Reader > Reader's Quotes

“I've been pulling up the wood crosses and replacing them with limestone slabs that I pry out of the dry riverbed in the belief that the children buried here deserve better than having their graves marked with the talisman of the cult that killed them.”
― Thomas King, Sufferance

“Stanley told me that's how everybody does business these days. They make up swell corporations so no one can find them."

"It's shell corporations."

"That's what we should have done when that Columbus guy showed up.”
― Thomas King, DreadfulWater

“A great many intelligent and compassionate people have called residential schools a national tragedy. And they were. But perhaps “tragedy” is the wrong term. It suggests that the consequences of residential schools were unintended and undesired, a difficult argument to make since, as Ward Churchill points out, the schools were national policy”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told.”
― Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

“No one knows for sure how many Native children wound up at residential schools in the United States. Canada reckons their own numbers at about 150,000, so the tally for America would have been considerably higher. But for the children who did find themselves there, the schools were, in all ways, a death trap. Children were stripped of their cultures and their languages. Up to 50 percent of them lost their lives to disease, malnutrition, neglect, and abuse—50 percent.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Lately, Indians have become First Nations in Canada and Native Americans in the United States, but the fact of the matter is that there has never been a good collective noun because there never was a collective to begin with”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“For an individual, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. For a government, such behavior is called . . . policy.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition.”
― Thomas King

“Indians were made for film. Indians were exotic and erotic. All those feathers, all that face paint, the breast plates, the bone chokers, the skimpy loincloths, not to mention the bows and arrows and spears, the war cries, the galloping horses, the stern stares, and the threatening grunts. We hunted buffalo, fought the cavalry, circled wagon trains, fought the cavalry, captured White women, fought the cavalry, scalped homesteaders, fought the cavalry. And don't forget the drums and the wild dances where we got all sweaty and lathered up, before we rode off to fight the cavalry.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“There was no particular reason for the Canadian government to remember what had happened to the Cherokee in the 1840s. After all, most governments can't remember the promises that got them elected.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Most of us think that history is the past. It’s not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That’s all it is.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Francis Jennings, and his book the invasion of America, called christianity a conquest religion. I suspect this description is true of most religions. I can’t think of one that could be termed a seduction religion, where converts are lured in by the beauty of the doctrine and the generosity of the practice.
Maybe Buddhism. Certainly not Christianity.
Missionary work in the New World was war. Christianity, and all its varieties, has always been a stakeholder in the business of assimilation, and in the 16th century, it was the initial wound in the side of native culture.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Everybody's related, Lucy told us. The trouble with this world is that you wouldn't know it from the way we behave.”
― Thomas King, Truth and Bright Water

“Ignorance has never been the problem. The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“So it’s lucky for me that literary analysis is not about proof, only persuasion. In our cynical world, where suspicion is a necessity, insisting that something is true is not nearly as powerful as suggesting that something might be true.”
― Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

“There are no truths, Coyote,” I says. “Only stories.”
― Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water

“The truth about stories is, that's all we are.”
― Thomas King

“For every terrified child taken”
― Michelle Good, Five Little Indians

“Do you pray Clara? Clara stiffened, the familiar rage rushing through her veins. Pray? You mean talk to myself and imagine some guy in the sky will make it all better?”
― Michelle Good, Five Little Indians

“The teachings show us that we learn and become strong through suffering. I can see that you are very strong. There is no shame in sadness.”
― Michelle Good, Five Little Indians

“There are no English words to describe how one woman walked into that lodge and another walked out. All Clara knew was that it took her back. Back to the birch grove and the angel songs. Back to who she was before Sister Mary, before the school, before they tried to beat her into a little brown white girl. She felt a certainty, from then on, that all the ones who had come before walked with her. Life was no longer just survival. It was about being someone. An Indian someone, with all the truth that was born into her at the moment she was placed in her mother's womb.”
― Michelle Good, Five Little Indians