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.

Burroughs frames “dreams” as a people’s inner life: imagination, spiritual practices, cultural memory, and the sense of possible futures. To “kill” a person or nation, in this view, is not only to inflict physical harm but to sever the symbolic and psychic resources that sustain identity and resilience. His comparison to U.S. treatment of Indigenous peoples points to cultural destruction—suppression of languages, ceremonies, and traditional cosmologies—as a form of annihilation that can persist even when bodies survive. The mention of “magic” and “familiar spirits” underscores that what is targeted is the non-material dimension of culture: belief, ritual, and the felt presence of ancestral or guiding forces.