Indigenous Peoples Quotes

“English is so hierarchical. In Cree, we don't have animate-inanimate comparisons between things. Animals have souls that are equal to ours. Rocks have souls, trees have souls. Trees are 'who,' not 'what.”
― Tomson Highway

“I think that the thing I most want you to remember is that research is a ceremony. And so is life. Everything that we do shares in the ongoing creation of our universe.”
― Shawn Wilson

“To understand the Dreamtime, you must understand that we do not own the land. The land is our mother and she owns and nurtures us.”
― Lance Morcan, White Spirit

“The global Indigenous cause reached a major milestone in 2007 when the UN General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Only four members of the assembly voted in opposition, all of them Anglo settler-states - the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

“Los blancos hicieron que estas tierras fueran extranjeras para el indio; hicieron que el indio comprara con su sangre el aire que respira.”
― Ermilo Abreu Gómez, Canek

“History repeats itself. The first time as tragedy. The second time as farce. The third time as tourist trap.”
― Sarah Vowell

“I would rather not speak with history but history came to me.
It was dark before daybreak when the fire sparked.
The men left on a hunt from the Pequot village here where I stand.
The women and children left behind were set afire.
I do not want to know this, but my gut knows the language of bloodshed.
Over six hundred were killed, to establish a home for God’s people, crowed the Puritan leaders in their Sunday sermons.
And then history was gone in a betrayal of smoke.
There is still burning though we live in a democracy erected over the burial ground.”
― Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems

“Adams has shown a nearly inexhaustible desire, leavened with an equal amount of sheer talent- five decades' worth and counting- in an unrelenting effort to stabilize, strengthen, and improve the standing of indigenous peoples, minority groups, and the larger society as well. He is an exemplary Native activist, indeed.”
― David E. Wilkins, The Hank Adams Reader: An Exemplary Native Activist and the Unleashing of Indigenous Sovereignty

“If I stay here, I will be just fine. Before I shut the door, I got a box of crackers from the kitchen, so I will be fine.”
― Kathleen Alcala, The Flower in the Skull

“Ellos, que no pertenecen ni a mi mundo ni al de los españoles. Ellos, que son la mezcla de todas las sangres--la iberica, la africana, la romana, la goda, la sangre indigena y la sangre del medio oreinte--, ellos que junto con todos los que estan naciendo, son el nuevo recipeinte para que el verdadero pensamiento de Cristo--Quetzalcoatl se instale nuevamente en los corazones y proyecte al mundo su luz, ¡que nunca tengan miedo! ¡que nunca se sientan solos!”
― Laura Esquivel, Malinche

“Sa pagdilat ng aking mga mata, mga alon na ang naglalaro sa aking paningin. Mga alon ang una kong naging kalaro. Kapuwa namin pinag-iisipan, kapag palubog na ang araw, kung sumisisid ba ang nagbabagang bola sa dagat o ang mapagkandiling dagat ang pilit na yumayakap dito.”
― Eugene Y. Evasco

“But Palestinians do respond overwhelmingly with love. Just as the Indigenous populations of an entire hemisphere, subjected to the largest genocide in human history, responded overwhelmingly with love. Just as the Black communities in much of the United States, a country that quite simply would not exist in its current form were it not for the theft of their labor, responded overwhelmingly with love. Just as every people everywhere deemed acceptable collateral in service of the empire’s interest responded overwhelmingly with love.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“If a Lumbee worldview exists, it radiates from Robeson.”
― Ryan Emanuel, On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice

“These are the ancestral lands of. . . .' The phrase carries both truth and trauma that can slip past uneducated ears. Indigenous homelands on the Coastal Plain are places of deep connection and remembrance, but they are also places where horrific colonial experiences befell our ancestors. The trauma of those experiences still flows through our communities today. The pain of racial oppression and cultural loss combines with the radical transformation of our homelands, and it haunts us from generation to generation.”
― Ryan Emanuel, On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice

“Meanwhile, hemlocks kept their footings in the deep, shady wrinkles of lower mountain slopes— coves shaped by intimate creeks and gorges carved by thundering rivers. Even east of the mountains, hemlocks survived on steep, north- facing slopes. In all of these places, microclimates continued to mimic conditions experienced in the region during the ice age. These isolated pockets are the last vestiges of a forest that once covered much of the Southeast. They are refugia.”
― Ryan Emanuel, On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice

“Paleoecology teaches that refugia are not only physical places, but they also represent bottlenecks along a timeline. Large populations of trees, insects, birds, and more shrink down to tiny remnants during times of adversity, but when glaciers retreat and weather warms, populations rebound. If conditions permit, populations spring from their refugia into their former ranges or, perhaps, into new places with favorable soils and climate. Sometimes I imagine that Lumbee ancestors who sought refuge in the remotest parts of their lands were biding their time, waiting to spring forth into a radically transformed world.”
― Ryan Emanuel, On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice

“Of all of society's institutions, education has brought us to the current state of poor relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples; but if it is education that created this mess, it will be education that will get us out of it. We know that making things better will not happen overnight. It will take generations. That's how the damage was created and that's how the damage will be fixed. But if we agree on the objective of reconciliation, and agree to work together, the work we do today will immeasurably strengthen the social fabric of Canada tomorrow.”
― Murray Sinclair, Who We Are: Four Questions For a Life and a Nation

“We go and do the things that you're calling exploring and adventuring ... and [for us] it's just regular life.”
― Gayle Kabloona

“By comparison, the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous populations—which the Society, for one, consistently linked to slavery—was largely ignored by the public. For the most part, Britain and the US treated Indigenous peoples as belonging to the past, as active threats to modernity. Above all, they described Natives as “perishing,” as “disappearing.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“I know you love him very much, but you need to let him go. They're not the same after they pass over. Calling them back is only asking for trouble”
― Norris Black, Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology

“I feel alone here. In some ways, I feel abandoned here. This feels fitting, somehow, and, in recognizing the truth in that, I find that I can breathe easier here.”
― Brittany Penner, Children Like Us: A Métis Woman's Memoir of Family, Identity and Walking Herself Home

“Churchill was a big fat cannibal,
Leopold was an ugly deadly virus,
Columbus was a most wanted terrorist.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“It's been a relief to not have to fight so hard
for at least a large group of us to question
the old orthodoxy.

Now many of us celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day,
no matter if the government takes the legal designation away.
I see it as a day to learn more about the people whose land we stole
(yes, even we whose forebearers came more recently,
because we continue to benefit from the theft),
and to sit in the complexity that is the building
and continuation of
our civilization.”
― Shellen Lubin

“Like I said, no Indian I’ve ever heard of has ever been or seen an angel.”
― Natalie Díaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec

“Quit bothering with angels, I say. They’re no good for Indians.
Remember what happened last time
some white god came floating across the ocean?”
― Natalie Díaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec

“We understand the forked tongue that our grandfathers talked about. [...] We know all the tricks of the wasicu world. Our young people have mastered it. I have mastered your language. [...] But I also know the genetic psyche. And I also have the collective memory of the damages that have occurred to my people. And I will never submit to any pipeline to go through my homeland. Mitakuye Oyasin!"

— Phyllis Young”
― Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

“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.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction

“I'm reasonably certain,
salmon, swordfish, and hammerhead sharks
do not find themselves paralyzed
by spasms of self-blame for their plight
- What could I do differently to placate these people?
If only I were a better fish they would not hate me -
but instead know precisely who is killing them.

The same can be said for the indigenous.
You can't get much clearer than Sitting Bull, who said,
when forced to speak at a celebration of the completion of a railroad
through what had been his people's land:

"I hate you.
I hate you.
I hate all the white people.
You are thieves and liars.
You have taken away our land and made us outcasts,
so I hate you."

It's important to note, by the way,
that the white translator did not speak these words,
but instead the "friendly, courteous speech he had prepared."
[Glaspell, Kate Eldridge. "Incidents in the Life of a Pioneer."
North Dakota Historical Quarterly, 1941, 187-88.]”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“Ancient wisdom did not disappear.
We simply stopped knowing how to listen.”
― Gabriela Jurosz-Landa, Transcendent Wisdom of the Maya: The Ceremonies and Symbolism of a Living Tradition

“Papuan ancestors never begged for survival. They engineered it. They did not ask the world for permission to exist; they organised their lives in such a way that they could not be eradicated. While empires were still learning the language of borders, Papuan societies already understood the grammar of resilience. Survival was never a plea — it was an intelligent system embedded in land, clan and memory. They did not survive by being seen. They survived by being unbreakable. A people who once shaped their world through cohesion and strategy were never meant to be reduced to fragments. The future belongs not to those who beg to live, but to those who redefine life itself. What was never built on begging cannot be restored through it”.”
― Yamin Kogoya, WE ARE THE LAST VOICE OF THE FIRST PEOPLES & THE FIRST VOICE OF THE LAST PEOPLES: 63 Sacred Sayings from the Edge of Extinction: Remembering 63 Years of Invasion, Betrayal, and Resistance