Indigeneity Quotes

“. . . if i am somehow, miraculously, bodied then/
my skin is a collage of meditations on love and shattered selves.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, This Wound Is a World

“Is the land a source of belongings, or a source of belonging?”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer

“What has stayed constant between us is this cycle of losing and finding, this unending transference of vitality, without which we might feel directionless. Love of this sort, however, isn't about making a roadmap to an other who then becomes your compass. It is a proposition to nest in the unrepayable and every-mounting debt of care that stands in opposition to the careless and transactional practices of state power that mire the lives of NDNs and other minoritized populations. Having inherited your philosophy of love, which is also a theory of freedom, nôhkom, I can write myself into a narrative of joy that troubles the horrid fiction of race that stalks me as it does you and our kin.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“These people are fully in exile. They have not received anything from modern India. This metal road has come to them to serve the interests of those very moneylenders from Bhalpura and Rajaura who will snatch their harvests to recover their loans, those patient customers who wait like vultures for the moment when starving parents will sell their children in the extremity of despair, and fall to feeding on carrion, the advance men of those labor contractors who will make the aboriginals their bond slaves with the seduction of 'ten rupees a day and a full stomach.'

Modern India only gives them posters for family planning. The birth of children increases rather than decreases as a result of starvation, until the bodies of the man and the woman go on strike permanently.”
― Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps