Indigenous Quotes

“People on the streets are dehumanized the same way settlers dehumanized the Indigenous, to steal the land of abundance at gunpoint, to tax the land to the fullest.”
― San Mateo, San Mateo: Proof of The Divine

“Where all was free, is free no more.”
― San Mateo, San Mateo: Proof of The Divine

“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 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

“And in the year 1924 Indian citizenship will have been granted, even though they will mean to dissolve tribes by giving citizenship, dissolve being another word for disappearance, a kind of chemical word for a gradual death of tribes and Indians, a clinical killing, designed by psychopaths calling themselves politicians.”
― Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

“keep this / with you / it is part / of your story / sometimes / to remember / a wound / is the way / of healing”
― Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe, Rose Quartz: Poems

“There’s an old, Native American parable. It explains how everybody has two wolves constantly fighting inside each of us. The negative wolf—the wolf that tells you that you’re bad, you can’t do it, you’re a failure. And the positive wolf, which tells you, you can do it. You are worthy. You are loved. The wolf that wins is, very simply, the one you feed. When you indulge one of the wolves, leave it to go unchallenged, agree with it, don’t seek out evidence to oppose it, you feed it, and it grows stronger.”
― Marina Vivancos, In This Iron Ground

“A part of me wants to cry at this small request, because I know what that longing is like, what it means. I won't be there forever, but I will be there for her. For her sister. For her mother. I'll be there, for a while, planting seeds, and it will matter.”
― Alicia Elliott, And Then She Fell

“How is it I have never dated / someone who is also Coast Salish / or at least Indigenous / instead it's Disney's Pocahontas / her animated dad with his hands up / these white men are dangerous / and I come running”
― Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe, Rose Quartz: Poems

“We have come a long way, but the amount of wisdom we could learn from the Indigenous people and their ecological practices to create sustainable civilizations is multitudinous.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya, Our Nepal, Our Pride

“Some groups viewed the behaviors and perceptions of what today we call psychological disability as a great gift to be treasured and a source of community wisdom.”
― Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States

“All bodies likely and eventually became transformed, and thus bodily differences were unremarkable.”
― Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States

“Perhaps his sister frequently spoke to beings that others did not see, and her frequent and unpredictable vocalizations made successful hunting and fishing difficult. She may have been considered to have great insight into that which others did not understand, and others would come to her for guidance.”
― Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States

“Everybody shivered. All over the camp, the emaciated dogs died. Every day had a thousand and one wrinkles and a thousand and one knots. The men looked for employment, for food. They avoided the police, who were implicating Palestinians in everything from inflation and communist plots to cold spells. And once every month they lined up, as if in a funeral procession, to receive their UNRWA rations of flour, powdered milk, and dates. The rations lasted a week. Then people ate words. The words led to orange groves in Jaffa, to olive trees in Tershiha, to cloudless summers in Haifa. And back again to Bourj el Barajneh.”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile

“Implying that realities are merely psychotic experiences or that they exist in a realm that is not legitimate disregards Indigenous belief systems, which value spiritual experiences and recognize the impact of ancestral trauma”
― Renee Linklater, Decolonizing Trauma Work: Indigenous Stories and Strategies

“Duran argues for the need for healing institutions to retain culturally competent staff and that the adherence to strictly Western models of treatment maintains the colonization process. Hodge, Limb, and Cross claim that the Western therapeutic project is inconsistent with many Indigenous cultures and often serves as a form of Western colonization.”
― Renee Linklater, Decolonizing Trauma Work: Indigenous Stories and Strategies

“On earth we are immigrants from Africa - out in space we'd be immigrants from Earth - in a different galaxy, we'd be immigrants from Milkyway. To put simply, in exploration of space, both external and internal, terms like immigrant and indigenous are meaningless. It's the heart that makes us indigenous or immigrant, not blood.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth

“Calling people out their names is a bad habit the people of European descent seem to have. The one that takes the rag off the bush is how they went all the way to Africa and called nature out of its name...Victoria Falls, Leopoldville, Johannesburg, Lake Victoria, Lake Rudolf, Lake Albert, etc. The W.F.'s that came here did the same thing with the indigenous people living here...called them Indians; and years later missionaries, government officials, census takers, etc., "tidied up their records and account books by arbitrarily shortening or changing the names of their charges." "He Who Causes Fear" and "Brave Chief" suddenly became Indian Joe and Bob.”
― Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap by Verta Mae

“The church wanted souls; the government wanted subjects and taxes; the conquistadors wanted gold. In each case, they needed people, and they needed people identified as Indian. But they each sought to remake Indigenous peoples to fit their own desires. The church claimed rights to evangelize Indigenous peoples, the Crown to tax them, and the conquistadors to enslave them. As they jostled for control, they subjected Indigenous forms of religion, governance, and labor to their sometimes-competing objectives.”
― Aviva Chomsky, Central America's Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration

“Art taught her that love wasn’t supposed to be a roller coaster; it could be a walk in the woods. She told me there’s a phrase in our beautiful language for when you no longer walk alone on your path but are together for the journey on this earth: wiijiindiwin.”
― Angeline Boulley, Firekeeper’s Daughter

“Western definitions of happiness--and Western maps of how you get there--may even lead you away from well-being.”
― Randy Woodley, Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Lead Us to Harmony and Well-Being

“But there is hope. The United Nations did a study showing that small farms can feed the world. Small farms are more adaptable. They are less costly, because they don't need extremely expensive machinery, and less environmentally damaging, because they don't need to spray chemicals. And they provide greater local economic opportunities than large industrial farms do. Small farms have been proven to produce higher yields per acre and more nutrient-dense foods.”
― Randy Woodley, Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Lead Us to Harmony and Well-Being

“Remind yourself every day that all things are connected, that all people and things are your relatives.”
― Randy Woodley, Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Lead Us to Harmony and Well-Being

“After more than 530 years of the Western worldview in America, we think it is fair to call the Western worldview a failed experiment. Western civilization has done Turtle Island and the world little good, and it has caused damage beyond compare.”
― Randy Woodley, Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Lead Us to Harmony and Well-Being

“This principle of reciprocity--a give-and-take in a relationship of balance--is not just some transaction done to advance one's own aims. Traditionally, Native Americans see reciprocity as a natural law of the universe and as crucial for humans to maintain harmony.”
― Randy Woodley, Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Lead Us to Harmony and Well-Being

“As they made their way forward, his grandfather reminded him to keep looking back. If he did not recognize where he had been, his grandfather said, he would never find his way out of those woods.”
― Randy Woodley, Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Lead Us to Harmony and Well-Being

“Hoarding means both depleting natural resources and creating a storage problem. Neither does it make sense to hoard food away from the needs of others.”
― Randy Woodley, Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Lead Us to Harmony and Well-Being

“My great-grandfather survived the Sand Creek Massacre, and his son survived boarding schools, and his daughter, my mother, survived losing her mother and being raised by white people. And still brought us up knowing who we were. Who we are. Somehow. So why had I been sheltering the boys from their culture? Something made so strong it survived more than it should have survived. It was more than survival. The culture sings. The culture dances. The culture keeps telling stories that bring you into them, take you away from your life and bring you back better made.”
― Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

“I wanted to feel connected to being Native, and to being Cheyenne, but I didn't quite know how and didn't even know any other Cheyenne people who weren't in my family. Being in recovery seemed to fulfill that in some way. Native people were in recovery everywhere. Had found out that they couldn't not take substance use to its abuse point. Had found out that some wounds were bottomless holes asking to be filled every day. Running alone did what I needed done to keep sober. So that's what I kept doing. Every day.”
― Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars