Indigenous Quotes

“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

“My story may be rooted in trauma but it is not my only story.”
― Elaine Alec, Calling My Spirit Back

“I never learned how to be a woman in this world because I didn't know what it meant to be one. What I learned were things I was supposed to do and how to carry myself, but no one taught me to do that and trudge through my trauma at the same time.”
― Elaine Alec, Calling My Spirit Back

“Shop where you stay, shop where you see smile, shop such so they sustain.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“At times, it feels like a cliché, a little Indigenous girl left one in a church basement, surrounded by white boys, and men meant to, if not protect her, then at the very least not hurt her. But clichés are clichés for a reason, I suppose.”
― Brittany Penner, Children Like Us: A Métis Woman's Memoir of Family, Identity and Walking Herself Home

“this is the land striving to give you
a sovereign ground within your body.”
― Jess Housty, Crushed Wild Mint

“I will have come home and home again every day of my life
to rest in the wilderness of your love.”
― Jess Housty, Crushed Wild Mint

“This notion of a vital force knows no single home, no lone epoch. It resounds in the ancient East as the breath of being, in indigenous rites honoring the earth’s spirit, in the quests of early thinkers to name the spark of life. Wilhelm Reich, a seer across psychology and science, reframed this timeless thread, naming it orgone and tying it to the body’s silent rhythms, to the pulse beneath our skin.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Earth belongs to the Natives.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Earth belongs to the Natives, settlers are welcome, but as participant, not head of state.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Somos indígenas, somos indomables - you can make us houseless, but never homeless.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Landback is the mother of all movements, it contains the plight of all First Humans.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Colonizers are the second class citizens, every land first belongs to the indigenous.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Abe held a palmful of loose-leaf tobacco. He called it semaa—SAY-mah—and asked if I'd like to offer some to give thanks for my dad. I held out my hand. He nudged my other hand.

"Left hand," he said. "Closer to your heart.”
― Angeline Boulley, Sisters in the Wind

“When Destiny Turns To Dust (Sonnet 2406)

At the end of the century,
fascism leaves no lasting mark
on thousand year old civilizations,
it's only the adolescent countries like
the US that get wiped out of existence.

Tyrants come, tyrants go,
both foreign and domestic,
ancient civilizations endure political
upheaval like a bleep in the continuum,

whereas, destiny manifested on patchwork history
and bootleg culture, collapse into obsolescence.

So the world continues, culture continues,
reformation continues, even better without
the parasitic powers of world politics -
civilization thrives for they're never aloof,
but ever entwined with Nature's dynamics.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid. From the jungles of his dreaming he recognized why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices, with Josiah’s voice and Rocky’s voice; the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery’s final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“The sun was pushing against the gray horizon hills, sending yellow light across the clouds, and the yellow river sand was speckled with the broken shadows of tamarisk and river willow. The transition was completed. In the west and in the south too, the clouds with round heavy bellies had gathered for the dawn. It was not necessary, but it was right, and even if the sky had been cloudless the end was the same. The ear for the story and the eye for the pattern were theirs; the feeling was theirs: we came out of this land and we are hers.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“He had been so intent on finding the cattle that he had forgotten all the events of the past days and past years. Hunting the cattle was good for that. Old Betonie was right. It was a cure for that, and maybe for other things too. The spotted cattle wouldn’t be lost any more, scattered through his dreams, driven by his hesitation to admit they had been stolen, that the land—all of it—had been stolen from them. The anticipation of what he might find was strung tight in his belly; suddenly the tension snapped and hurled him into the empty room where the ticking of the clock behind the curtains had ceased. He stopped the mare. The silence was inside, in his belly; there was no longer any hurry.

The ride into the mountain had branched into all directions of time. He knew then why the oldtimers could only speak of yesterday and tomorrow in terms of the present moment: the only certainty; and this present sense of being was qualified with bare hints of yesterday or tomorrow, by saying, “I go up to the mountain yesterday or I go up to the mountain tomorrow.” The ck’o’yo Kaup’a’ta somewhere is stacking his gambling sticks and waiting for a visitor; Rocky and I are walking across the ridge in the moonlight; Josiah and Robert are waiting for us. This night is a single night; and there has never been any other.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko

“The wind was practicing with small gusts of hot air that fluttered the leaves on the elm tree in the yard. The wind was warming up for the afternoon, and within a few hours the sky over the valley would be dense with red dust, and along the ground the wind would catch waves of reddish sand and make them race across the dry red clay flats. The sky was hazy blue and it looked far away and uncertain, but he could remember times when he and Rocky had climbed Bone Mesa, high above the valley southwest of Mesita, and he had felt that the sky was near and that he could have touched it. He believed then that touching the sky had to do with where you were standing and how the clouds were that day. He had believed that on certain nights, when the moon rose full and wide as a corner of the sky, a person standing on the high sandstone cliff of that mesa could reach the moon.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko

“But old Grandma always used to say, “Back in time immemorial, things were different, the animals could talk to human beings and many magical things still happened.” He never lost the feeling he had in his chest when she spoke those words, as she did each time she told them stories; and he still felt it was true, despite all they had taught him in school—that long long ago things had been different, and human beings could understand what the animals said, and once the Gambler had trapped the storm clouds on his mountaintop.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“Dragonflies came and hovered over the pool. They were all colors of blue—powdery sky blue, dark night blue, shimmering with almost black iridescent light, and mountain blue. There were stories about the dragonflies too. He turned. Everywhere he looked, he saw a world made of stories, the long ago, time immemorial stories, as old Grandma called them. It was a world alive, always changing and moving; and if you knew where to look, you could see it, sometimes almost imperceptible, like the motion of the stars across the sky”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“The lie. He cut into the wire as if cutting away at the lie inside himself. The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; as long as people believed the lies, they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other. He wiped the sweat off his face onto the sleeve of his jacket. He stood back and looked at the gaping cut in the wire. If the white people never looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white.

The destroyers had only to set it into motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it. The cut in the fence was a good twenty feet wide, large enough for the cattle to find. He walked back to the horse and put away the pliers. He poured water over the raw skin on his hands and drank what was left in the canteen; he pissed one more time. The moon was bright, and the rolling hills and dry lake flats reflected a silvery light illusion that everything was as visible as if seen in broad daylight. But the mare stumbled and threw him hard against the saddle horn, and he realized how deceptive the moonlight was; exposed root tips and dark rocks waited in deep shadows cast by the moon. Their lies would destroy this world.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“The sun was pushing against the gray horizon hills, sending yellow light across the clouds, and the yellow river sand was speckled with the broken shadows of tamaric and river willow. The transition was completed. In the west and in the south too, the clouds with round heavy bellies had gathered for the dawn. It was not necessary, but it was right, and even if the sky had been cloudless the end was the same. The ear for the story and the eye for the pattern were theirs; the feeling was theirs: we came out of this land and we are hers.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“The cloudy yellow sandstone of Enchanted Mesa was still smoky blue before dawn, and only a faint hint of yellow light touched the highest point of the mesa. All things seemed to converge there: roads and wagon trails, canyons with springs, cliff paintings and shrines, the memory of Josiah with his cattle; but the other was distinct and strong like the violet-flowered weed that killed the mule, and the black markings on the cliffs, deep caves along the valley the Spaniards followed to their attack on Acoma. Yet at that moment in the sunrise, it was all so beautiful, everything, from all directions, evenly, perfectly, balancing day with night, summer months with winter. The valley was enclosing this totality, like the mind holding all thoughts together in a single moment. The strength came from here, from this feeling. It had always been there. He stood there with the sun on his face, and he thought maybe he might make it after all.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“He breathed deeply, and each breath had a distinct smell of snow from the north, of ponderosa pine on the rimrock above; finally he smelled horses from the direction of the corral, and he smiled. Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time.
...
The position of the sun in the sky was delicate, transitional; and the season was unmistakable. The sky was the early morning color of autumn: Jemez turquoise, edged with thin quartz clouds. He breathed deeply, trying to inhale the immensity of it, trying to take it all inside himself, the way the arroyo sand swallowed time.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“The Lakota...close, open, and often punctuate their prayers with the word Meta­kuyeayasi, a generally accepted translation of which is "all rela­tions"...human relations are, of course, included. But, in the same sense, so are the four legged animals, the animals which crawl and swim and fly, the plants, the mountains, lakes, plains, rivers, the sky and sun, stars, moon, the four directions...in short, everything. Everything in the universe is related within the tradition of Lakota spirituality; everything is relational, and can only be understood in that way. The basis for this understanding on the part of traditional Lakota culture is its spirituality. The relationality ofthe universe is a spiritual proposition, a force so complex and so powerful that it creates a sense of wonder and impotence in any sane human who truly considers it.”
― Frank Black Elk

“Okay, but look. Think how white people believe their houses or yards or scenic overlooks are haunted by Indians, when it's really the opposite. We're haunted by settlers and their descendants.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Sentence

“Our ancestors dreamed us into being. The least we can do is listen when the earth speaks back.”
― Lawrence Nault