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

“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

“Indian boarding schools began in 1860, with the first school being established on the Yakima Indian Reservation in Washington State. These schools were designed to take Native American youths and mold them into members of "civilized society"; to make them White. The schools taught the basics of education, such as arithmetic, but also taught the students to practice Christianity and that the political structures of the United States were ideal for everyone. The actual goal was to eradicate every ounce of Native cultures.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“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

“And some part of me has always known that the love of a dog was something I needed, no less than I needed food in my belly or warm clothes in the winter. I am the end result of this pairwise coevolution of our ancestors, both human and wolf: I needed this love to survive.”
― Sophie Hicks, Fighting Freud: A memoir exploring anger, intergenerational trauma and narcissistic abuse

“Grandma hid that there’s a lick of Indian in us, a remnant of that prairie savage that suckles too hard on the taxpayer’s teat.”
― Sophie Hicks, Fighting Freud: A memoir exploring anger, intergenerational trauma and narcissistic abuse

“It's a big subject the history of English food," Dilys said, but then frowned and looked like she was reevaluating her words. "Or perhaps it isn't--- most things are imported, aren't they? If you wind it back, I guess there's not much that truly is native. I suppose, when it comes down to it, our only indigenous foods are fungi, worts and seaweeds.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“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

“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

“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