Native Quotes

“Finding an access to the ‘open public space’ is the challenge that really matters in life. We may know that everyone might feel like an alien to someone else or sometimes even to oneself, whether native, foreigner or exile, whether assimilated or singular, whether straight or gay. Be that as it may, a basic premise for the safeguard of self-fulfillment is the availability of a comforting maneuvering ground for one and all and an opportunity to enter a 'space of appearance' with a gate to a ‘citizenship of the world’. ("His master's voice" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil.”
― Muhammad Ali Jinnah

“I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul.”
― Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave

“The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind.
However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity.

---- Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss”
― Brian Aldiss, Hothouse

“Sólo se sentía la tranquilidad sorda de las aguas, las cuales parecía que se despeñaban en el abismo.”
― Popol Vuh

“Our task is to build cultural fortresses to protect our emerging nativeness. They must be strong enough to hold at bay the powers of consumerism, the powers of greed and envy and pride. One of the most effective ways for this to come about would be for our universities to assume the awesome responsibility to both validate and educate those who want to be homecomers -- not necessarily to go home but to go someplace and dig in and begin the long search and experiment to become native.”
― Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place

“Pensaron cómo harían brotar la luz, la cual recibiría alimento de eternidad. La luz se hizo entonces en el seno de lo increado. Contemplaron así la naturaleza original de la vida que está en la entraña de lo desconocido.”
― Popol Vuh

“Chapter 90: [This] Countryside
I swear by [this] countryside, you are a native settled on this land, as well as any parent and whatever he may father. We have created man under stress. Does he reckon that no one can do anything against him? He says: "I have used up piles of money!" Does he consider that no one sees him? Have we not granted him both eyes, a tongue and two lips, and guided him along both highroads? Yet he does not tackle the Obstacle!

What will make you realize what the Obstacle is?

It means redeeming the captive, or feeding some orphaned relative on a day of famine or some needy person in distress.

Then he will act like someone who believes, recommends patience and encourages mercifulness. Those will be the companions on the right-hand side, while the ones who disbelieve in Our signs will be companions on the sinister side: above them a fire will hem them in.”
― T. B. Irving, A Translation Of The Meaning Of The Noble Qur'an

“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.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“The salmon is a symbol of prosperity and determination to the Coast Salish tribes, the band of tribes in the Pacific Northwest of which the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe is a part. She defies nature, swimming upstream to provide for the people of the land. Yet she must sacrifice herself to give that abundance to others. Her determination comes at a deep personal cost.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“Most White people saw me as Hispanic, and people of other races often thought I was the same as them.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“The first wave of guilt came with images of the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. The pipeline was constructed to transport crude oil through the Dakotas into Illinois. It was voted on and decided by White men and given permission not through voluntary easements, as was originally required, but instead through forced condemnations and evictions. The Standing Rock Sioux disagreed with the pipeline, as it was likely to destroy their ancestral burial grounds and taint their water supply with viscous, black poison. Their voices went unheard.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“When the construction was announced to continue as planned, the tribe and their allies came together. People from across two hundred tribes and beyond to other communities came together to try and protect their water, their lives. They were met with forces from the National Guard and seventy-five other law enforcement agencies across the country. These forces used concussion grenades and automatic rifles against civilians. They spent hours shooting them with water cannons in subfreezing temperatures to try and make them give in.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“I was working towards my bachelor's degree in creative writing at Arizona State University when videos, pictures, and stories from these protests started blooming across my Facebook feed. I saw Native people holding their ground and being ground down by the opposing police force. I saw them bitten by dogs and hosed down and maimed by rubber bullets hitting their faces and bodies, all while bright white words scrolled across the bottom of the video, explaining the situation and giving statistics.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“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.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“Many jokes were about colonizers who claim to be Native because of some distant person in their family's history. The most common joke, and one I have told, is about someone being one-sixteenth Cherokee since their great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess.
I laugh at these jokes even as I worry that they would make that joke about me since I am one-eighth. I cackle and like the videos, and feel the flicker of pain in the back of my mind that screams that, if I ever had children, these videos would be about them.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“I’d advise looking into what types of frogs are native to your area so you know what to expect and when the best time to look is.”
― Aesop Rock

“Environmentalists like to say that defeats are permanent, victories temporary. Extinction, like death, is forever, but protection needs to be maintained. But now, in a world where restoration ecology is becoming increasingly important, it turns out that even defeats aren't always permanent. Across the United States and Europe, dams have been removed, wetlands and rivers restored, once-vanished native species reintroduced, endangered species regenerated.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

“Thus the native discovers that his life, his breath, his
beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds
out that the settler's skin is not of any more value than
a native's skin; and it must be said that this discovery
shakes the world in a very necessary manner. All the new,
revolutionary assurance of the native stems from it. For
if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler's, his
glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his
voice no longer turns me into stone. I am no longer on
tenterhooks in his presence; in fact, I don't give a damn
for him. Not only does his presence no longer trouble me,
but I am already preparing such efficient ambushes for
him that soon there will be no way out but that of flight.”
― Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence

“There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid. From the jungles of his dreaming he recognized why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices, with Josiah’s voice and Rocky’s voice; the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery’s final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.”
― 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 tamarisk 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

“He had been so intent on finding the cattle that he had forgotten all the events of the past days and past years. Hunting the cattle was good for that. Old Betonie was right. It was a cure for that, and maybe for other things too. The spotted cattle wouldn’t be lost any more, scattered through his dreams, driven by his hesitation to admit they had been stolen, that the land—all of it—had been stolen from them. The anticipation of what he might find was strung tight in his belly; suddenly the tension snapped and hurled him into the empty room where the ticking of the clock behind the curtains had ceased. He stopped the mare. The silence was inside, in his belly; there was no longer any hurry.

The ride into the mountain had branched into all directions of time. He knew then why the oldtimers could only speak of yesterday and tomorrow in terms of the present moment: the only certainty; and this present sense of being was qualified with bare hints of yesterday or tomorrow, by saying, “I go up to the mountain yesterday or I go up to the mountain tomorrow.” The ck’o’yo Kaup’a’ta somewhere is stacking his gambling sticks and waiting for a visitor; Rocky and I are walking across the ridge in the moonlight; Josiah and Robert are waiting for us. This night is a single night; and there has never been any other.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko

“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

“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