Best 58 quotes in «indigenous quotes» category

Our power comes from the earth

People should read more Indigenous writers. They are writing some of the most innovative and important work in contemporary literature.

Pull back the curtain and jump down the rabbit hole.

The bureaucrats were accountable to their political masters, not accountable to the people whom they were overseeing. And putting it as bluntly as possible, no government ever won votes by spending money on Indians.

Right-wing pundits continually framed First Nations issues as a drain on taxpayers when, in fact, Indigenous communities were presenting a major growth opportunity.

The Dreaming is now. The Dreaming is always; forever; it circles around and around. It never ends. It's always happening, and us mob, we're part of it, all the time, everywhere, and every-when too.

... the government had spent more than four times the amount on lawyers [fighting a First Nations family's request for medical treatment] than would have been required to actually do the surgery.

[The federal government memo documents] imply a feeling of bureaucratic effrontery as though this child, who hovered between life and death, was some kind of chiseller to the taxpayer.

There is no concept of justice in Cree culture. The nearest word is kintohpatatin, which loosely translates to "you've been listened to." But kintohpatatin is richer than justice - really it means you've been listened to by someone compassionate and fair, and your needs will be taken seriously.

The patronizing assumption by the powers in Ottawa that they best knew what policies would serve the interests of the West was resented by the unconsulted residents of that West

The purpose of any ceremony is to build stronger relationship or bridge the distance between our cosmos and us. The research that we do as Indigenous people is a ceremony that allows us a raised level of consciousness and insight into our world. Through going forward together with open minds and good hearts we have uncovered the nature of this ceremony

The problem is that after two centuries of conflict about just who was wanted in the Australian nation the term 'Australia' both includes and excludes. There are still people for whom 'Australian' means predominatly Anglo-Celtic white people whose parents were born here before 'New Australians' came as migrants after the Second World War. A common alternative to 'white people' (who from an Aboriginal perspective might be more genially called 'whitefellas') is 'Europeans'. This makes an incongruous appeal to history. Politically the colonisers were British, but they includes people of many nationalities. It's an odd usage, as when you see a sign in a national park telling you 'Europeans' brought the invasive weeds and pests. They brought the sign and the concept of a park too, and 'they', in a complex sense, are 'us'.

There are no such things as dead ends. Only people who find dead ends.

There is a social responsibility for professionals to not take jobs on projects that have disrespected the indigenous population and their beliefs.

When Lillian (Holt) argues that leadership steals your spirit, she means that institutional pressures change you; they erode your courage, passion and humour and wear you down so that important things don't get named and get overtaken by the trivial. In the following excerpts from one interview I undertook with her, Lillian elaborates why Indigenous Australians find it hard to speak out. There is a systemic blockage. Something happens to Aboriginal people who work in hierarchies, whether bureaucracy or academic… a bit like my own story of climbing the ladder of success. You get to the top and find it bereft, bereft of passion, bereft of intuition, of emotion. 'For God's sake don't talk about emotion in a place like this!

There were waves of genocide that overcame indigenous populations of Oceania and do we have a library of books or films to tell our story? No. We have tourist hula shows and commercials where the “natives” tend to tourists like indentured servants with plastic, lifeless smiles. It’s not such a charming picture, is it? The truth is ugly, but so is ignorance or denial of such atrocities and pain.

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.

We are no longer indigenous to our environment.

We are still waiting for our welcoming ceremonies.

We are people who matter. Yes, it's true. Now let's show the world what people who matter can do.

... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.

Although wrongs have been done me I live in hope. ... Now we are together again to make peace.

Bolivia is a majority indigenous nation, but that majority has always been excluded.

There is room on this land for all of us and there must also be, after centuries of struggle, room for justice for Indigenous peoples. That is all we ask. And we will settle for nothing less.

We've got to think now, in real terms, for that seventh generation . . . We've got to get back to spiritual law if we are to survive.

You are the sun and the rain, the water and the plants, the birds and the animals. There is no such thing as ‘nature,’ apart from you and me. You are nature, I am nature, just as you are me and I am you.

The most important thing is the script.

I support the indigenous people anywhere in the planet

Superstition is a quality that seems indigenous to the ocean.

Indigenous people made huge contributions to this country. The biggest is in sharing the land and resources. People need to see that, understand that. Indigenous people should be viewed as the founding peoples of this land.

Solutions will not be found while Indigenous people are treated as victims for whom someone else must find solutions.

The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans.

We hide our racism. We just go on about our lives - may I say, white Canadians go on about their lives. African-Canadians understand racism, Indigenous Canadians understand racism: they see it all the time, they live with it.

We are all indigenous people on this planet, and we have to reorganize to get along.

First Nations and science fiction don't usually go together. In fact, they could be considered rather unusual topics to mention in the same sentence, much like fish and bicycles.... To me, sci-fi was a world of possibilities. As a fan of writing, why shouldn't my fascination extend to such unconventional works? It was still writing, still literature in all its glory, but here they used different tools to explore the human condition, be they aliens, advanced technology, or other such novel approaches.... I wanted to take traditional (a buzzword in the Native community) science-fiction characteristics and filter them through an Aboriginal consciousness.

At the least, we should leave flowers, at the least we should leave songs.

Being apprehensive of my culture sounds bizarre, especially after being kept away from it until then, but part of me did not feel like I belonged. Also I didn’t want to appear stupid and they would certainly know that I did not belong if I started asking questions. When you don’t know what you don’t know, how do you know what to ask?

But far too many innocent youngsters have been needlessly ground up in a bureaucratic meat grinder. There isn't anything accidental about such a waste of potential and life.

99% of human existence has been nonindustrial, nonmajor agriculture, it's been hunting, gathering & agroecology.

And Jeffrey's dark skin, amid a sea of white, made him an alien too. In the country of his ancestors.

A warrior confronts colonialism with the truth in order to regenerate authenticity and recreate a life worth living and principles worth dying for. The struggle is to restore connections severed by the colonial machine. The victory is an integrated personality, a cohesive community, and the restoration of respectful and harmonious relationships.

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.

First off, as has been well stated by many Indigenous Feminists before us, the idea of gender equality did not come from the suffragettes or other so-called "foremothers" of feminist theory. It should also be recognized that although we are still struggling for this thing called "gender equality," it is not actually a framed issue within the feminist realm, but a continuation of the larger tackling of colonialism. So this idea that women of colour all of a sudden realized "we are women," and magically joined the feminist fight actually re-colonizes people for who gender equality and other "feminist" notions is a remembered history and current reality since before Columbus. The mainstream feminist movement is supposed to have started in the early 1900s with women fighting for the right to vote. However, these white women deliberately excluded the struggles of working class women of color and participated in the policy of forced sterilization for Aboriginal women and women with disabilities. Furthermore, the idea that we all need to subscribe to the same theoretical understandings of history is marginalizing. We all have our own truths and histories to live.

Hush now, ‘tis time to sleep and dream secrets of long ago.

He sounded like a lot of the youth in our community, stuck between the past and the future. The true goal is finding enough of both to make your life worth living.

In the history of all empires, it has proved difficult to enslave the local population for the benefit of foreign invaders. The indigenous inhabitants refuse to work, die off or leave to go elsewhere. Slaves have to be brought in from outside. The Indians of Cuba proved no exception to this. Many had been massacred during the punitive expedition of Pánfilo, but many simply withdrew their labour and disappeared into the hills.

I did have the longest hair of any of the boys... I braided it myself each morning, to keep it out of the way and to remind myself of things I couldn’t quite remember but that, nevertheless, I knew to be true.

I have a dream, humans were part of aliens on earth. I also dream, that some humans are really indigenous.

In the fight among politicians, the children lost again.

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together...