Civilization is socially constituted violence against the Earth.

Civilization has always been the mission of colonizers. It is carved deeply throughout the text of their laws and into our flesh. The imposed literacy of settler violence is the way we learn to read and tend to the scars that track this chronology of colonial conquest named history. These are the unhealed and partly healed wounds spreading in all directions that map the specter of abuse that are documented as the progression of religion, capital, democracy, and civilization. It is unwritten in cultural knowledge buried in a shallow boarding school mass grave located in the vacuous space between mythology and sin. This literacy is what sanctions the destruction and desecration of the sacred. It declares, "I'm wearing this headdress because I appreciate your culture." It declares, "The wastewater we're spraying on your sacred site is clean enough to drink." It insists, "That was in the past, I'm not responsible for the actions of my ancestors." It admonishes, "They're on the street because they're lazy." It contemplates "poor and angry Indians contrasted with respectable ones." It declared utopia while slaughtering and enslaving millions. It wrote in blood and pus, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." It declared, "Tradition is the enemy of progress." It shifts phrases and dresses the meaning in newly ironed clothes that smell of starch, piss, and appropriation.

— No Spiritual Surrender by Klee Benally (Page 24 - 25)