Michaela

“I think most of the things we call evil are not evil at all; it is just that we don't understand those things and so we call them evil. And we fear evil only because we do not understand it." - Gabriel Marez”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“It has proven unfortunate for the survival of Indian nations that their way of viewing the world is so drastically at odds with the views of American technological society. Indigenous systems of logic have not led them to emphasize expansion, power, or high-impact technologies of violence. Meanwhile, several aspects of the industrial system, especially in capitalist societies, to celebrate and even require the goals of expansion, growth, and exploitation and the development of the technologies appropriate to those goals. When the two world views come into conflict, we in the industrial cultures have the brute advantage of the violent technologies to help wipe out indigenous cultures; we then interpret this so-called victory as further evidence of our greater fitness to survive.”
― Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations

“Understanding comes with life. As a man grows he sees life and death, he is happy and sad, he works, plays, meets people - sometimes it takes a lifetime to acquire understanding, because in the end understanding simply means having sympathy for people. ”
― Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

“I believe it is critically important for all Westerners to realize that the idea of the earth not being alive is a new idea. Even today, that view is far from universal and may represent a minority viewpoint, advocated mainly by people who live in Western technological cultures. Failing to see the planet as alive, they have become free of moral and ethical constraints, and have benefited from exploiting resources at the earth's expense. But if the majority of people in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union are comfortable regarding the earth as a huge, dead rock, this is emphatically not true of those Indians and aboriginal peoples throughout the world who continue to live as they have for thousands of years, in direct relationship to the planet.”
― Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations