I Am Woman Quotes

“To be raped is to be sexually violated. For society to force someone, through shame and ostracism, to comply with love and sex that it defines, is nothing but organized rape. That is what homophobia is all about. Organized rape.”
― Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism

“I succeeded on my own, why can't you?" is a dispassionate call to the majority of Native people to forsake one another. The end results is each of us digging our own way out of the hole, filling up the path with dirt as we go. Such things as justice and principles prevent the whole people from becoming dispassionate. Until all of us are free, the few who think they are remain tainted with enslavement.”
― Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism

“The result of being colonized is the internalization of the need to remain invisible.”
― Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism

“I sometimes feel like a foolish young grandmother armed with a teaspoon, determined to remove three mountains from the path to liberation: the mountain of racism, the mountain of sexism and the mountain of nationalist oppression. I tire easily these days ... Sometimes I feel the tiredness is old, as old as the colonial process itself. On those days I am energized by the fact that it is not my fatigue but the fatigue of the oppressor's system which haunts me. On other days the tiredness is deeply personal.”
― Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism