psychic slow violence of making hope impossible.
His choice of “dreams” is strategic. Dreams are where desire, identity, and continuity live; they’re also where power has the hardest time policing you. So the real target, he implies, isn’t land alone but imagination itself: the capacity to tell your own story, to make meaning on your own terms. That’s why he stacks “magic” and “familiar spirits” beside “dreams.” He’s not romanticizing Indigenous life as exotic; he’s pointing to the infrastructure of a worldview - rituals, cosmology, relationship to the unseen - that colonial policy historically treated as a threat to be reeducated out of existence.
The blunt “the whites” is meant to sting. Burroughs refuses the comfort of passive voice and bureaucratic euphemism, the language that turns conquest into “assimilation” or “progress.” Underneath the provocation is a diagnosis: domination works best when it convinces the dominated that nothing else is imaginable. In that sense, the quote isn’t only about Native America; it’s Burroughs sketching a broader theory of empire as a dream-killing machine.
His choice of “dreams” is strategic. Dreams are where desire, identity, and continuity live; they’re also where power has the hardest time policing you. So the real target, he implies, isn’t land alone but imagination itself: the capacity to tell your own story, to make meaning on your own terms. That’s why he stacks “magic” and “familiar spirits” beside “dreams.” He’s not romanticizing Indigenous life as exotic; he’s pointing to the infrastructure of a worldview - rituals, cosmology, relationship to the unseen - that colonial policy historically treated as a threat to be reeducated out of existence.
The blunt “the whites” is meant to sting. Burroughs refuses the comfort of passive voice and bureaucratic euphemism, the language that turns conquest into “assimilation” or “progress.” Underneath the provocation is a diagnosis: domination works best when it convinces the dominated that nothing else is imaginable. In that sense, the quote isn’t only about Native America; it’s Burroughs sketching a broader theory of empire as a dream-killing machine.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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