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Indigenous Quotes

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Indigenous Quotes

“I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift. We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear almost nothing about how to nurture it. It is no surprise then that environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings. Our natural inclination to do right by the world is stifled, breeding despair when it should be inspiring action. The participatory role of people in the well-being of the land has been lost, our reciprocal relations reduced to a KEEP OUT sign.”

JoyNatureDespairIndigenousRestorationEnvironmentalismIndigenous WisdomRestore
Book:Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
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“Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth… Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. ... Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us.”

NatureHealingDespairEcologyIndigenousRestorationEnvironmentalismReciprocityIndigenous WisdomEcological Restoration
Book:Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
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“Suddenly, two 3D animated figures materialized out of thin air. One of them resembled a young, Native American woman in her 20's. The other resembled a knight in shining armour from the 1500's. Both characters stood about 30 feet tall. Just then, a booming voice resounded from the UFO: Well, well! If it isn't the Sky Fighters, and their Houndy Crunchers cohorts! Your pathetic attempts to stop me from taking over this planet are all in vain! Now come forth and bow to your new masters; two of my strongest henchmen! MU-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!”

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Book:Sky Fighters and Houndy Crunchers
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“In the indigenous view, humans are viewed as somewhat lesser beings in the democracy of species. We are referred to as the younger brother of Creation, so like younger brothers we must learn from our elders. Plants were here first and have had a long time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground and hold the earth in place.”

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Book:Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
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“On earth we are immigrants from Africa - out in space we'd be immigrants from Earth - in a different galaxy, we'd be immigrants from Milkyway. To put simply, in exploration of space, both external and internal, terms like immigrant and indigenous are meaningless. It's the heart that makes us indigenous or immigrant, not blood.”

HumanityDiversityHuman RaceImmigrantsInclusionMulticulturalismIndigenousCultural IntegrationImmigrant
Book:Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth
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“Use the act of breathing to shape air into sounds that take on the context of language that lifts and transports those who hear it, takes them beyond what they think and how they feel and empowers them to think and know even more. We’re all storytellers, really. That’s what we do. That is our power as human beings. Not to tell people how to think and feel and therefore know - but through stories allow them to discover questions within themselves. Turn off your TV and your devices and talk to each other. Share stories. Be joined, transported and transformed.”

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Book:Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations
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“But as I thought about it, I liked the idea more and more. Depredation claims. If something was stolen from you, all you had to do was file a claim and your losses would be restored. How about a depredation claim of the heart? Maybe I could file some form to get back the years I'd grieved for my mother, father, and sister. Or maybe I could submit a claim to have our dignity returned to us, sealed in an official envelope, the sins of the past magically wiped out, gone like the buffalo.”

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Book:Winter Counts
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“Patriarchy believes emotion is weak and has no place in business or governance. It means leaving pieces of you behind when you sit at the table. It means that if you want to be part of the winning side, you have to comply and be ready to be part of the team without holding them back. Matriarchal and egalitarian systems promote love-based decision-making and space for people to share their emotions.”

HealingHealthEquityIndigenousIndigenous WisdomMatriarchyEgalitarianMatriarchal
Book:Calling My Spirit Back
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“The new owners of the South Valley Street house, who described themselves online as people who "love dancing, practicing selfrealization, meditation, freedom, and investing," turned the Kardonsky-Cook home into an Airbnb. They named it "A Creek Runs Through It Olympic Mountain Retreat." It was one of the four properties they had purchased to rent around the Olympic Peninsula. The listing described the house as a "historic luxury two-story farmhouse" and charged guests $190 a night to sleep in the rooms where my family once lived. A big selling point for their property was the creek that my grandmother and her siblings played in, that my mother explored before picking salmonberries from the bushes on its bank. They marketed the home as being close to the waterfront that my great-grandfather walked to every day for work. He was a longshoreman and worked at the docks the entire time he lived there. His cat met him halfway home after every shift. One review read, "It doesn't feel like someone fixed up a house and is renting it, it feels like someone's home.”

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Book:Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity
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“The hummingbird represents beauty and joy. She is a creature of flight, bringing her closer to the cosmos with each wingbeat. She is constantly moving and is rarely seen at rest, preferring instead to perform her aerial acrobatics. Her heart is as fast as her wings and her colors are bright and shifting; they are colors that capture the sunlight in their iridescence. She brings love wherever she passes by.”

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Book:Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity
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“My grandmother, Vivian, and her siblings were the first Native American children in the Port Angeles school system. It was not an easy integration. They were bullied and beaten daily by the other children, having stones and slurs hurled at them with no one stepping in. When Lillian went to the White principal about this, it was clear he didn't see it as severe. I wonder if he dared to utter the words "kids will be kids" in front of an angry Bear Mother trying to protect her cubs. When he finally agreed to act, his generous solution was to release the siblings ten minutes earlier than everyone else, to give them a head start on their run home. It didn't always work.”

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Book:Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity
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“We drove for three days into the mountains in a car that struggled to go uphill. Still, we made it and I was finally back in my tribal homeland. In the beginning, it felt like coming home, even though I'd never lived there and rarely visited. My family members were welcoming, and the water and forest calmed the fluttering darkness deep within me.”

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Book:Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity
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“And afterward, I stopped at Red Cloud's grave to pay my respects to the old chief. Some Oglalas had left him tobacco ties, little sacred bundles in all the colors of the four directions. I asked him to take care of my woman out there, where she was new and maybe lost. I asked him to take her into his lodge and protect her until I could come for her. That's all I remember.”

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Book:Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction
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“Pratt created the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and his motto was "kill the Indian, save the man." At this school, and others that would open and follow in its wake, tens of thousands of Native children faced abuse and neglect. They were often forcibly removed from their homes and taken to these schools that were sometimes across the country from their original lives. When they arrived, the children were forced to cut their hair and change their names. They were made to become White in look and label, stripped of any semblance of Native heritage. The children were not allowed to speak their Native tongues, some of them not knowing anything else. They were prohibited from acting in any way that might reflect the only culture they had ever known. At Pratt's Carlisle Indian Industrial School alone, the numbers revealed the truth of what this treatment did. Of the ten thousand children from 141 different tribes across the country, only a small fraction of them ever graduated. According to the Carlisle Indian School Project, there are 180 marked graves of Native children who died while attending. There were even more children who died while held captive at the Carlisle school and others across the county. Their bodies are only being discovered in modern times, exhumed by the army and people doing surveys of the land who are finding unmarked burial sites. An autograph book from one of the schools was found in the historical records with one child's message to a friend, "Please remember me when I'm in the grave." The US Bureau of Indian Affairs seemed to think Pratt had the right idea and made his school the model for more. There ended up being more than 350 government-funded boarding schools for Natives in the United States. Most of them followed the same ideology: Never let the children be themselves. Beat their language out of them. Punish them for practicing their cultures. Pratt and his followers certainly killed plenty of Indians, but they didn't save a damn thing.”

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Book:Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity
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“The bureaucrats were accountable to their political masters, not accountable to the people whom they were overseeing. And putting it as bluntly as possible, no government ever won votes by spending money on Indians.”

ChildrenPoliticsCanadaColonialismIndigenousDecolonizationAboriginalsResidential SchoolsIdle No MoreIndian Affairs
Book:Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream
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“... the government had spent more than four times the amount on lawyers [fighting a First Nations family's request for medical treatment] than would have been required to actually do the surgery.”

ChildrenPoliticsCanadaColonialismIndigenousDecolonizationAboriginalsResidential SchoolsIdle No MoreIndian Affairs
Book:Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream
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“[The federal government memo documents] imply a feeling of bureaucratic effrontery as though this child, who hovered between life and death, was some kind of chiseller to the taxpayer.”

ChildrenPoliticsCanadaColonialismIndigenousDecolonizationAboriginalsResidential SchoolsIdle No MoreIndian Affairs
Book:Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada's Lost Promise and One Girl's Dream
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“Everything was an excuse. The felt so concrete, so real at the time. Now they are wispy, pathetic. I was terrified. If I participated in the world I moved closer to, then I would have to stomach the chance that I might fail at every task I tackled. I didn't want to fail at being Native. Being Native to me then meant not only having the experience of all of these cultural things, but also being decent at them. I wanted to feel a peace in myself that cultural things brought me, but I had never felt so out of my depth. Failure felt imminent. But I couldn't fail at something I never had the chance to try. So the excuses continued to pour from me, sweetly apologetic to hide the stench of the rotting fear that created them.”

CultureAnxietyMemoirNativeGood EnoughSelf AcceptanceNative AmericanIndigenousFear Of FailureImpostor Syndrome
Book:Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity
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