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

“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

“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

“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

“Papuan extinction is a systematised, structured, programmed, manufactured, engineered, monitored, funded, managed, organised, systematic, highly planned, bureaucratised, corporatised, institutionalised, civilisationalised, projected and promoted and advertised as progress, development, salvation, improvement — and for these to guarantee the outcome – the extinction itself — the system is militarised, securitised and guarded with all the world’s industrial, technological, arms machinery, manpower, technology, scientists, psychologists, priests, developers, anthropologists, sociologists, educators, bankers — all working hand in hand to ensure that one of the most original cosmobian societies, of the original memories of the human species on this planet, is deleted permanently with all their languages, memories, myths, legends, stories, songs, poetry, gods, goddesses, guardians, wisdom, cosmologies and ontology.
Don’t blame God, don’t blame the Devil — it is the human species who are doing this on the wretched earth.”
― Yamin Kogoya, PAPUAN TRAGEDY: 300 Warnings From The Edge Of Extinction

“The greatest tragedy is not that Papuans disappear. It is that Papua disappears while Papuans remain.”
― Yamin Kogoya, PAPUAN TRAGEDY: 300 Warnings From The Edge Of Extinction

“Papuan ancestors never stood before the world begging for the right to exist. They carved their existence into the mountains, forests, clans, rivers, memories and bloodlines. Survival was never charity. It was architecture.”
― 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

“An Indonesianised Papuan mind is more dangerous to Papua’s sovereignty than an Indonesian weapon.”
― Yamin Kogoya, PAPUAN TRAGEDY: 300 Warnings From The Edge Of Extinction

“Being Papuan is not just about having a different identity, It is to enter the world through a different condition of existence — one in which the body, land, history, future, suffering and death are all understood differently. Being Papuan is therefore a condition imposed on existence by how the world sees and treats Papuans. Papuans do not simply experience the world; Papuans experience a world that has already interpreted defined them, classified them.”
― Yamin Kogoya, The Papuans: Being Papuan and Papuan Being

“A Papuan child is born into meanings that predate him. Before he can speak, he is classified; before he can define himself, he is forced into a world; before he can give consent, he is governed; and before he can explain himself, he is judged.”
― Yamin Kogoya, The Papuans: Being Papuan and Papuan Being

“In a colonised world, domination does not begin with the occupation of land. It begins with the occupation of appearance. The coloniser does not merely seize territory; they take control of the stage on which reality is presented. They reshape the world until conquest appears as civilisation, domination as order, extraction as development, violence as security, possession as legitimacy and power as virtue. He dresses himself as morality. He presents himself as civilisation. He presents himself as progress. He builds monuments, institutions, roads, churches, schools, parliaments, armies and cities that all silently proclaim the same message: 'We belong at the centre of the world.”
― Yamin Kogoya, The Papuans: Being Papuan and Papuan Being

“Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it,
but also the truth. Because who would believe
the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival
those who were never meant
to survive?”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“Before I set out on my road trip, I already knew this: the reason we have any national park is the same reason we have any land in America at all. White settlers and the United States government violently dispossessed Indigenous people of the land they had lived on for thousands of years, which they knew deeply and to which they had spiritual connection.”
― Blythe Roberson, America the Beautiful?: One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled