Indigenous Quotes

“They're all gone, my tribe is gone. Those blankets they gave us, infected with smallpox, have killed us. I'm the last, the very last, and I'm sick, too. So very sick. Hot. My fever burning so hot.
I have to take off my clothes, feel the cold air, splash water across my bare skin. And dance. I'll dance a Ghost Dance. I'll bring them back. Can you hear the drums? I can hear them, and it's my grandfather and grandmother singing. Can you hear them?
I dance one step and my sister rises from the ash. I dance another and a buffalo crashes down from the sky onto a log cabin in Nebraska. With every step, an Indian rises. With every other step, a buffalo falls.
I'm growing, too. My blisters heal, my muscles stretch, expand. My tribe dances behind me. At first they are no bigger than children. Then they begin to grow, larger than me, larger than the trees around us. The buffalo come to join us and their hooves shake the earth, knock all the white people from their beds, send their plates crashing to the floor.
We dance in circles growing larger and larger until we are standing on the shore, watching all the ships returning to Europe. All the white hands are waving good-bye and we continue to dance, dance until the ships fall off the horizon, dance until we are so tall and strong that the sun is nearly jealous. We dance that way.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of. As for hat we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilisations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you.”
― Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

“I never learned how to be a woman in this world because I didn't know what it meant to be one. What I learned were things I was supposed to do and how to carry myself, but no one taught me to do that and trudge through my trauma at the same time.”
― Elaine Alec, Calling My Spirit Back

“I have a dream, humans were part of aliens on earth.
I also dream, that some humans are really indigenous.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“My story may be rooted in trauma but it is not my only story.”
― Elaine Alec, Calling My Spirit Back

“Shop where you stay, shop where you see smile, shop such so they sustain.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Our ancestors dreamed us into being. The least we can do is listen when the earth speaks back.”
― Lawrence Nault

“Maria Sabina Magdalena Garcia (July 22, 1894, Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca - November 23, 1985) was a curandera and shaman of the Mazatec indigenous ethnicity of the state of Oaxaca in Mexico. She subverted patriarchal theology by invoking the Divine Feminine in her entrancing chants.”
― Laurence Galian, Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!

“The wind was practicing with small gusts of hot air that fluttered the leaves on the elm tree in the yard. The wind was warming up for the afternoon, and within a few hours the sky over the valley would be dense with red dust, and along the ground the wind would catch waves of reddish sand and make them race across the dry red clay flats. The sky was hazy blue and it looked far away and uncertain, but he could remember times when he and Rocky had climbed Bone Mesa, high above the valley southwest of Mesita, and he had felt that the sky was near and that he could have touched it. He believed then that touching the sky had to do with where you were standing and how the clouds were that day. He had believed that on certain nights, when the moon rose full and wide as a corner of the sky, a person standing on the high sandstone cliff of that mesa could reach the moon.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko

“But old Grandma always used to say, “Back in time immemorial, things were different, the animals could talk to human beings and many magical things still happened.” He never lost the feeling he had in his chest when she spoke those words, as she did each time she told them stories; and he still felt it was true, despite all they had taught him in school—that long long ago things had been different, and human beings could understand what the animals said, and once the Gambler had trapped the storm clouds on his mountaintop.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“Dragonflies came and hovered over the pool. They were all colors of blue—powdery sky blue, dark night blue, shimmering with almost black iridescent light, and mountain blue. There were stories about the dragonflies too. He turned. Everywhere he looked, he saw a world made of stories, the long ago, time immemorial stories, as old Grandma called them. It was a world alive, always changing and moving; and if you knew where to look, you could see it, sometimes almost imperceptible, like the motion of the stars across the sky”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“The lie. He cut into the wire as if cutting away at the lie inside himself. The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; as long as people believed the lies, they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other. He wiped the sweat off his face onto the sleeve of his jacket. He stood back and looked at the gaping cut in the wire. If the white people never looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white.

The destroyers had only to set it into motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it. The cut in the fence was a good twenty feet wide, large enough for the cattle to find. He walked back to the horse and put away the pliers. He poured water over the raw skin on his hands and drank what was left in the canteen; he pissed one more time. The moon was bright, and the rolling hills and dry lake flats reflected a silvery light illusion that everything was as visible as if seen in broad daylight. But the mare stumbled and threw him hard against the saddle horn, and he realized how deceptive the moonlight was; exposed root tips and dark rocks waited in deep shadows cast by the moon. Their lies would destroy this world.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“The sun was pushing against the gray horizon hills, sending yellow light across the clouds, and the yellow river sand was speckled with the broken shadows of tamaric and river willow. The transition was completed. In the west and in the south too, the clouds with round heavy bellies had gathered for the dawn. It was not necessary, but it was right, and even if the sky had been cloudless the end was the same. The ear for the story and the eye for the pattern were theirs; the feeling was theirs: we came out of this land and we are hers.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“The cloudy yellow sandstone of Enchanted Mesa was still smoky blue before dawn, and only a faint hint of yellow light touched the highest point of the mesa. All things seemed to converge there: roads and wagon trails, canyons with springs, cliff paintings and shrines, the memory of Josiah with his cattle; but the other was distinct and strong like the violet-flowered weed that killed the mule, and the black markings on the cliffs, deep caves along the valley the Spaniards followed to their attack on Acoma. Yet at that moment in the sunrise, it was all so beautiful, everything, from all directions, evenly, perfectly, balancing day with night, summer months with winter. The valley was enclosing this totality, like the mind holding all thoughts together in a single moment. The strength came from here, from this feeling. It had always been there. He stood there with the sun on his face, and he thought maybe he might make it after all.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“He breathed deeply, and each breath had a distinct smell of snow from the north, of ponderosa pine on the rimrock above; finally he smelled horses from the direction of the corral, and he smiled. Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time.
...
The position of the sun in the sky was delicate, transitional; and the season was unmistakable. The sky was the early morning color of autumn: Jemez turquoise, edged with thin quartz clouds. He breathed deeply, trying to inhale the immensity of it, trying to take it all inside himself, the way the arroyo sand swallowed time.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“The Lakota...close, open, and often punctuate their prayers with the word Meta­kuyeayasi, a generally accepted translation of which is "all rela­tions"...human relations are, of course, included. But, in the same sense, so are the four legged animals, the animals which crawl and swim and fly, the plants, the mountains, lakes, plains, rivers, the sky and sun, stars, moon, the four directions...in short, everything. Everything in the universe is related within the tradition of Lakota spirituality; everything is relational, and can only be understood in that way. The basis for this understanding on the part of traditional Lakota culture is its spirituality. The relationality ofthe universe is a spiritual proposition, a force so complex and so powerful that it creates a sense of wonder and impotence in any sane human who truly considers it.”
― Frank Black Elk

“Okay, but look. Think how white people believe their houses or yards or scenic overlooks are haunted by Indians, when it's really the opposite. We're haunted by settlers and their descendants.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Sentence

“In a world run by the indigenous, no ethnicity is the second race.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“We cultivated our land, but in a way different from the white man. We endeavored to live with the land; they seemed to live off it. I was taught to preserve, never to destroy.”
― tom dystra

“Maidens dream of love's soft song; women seek the trust that
lasts long.
The soul yearns for the twin flames of feeling and fire,
passion's blaze restoring belief to the young and lost,
consumed by their own desire.”
― Tiffany Desiree, Nature, Sex, and Culture: A Tree of Discombobulated Thoughts

“Wielu białych w tym kraju poczucie wyższości ma w genach. Nienawidzą nas. To nawet nie ich wina, rozumiem ich, taka jest Ameryka, tak została zbudowana. Dlatego przyszedł Trump, on uosabia tę całą nienawiść. Nigdy nie było bardziej amerykańskiego prezydenta.”
― Maciej Jarkowiec, Powrócę jako piorun. Krótka historia Dzikiego Zachodu

“She nodded so subtly as she passed, like we were both in the cartel, and the cartel was gay.”
― Eliana Ramage, To the Moon and Back

“The Earth is more than scenery—it is ancestry.”
― Lawrence Nault

“When rivers are dammed, so too are the stories they carried.”
― Lawrence Nault

“Every language carries a map of the soul that spoke it first.”
― Lawrence Nault

“Center of the world is indigenous.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“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

“The scientific descriptions of ethnology that we find in books are inevitably dry and do not give the least impression of the mysterious world of the Achumawi, whose life is so inextricably mixed in with the animals, the trees, the plants.
But without forming some mental picture of that life, it is, I believe, almost impossible to understand how and to what extent the Achumawi Indian finds himself in a state of direct mystical connection with the universe that surrounds him.
Now that is precisely his religion, and his entire religion.” — Jaime de Angulo
from
"Tracks Along the Left Coast"
by Andrew Schelling”
― Jaime de Angulo

“The scientific descriptions of ethnology that we find in books are inevitably dry and do not give the least impression of the mysterious world of the Achumawi, whose life is so inextricably mixed in with the animals, the trees, the plants. But without forming some mental picture of that life, it is, I believe, almost impossible to understand how and to what extent the Achumawi Indian finds himself in a state of direct mystical connection with the universe that surrounds him. Now that is precisely his religion, and his entire religion.”
— Jaime de Angulo

Appears in the introduction of "Tracks Along the Left Coast" by Andrew Schelling”
― Jaime de Angulo

“You say that to (Franz) Boas science is "austere and impersonal." You know, that is just the thing that gets my goat. They have managed to take all the life out of science. Why be ashamed of the joy and the exaltations that are the blood of knowl-edge? Why pretend that you have no emotions? In another century they will look aghast at the funereal aspect of our science. They will say: those people were doing penance for something! ... We have driven our libido underground.”
— Jaime de Angulo, written in a letter to his friend and mentor, the linguist Edward Sapir

(Appears in the introduction to "Tracks Along the Left Coast" by Andrew Schelling)”
― Jaime de Angulo