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Home Range

The mare saw two of her herdmates die when she was captured. One, an exhausted gray stallion, fell and broke his neck in the trailer; the other, a chestnut foal, only weeks old, was chased until its leg fractured, and it had to be euthanized. That was the first this mare knew of our kind. Of our kindness.

We Will Be Seen

Tressie McMillan Cottom On Confronting Racism, Sexism, And Classism

We are more comfortable in our culture talking about the distant past. We love black history; it’s black people we don’t like.

Racing Toward The Future

[History] rushes on, as it always did, with two forces racing toward the future, one splendidly uniformed, the other ragged but inspired.

An Imperfect Union

Astra Taylor On The Inherent Conflict Between Capitalism And Democracy

I resist seeing Trump as just a fluke or an aberration, because it’s too flattering to ourselves. When people say, “Trump’s not us,” I think, Maybe we need to see how he is us, so we can prevent this from happening again.

Sunbeams

Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

Rachel Carson

Sunbeams

Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. . . . We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Our Fellow Americans

Paul Chaat Smith On The Complex Truth Of Native American History

To see the full picture of Indians — as people who have had a continuing, complex relationship with all aspects of American culture — is just too much for some people. They want to put Indians in a box.

Sunbeams

It is an illusion to suppose that a dictator makes himself; at most he seizes an opportunity made for him by passive, stupid, incompetent, and, above all, unsatisfied and fearful men.

L. Susan Stebbing