Medicine Stories Quotes

“The only way to bear the overwhelming pain of oppression is by telling, in all its detail, in the presence of witnesses and in a context of resistance, how unbearable it is. If we attempt to craft resistance without understanding this task, we are collectively vulnerable to all the errors of judgement that unresolved trauma generates in individuals. It is part of our task as revolutionary people, people who want deep-rooted, radical change, to be as whole as it is possible for us to be. This can only be done if we face the reality of what oppression really means in our lives, not as abstract systems subject to analysis, but as an avalanche of traumas leaving a wake of devastation in the lives of real people who nevertheless remain human, unquenchable, complex and full of possibility.”
― Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity

“When we rely on written records we need to continually ask ourselves what might be missing, what might have been recorded in order to manipulate events and in what direction, and in what ways we are allowing ourselves to assume that objectivity is in any way connected with literacy.”
― Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity

“I wonder what it must have been like, what dignity it must have conferred on children of the Iroquois confederacy that any child over three was welcome to speak about matters of group importance in the tribal council.”
― Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity

“To do exciting, empowering research and leave it in academic journals and university libraries is like manufacturing unaffordable medicines for deadly diseases. We need to share our work in ways that people can assimilate, not in the private languages and forms of scholars...Those who are hungriest for what we dig up don't read scholarly journals and shouldn't have to. As historians we need to either be artists and community educations or find people who are and figure out how to collaborate with them. We can work with community groups to create original public history projects that really involved people. We can see to it that our work gets into at least the local popular culture through theater, murals, historical novels, posters, films, children's books, or a hundred other art forms. We can work with elementary and high school teachers to create curricula. Medicinal history is a form of healing and its purposes are conscious and overt.”
― Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity

“...oppression is really quite simple. It's about looting.”
― Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity

“Love is subversive, undermining the propaganda of narrow self-interest. Love emphasizes connection, responsibility and the joy we take in each other. Therefore love (as opposed to unthinking devotion) is a danger to the status quo and we have been taught to find it embarrassing.”
― Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity

“What we need is a collective practice in which investigating and shedding privilege is seen as reclaiming connection, mending relationships broken by the system, and is framed as gain, not loss… Deciding that we are in fact accountable frees us to act. Acknowledging our ancestors’ participation in the oppression of others (and this is ultimately true of everyone), and deciding to balance the accounts on their behalf and our own, leads to less shame and more integrity, less self-righteousness and more righteousness, more humility, compassion and a sense of proportion.”
― Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals

“…it is no longer useful to…keep defining and elaborating our understandings of the exact nature of racism, sexism, class and sexual orientation as if they ever operated in isolation.”
― Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity

“Feminism continues to be seen as less urgent, less life-and-death important than race or class, even though the”
― Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals

“What is so dreadful is that to transform the traumatic we must re-enter it fully, and allow the full weight of grief to pass through our hearts. It is not possible to digest atrocity without tasting it first, without assessing on our tongues the full bitterness of it.”
― Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity

“But abuse is the local eruption of systemic oppression, and oppression the accumulation of millions of small systematic abuses.”
― Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity