Fulcrum Publishing > Fulcrum's Quotes

“A significant number of people believe tribal people still live and dress as they did 300 years ago. During my tenure as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, national news agencies requesting interviews sometimes asked if they could film a tribal dance or if I would wear traditional tribal clothing for the interview. I doubt they asked the president of the United States to dress like a pilgrim for an interview.”
― Wilma Mankiller

“Though many non-Native Americans have learned very little about us, over time we have had to learn everything about them. We watch their films, read their literature, worship in their churches, and attend their schools. Every third-grade student in the United States is presented with the concept of Europeans discovering America as a "New World" with fertile soil, abundant gifts of nature, and glorious mountains and rivers. Only the most enlightened teachers will explain that this world certainly wasn't new to the millions of indigenous people who already lived here when Columbus arrived.”
― Wilma Mankiller, Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women

“Coyote, who is the creator of all of us, was sitting on his cloud the day after he created Indians. Now, he liked the Indians, liked what they were doing. This is good, he kept saying to himself. But he was bored. He thought and thought about what he should make next in the world. But he couldn't think of anything so he decided to clip his toenails. ... He looked around and around his cloud for somewhere to throw away his clippings. But he couldn't find anywhere and he got mad. He started jumping up and down because he was so mad. Then he accidentally dropped his toenail clippings over the side of the cloud and they fell to the earth. They clippings burrowed into teh ground like seeds and grew up to be white man. Coyote, he looked down at his newest creation and said, "Oh, shit.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“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

“When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours.”
― Vine Deloria Jr.

“These Indians are fierce, they wear feathers and grunt. Most of us dont fit this idealized figure since we grunt only when overeating”
― Vine Deloria Jr.

“Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there.”
― Vine Deloria Jr.

“Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.”
― Sherman Alexie

“Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“At the halfway point of any drunken night, there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future.”
― Sherman Alexie

“I grabbed my book and opened it up.

I wanted to smell it.

Heck, I wanted to kiss it.

Yes, kiss it.

That's right, I am a book kisser.

Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Books and beer are the best and worst defense.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World

“It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.”
― Sherman Alexie, War Dances

“Wilderness gave us knowledge. Wilderness made us human. We came from here. Perhaps that is why so many of us feel a strong bond to this land called Serengeti; it is the land of our youth.”
― Boyd Norton, Serengeti: The Eternal Beginning

“Hey boys, come up here!" Lee's excited shout bounced from rock to rock down the gulch. "I've got all of California right here in this pan!”
― Phyllis Flanders Dorset, The New Eldorado: The Story of Colorado's Gold and Silver Rushes

“To date, treasure-hunters have followed up clue after clue, including a dagger-marked tree, to no avail. If there is a fortune buried in Handcart Gulch, it is still safely hidden”
― Phyllis Flanders Dorset, The New Eldorado: The Story of Colorado's Gold and Silver Rushes

“Fred Olmsted sat at the edge of the stagecoach seat, chattering to his father about their trip. How exciting to see the towns and forests of western New York! Suddenly, Fred stopped talking. That roar in the distance could only be one thing. Niagara Falls!”
― Julie Dunlap, Parks for the People: A Story About Frederick Law Olmsted

“A critical element in nearly all effective social movements is leadership. For it is through smart, persistent, and authoritative leaders that a movement generates the appropriate concepts and language that captures the frustration, anger, or fear of the group's members and places responsibility where it is warranted.”
― David E. Wilkins, The Hank Adams Reader: An Exemplary Native Activist and the Unleashing of Indigenous Sovereignty

“Adams has shown a nearly inexhaustible desire, leavened with an equal amount of sheer talent- five decades' worth and counting- in an unrelenting effort to stabilize, strengthen, and improve the standing of indigenous peoples, minority groups, and the larger society as well. He is an exemplary Native activist, indeed.”
― David E. Wilkins, The Hank Adams Reader: An Exemplary Native Activist and the Unleashing of Indigenous Sovereignty

“My first vegetable garden was in a hard-packed dirt driveway in Boulder, Colorado. I was living in a basement apartment there, having jumped at the chance to come out West with a friend in his Volkswagen Bug, fleeing college and inner-city Philadelphia. I was twenty, hungry for experience, and fully intending to be a ski bum in my new life. But it didn’t turn out that way.”
― Jane Shellenberger, Organic Gardener's Companion: Growing Vegetables in the West

“There are many paths leading to a garden and many experiences awaiting those who venture in. No matter what your motive—whether to grow healthy, delicious food; spend time outdoors feeling more alive than your desk job allows; help save the planet; find relaxation, solace, or healing; meet your neighbors; get your hands in the sweet earth; or discover for yourself just how abundant and generous nature can be—a garden rarely disappoints. It’s a magnet for life in all its quirky, beautiful forms.”
― Jane Shellenberger, Organic Gardener's Companion: Growing Vegetables in the West

“Our most important job as vegetable gardeners is to feed and sustain soil life, often called the soil food web, beginning with the microbes. If we do this, our plants will thrive, we’ll grow nutritious, healthy food, and our soil conditions will get better each year. This is what is meant by the adage ”Feed the soil not the plants.”
― Jane Shellenberger, Organic Gardener's Companion: Growing Vegetables in the West

“Identifying the flaw in the US philosophical roots requires that we move beyond the intellectual and emotional climate in which the Constitution was conceived and adopted. The meanings of concepts and words change with use, and even the Supreme Court has admitted that the original perspective of the American social contract has been altered by the passage of time.”
― David E. Wilkins, The Legal Universe: Observations of the Foundations of American Law

“While significant strides have been made in the pursuit of life expectancy, healthcare, educational opportunities, and constitutional protections for women, the Supreme Court, in particular, still wrestles with their status, as evidenced by their problems in pursuing equal opportunity in education and employment, reproductive freedom, the military, and violence against women.”
― David E. Wilkins, The Legal Universe: Observations of the Foundations of American Law

“When there’s a vacuum of public input, lobbyists usually fill it. But when there’s public input, the people usually win.”
― Morgan Carroll, Take Back your Government: A Citizen's Guide to Grassroots Change

“Obviously these are some exceptional young people, but what they have in common is that they were ordinary people who cared. They wanted to act, to do something, to make life better for other people—and they have.”
― Morgan Carroll, Take Back your Government: A Citizen's Guide to Grassroots Change

“Josephy visited several leading Manhattan bookstores and sadly discovered the explanation [from his agent] to be generally correct; books about Indians were shelved in the back of the stores alongside books about natural history, dinosaurs, plants, birds, and animals rather than being placed alongside biographies and histories of Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, and other great world cultures. Puzzled, Josephy began asking bookstore managers for a justification of this marketing tactic and was informed that Indian books had “just always been placed there.” The longer he pondered booksellers’ indifference toward Indians, the more annoyed Josephy became with the realization that bookstore marketing tactics were simply a reflection of the pervasive thinking throughout the United States in 1961: Americans believed Indians to be a vanished people. “Thinking about it made me angry,” Josephy wrote in his autobiography, “and I vowed that someday, some way, I would do something about this ignorant insult.”
― Bobby Bridger, Where the Tall Grass Grows: Becoming Indigenous and the Mythological Legacy of the American West

“I spent my summers at my grandparents’ cabin in Estes Park, literally next door to Rocky Mountain National Park. We had a view of Longs Peak across the valley and the giant rock beaver who, my granddad told me, was forever climbing toward the summit of the mountain. We awoke to mule deer peering in the windows and hummingbirds buzzing around the red-trimmed feeders; spent the days chasing chipmunks across the boulders of Deer Mountain and the nights listening to coyotes howling in the dark.”
― Mary Taylor Young, The Guide to Colorado Mammals