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This stark process of taking land and of moving those on the land away is a hallmark of the United States and Canada, two nation-states where settlers stayed. The Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke Siege of 1990, or the so-called Oka Crisis, the 78-day armed standoff between Mohawks and several forces of the state, remains one of the clearest manifestations of this process in North America to date. Mohawks were not only "in the way," the put themselves in the way of the extension of a nine-hole golf course that was to not only destroy sacred Pines for white leisure but was also to extend through a Mohawk burial ground.

— When the Pine Needles Fall by Katsi'tsakwas Ellen Gabriel (Page 207)

But the use of force by policing authorities is a symptom of the problem. Police are doing the dirty work of corrupt politicians whose rhetoric upholds corporate greed, they're constantly repeating to themselves that they need to "balance" the so-called rights of all "stakeholders", which is just code for pandering to businesses and corporations while justifying the human rights violations of Indigenous Peoples. It should be understood that Indigenous rights are human rights, that we are more than just stakeholders, we are rights holders. I consider Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's words about reconciliation to be empty, meant to placate Indigenous people and the public. Trudeau says that no relationship is more important to him than Canada's relationship to Indigenous Peoples. But that's not what it feels like to me. His actions, or the lack of actions by his government, prove that little is changing in this country and that reconciliation is simply colonization repackaged.

— When the Pine Needles Fall by Katsi'tsakwas Ellen Gabriel (Page 170 - 171)

The Pines remain a very magical and spiritual part of the environment that I live in and grew up in. That connection to land is just something that you feel inside. And to know that it's being threatened because someone just wants to expand a golf course was frustrating-- that's what was proposed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, you know? What was even more insulting is that the developers were going to dig up our family members, our ancestors in our cemetery, to do it! That was just too much. It was an affront to us as Kanienʼkehá:ka. Our community of Kanehsatà:ke has been fighting these kinds of incursions on our lands for three hundred years now.

— When the Pine Needles Fall by Katsi'tsakwas Ellen Gabriel (Page 9)

Journalists claim to be hearing "both sides" as though a binary opposition had been set down by some disinterested god. But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god -- it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture -- network execs, producers, publishers -- whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not.

— The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Page 120)

"Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others," writes Edward Said. That its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.

— The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Page 115)

But I think many of us who are teachers and professors have forgotten that the syllabus serves the student, and all around us are teachers, administrators, and columnists who seem to believe that material should be hard for the sake of it and that education itself is best when rendered not in wonder but in force.

— The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Page 73)