Daniel Heath Justice > Quotes

“I would ask you to remember only this one thing’, said Badger. ‘The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves. One day you will be good storytellers. Never forget these obligations.’ Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel (1990)”
― Daniel Heath Justice, Badger

“We’re stubborn people, queer folks and Indians and queer Indians alike. Green shoots rise quickly from burnt-over earth—and rarely, if ever, in solitude.”
― Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

“But if the only thing defining us is trauma, or wounding, most of us wouldn’t be here. Our stories are about far more than the dominant presumption of Indigenous lack or deficiency; our bodies are not only objects of contestation, or devastation, or pain, or suffering.”
― Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

“But those are lies!” Imweshi turned with a frigid smile. “Of course they are! But who cares? Does it matter to them?” She gestured toward the window. “Who are they going to believe? Us? We well-fed, clean, healthy, wealthy, coach-riding Kyn? Perhaps you with all your savage finery can convince them that the mechanical beasts that draw this carriage are something other than dark sorcery. What will you say to them, my truth-telling Wielder? Will your truth feed them, clothe them, give them warm homes? What would they rather hear: that Lojar Vald and his kind have driven them halfway into their graves out of greed and selfish ambition, that the promises of another life are mere manipulations to ensure their subservience, or that a small group of backward barbarians are the only thing between them and their salvation? If you stood in their place, who would you believe?” The carriage crested a hill and left the foundries and the empty-eyed Humans behind. Tarsa”
― Daniel Heath Justice, The Way of Thorn and Thunder

“The Everland night possessed a beauty unmatched in the lands of Men. In daylight, the sister suns warmed the world: Goldmantle, the elder sister, was the largest and most beautiful, her hue that of gilded bronze; Bright-Eye, the younger, was smaller, and she burned white-hot. They traveled across the sky-vault together, Bright-Eye’s heat tempered behind Goldmantle’s ample sphere, both looking down upon the Thresholds of the long-shattered Eld Green, ever-faithful sentinels over their fragmented kindred. It was the night, however, that truly revealed the Eld Green’s beauty. The Greatmoon, Pearl-in-Darkness, loomed large in the heavens. Even in the daytime the Greatmoon was an impressive sight, although only a milky shadow of his luminous radiance in the night. He”
― Daniel Heath Justice, The Way of Thorn and Thunder