Memory is a code to who we are, a collection of not just dates and facts but also of epic emotional struggles, epiphanies, transformations.
David GrannRead
In Brazil, the history of the interaction between blancos and indios - whites and Indians - often reads like an extended epitaph. Tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the tragic impact of European colonization on Indigenous peoples in Brazil.
David Grann's quote reflects on the devastating consequences of colonization, specifically how the interactions between whites and Indigenous tribes in Brazil resulted in immense loss of life, culture, and identity. It serves as a reminder of the historical atrocities faced by Indigenous populations, with their languages and cultures often lost forever due to diseases and violence brought by colonizers.
Themes
ColonizationIndigenousHistoryCultureLoss
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on Indigenous rights, this quote can illustrate the impact of colonization.
More from David Grann
All quotes →You want the story to be about something, have some deeper meaning, but there is also an emotional, almost instinctual, element, which is, does this story seize some part of you and compel you to get to the bottom of it?
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I think you get into trouble as an author and a journalist when, rather than owning the gaps, you try to elide them.
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Heroes have always served as a reflection of their times, a template of who we are and what we want to be.
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History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation. (82)
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I believe history will come to view 9/11 as an event on par with November 22, 1963, the date on which John F. Kennedy was murdered, cutting short a presidency that was growing ever more promising. Dreams died that day in Dallas; it is easy to imagine the 1960s turning out rather differently had President Kennedy lived.
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I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.
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My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.
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Look at how the British covered India with railroads, and it is easy to view them as modernisers. Look, however, at the abysmal levels of mass illiteracy in the subcontinent they left behind in 1947, and they appear rather differently.
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My mother was born in your state, Mr. Walter, and my mother was a Quaker, and my ancestors in the time of Washington baked bread for George Washington's troops when they crossed the Delaware, and my own father was a slave.
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