Ohitika Woman Quotes

“The government and the highest courts in the land have admitted that this huge area was stolen from us. But stolen or “bought,” Uncle Sam never gives any Indian land back.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“Whites break the law too, but it is always the poor and the nonwhites who actually do the time in penitentiaries.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“these white people have lost their own gods and mislaid their souls. They have trouble dealing with reality, with death.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“They are not racist. They’ll drill and mine the land of white ranchers and farmers too if they think their area is “resource rich.” So we told those white folks: “You’ll be next, you’ll be the next Indians.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“Fourteen billion dollars in gold alone have been taken out of our sacred land and they offer us 120 million in compensation!”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“truth is beautiful, even when it is ugly. I”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“The white man oppresses the half-blood, the half-blood oppresses the full-blood, and everybody takes out their anger, despair, and feeling of helplessness on the women.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“I will endure. I will fight to the end of my days—for everything that lives. MITAKUYE OYASIN—ALL MY RELATIONS.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“There is an old Lakota song that begins: “To be a man it is difficult, they say.” Well, to be a Native American woman is even harder.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“I think any white jury—and all the juries are white—would find even Jesus Christ himself guilty of murder or child molesting if he happened to be a skin and a member of AIM.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“At least half of all the Indian men and women I know have spent some time in jail. I have. It seems that we can’t help it.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“Bear Butte, sacred to the Cheyennes and Lakotas, now has a parking area and a paved road leading to the top from where gawking tourists with binoculars can watch one of our holy men undergo his vision quest. But the land is still there, beautiful, waiting to be redeemed, and so long as there is still a shred of life left in us we will keep on fighting for it. HECHEL LENA OYATE KIN NIPI KTE, so that my people may live.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“The big companies call the Lakota land a “Nuclear Energy Park,” or “Black Hills Multinational Energy Domain,” or even “National Sacrifice Area.” I ask myself: “Who and what is to be sacrificed here?” It makes me shudder. Some people say: “The collapse of the Soviet Union will kill the uranium mining and that will be our Indian ‘peace dividend.’” I don’t believe it. They’ll still find plenty of use for that evil stuff, and they’ll always find Indian land as the ideal site to test their weapons on. In 1942, the government seized 133,000 acres of the Pine Ridge Reservation as a gunnery range to practice aerial bombing. This was near Sheep Mountain in one of the most scenic parts of South Dakota.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“But we fight not only for our own, much diminished, Rosebud Reservation. We also fight for what rightfully belongs, or did belong, to all Sioux and Cheyennes—the sacred Black Hills. There has been a legal battle going on over this for a lifetime, and the white lawyers who worked for us on our claims have become millionaires, and that is the only result so far. The government and the highest courts in the land have admitted that this huge area was stolen from us. But stolen or “bought,” Uncle Sam never gives any Indian land back. Instead he has forked over some 122 million dollars to pay for the stolen land. But we have not accepted it. What we are saying is: “Give us the Black Hills back. Then, maybe we will accept the money you are holding in escrow for us as payment for all the gold and uranium you have taken, and are still taking, out of the hills.” Fourteen billion dollars in gold alone have been taken out of our sacred land and they offer us 120 million in compensation! That’s like someone stealing my brand-new car and coming back twenty years later saying: “I’m sorry I stole that car from you but I want to make it up to you. Here’s twenty bucks.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“We wanted no war with the whites. All we wanted was to be left alone. But they forced us to defend our land, and Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and our Cheyenne allies fought the army along the Bozeman Trail.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“There have been 341 treaties between Indian tribes and the American government that guaranteed us eternal ownership of our land “as long as the sun will shine and the rivers flow,” and all of them have been broken.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“The white man can live disembodied within an artificial universe without ties to a particular tract of land. We cannot. We are bound to our Indian country.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“Maka ke wakan—the land is sacred. These words are at the core of our being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“So how was the Indian born? He was born from the sunrise and from the woman. This woman at first was all alone on this earth after it had been created. This woman was beautiful and no man had touched her. Then she met a spirit, a power from the moon, the shadow of the generation. It worked upon her so that she began to bleed in woman nature for the first time. And she used yellow bark and rabbit skin to put between her legs to contain the flow. And after she had encountered this power and woman’s nature cycle had started within her, she went to sleep. When she got up the next morning she had an urge to make water. She took that yellow bark and rabbit skin from between her thighs and squatted and this little drop of moon blood fell to the earth. Mashtinchala, the rabbit, came upon that little clot of blood and started playing with it, kicking it into life. Rabbit did this with the help of Takuskanskan, the mysterious moving power that quickens the fruit in the womb and gives motion to all living things. And being kicked around and around, the little blob of blood took shape, forming a little gut. The rabbit played with it some more, and the blob began to grow tiny arms and legs. The rabbit nudged it some more, and suddenly it had eyes and a heart. In this way the blood clot began to move by itself and grew into We Ota Wichasha, the first man.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“And then it was time for Tunkashila to create woman. There was no moon then. It was still the period of sacred newness, The sun again called all the planets and supernatural together, and when they had assembled, the sun, in a bright flash, plucked out one of his eves. He threw it on the wind of his vision into a certain place, and it became the moon, and it was female. And on this new orb, this eye-planet, he created woman. ‘You are a planet virgin, a moon maiden,’ he told her. ‘I have touched you, and made you out of my own shadow. I want you to walk on the earth.’ This happened in darkness at the time of a new moon. “‘How will I walk over that land?’ the woman asked. So the sun created woman power and woman understanding. He used lightning to make a bridge from the moon to the earth, and the woman walked on the lightning. Her crossing took a long, long time. “Now the maker of the universe had created man and woman and had given each a power of their own that has never been changed. Doing that, the sun had used up another million eons of creation time. He instructed the woman in her tasks, which she learned through her dreams, through her visions, through her special woman powers. “The Great Spirit had created man and woman for each other, but not right away. They had to make contact slowly, get used to each other, understand each other for the survival of their caretaking. Tunkashila let blood roll into the woman. She walked on the lightning, but she also walked on a blood vein reaching from the moon to the earth. This vein was a cord, a birth cord that went into her body, and through it she is forever connected to the moon. And nine months of creation were given to her. And the Spirit told her: ‘You are the caretaker of the generations. You are the birth-giver. You will be the carrier of the universe.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“After five hundred years of being held in subjection, we are finally standing up on our hind legs. Together with my sisters from many tribes, I am a birth-giver, a rebirth-giver, fighting to ensure a life for unborn generations. I am a Sioux woman!”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“I am sick and tired of all the bullshit that has been dumped on us by the wasichu for more than five hundred years after we were “discovered” by a fellow who was merely eight thousand miles off course and who thought he had landed in India. I am tired of being dominated by an alien and hostile culture. I am tired of the pressure to adapt to the white men’s idea of beauty, which prods me to have an ivory skin, to be as thin as a rail but have big breasts, to spend money on all kinds of crap to have “glorious silky hair,” to be manicured by a “nail artist,” and to shave the hair nature made grow under my armpits. I am sick and tired of being asked to conform to standards that are not our own. I am sick and tired of being forced to live within a society dominated by money, or in the case of us native peoples, by the total lack of it. I am sick and tired of seeing our men driven by despair, boredom, and lack of anything meaningful to do to find oblivion in alcohol, to commit suicide, or to end up in prison. I am sick and tired of seeing Indian people being driven by prevailing conditions into violence against each other. I am sick and tired of seeing the steady erosion of our land base, because without our land we will cease to be. I am goddam sick and tired of being put down on account of my sex and my race. I am sick and tired of the newspapers read by Indians running ads that say: “Strong, willing girl sought as live-in baby sitter and all-around maid. Must be sober and accommodating. Call collect.” What’s the matter? Could they be running out of our black sisters to do the shitwork for them? And I am also sick and tired of ads reading: “Loving couple eager to adopt cute, healthy baby boy.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“I could go on and on about strong sisters I’m proud to call my friends, but the list is so long that I better stop here. They are all ohitika win—brave women.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“I owe much to GRANDMA JOSETTE WAWASIK, an Ojibway lady who acted as the chief midwife for me when I gave birth to Pedro on April 11, 1973. She helped deliver my baby with bullets flying through the air and the pigs’ armored personnel carriers churning around real close to the perimeter. She went on calmly, pressing on my belly, lifting the newborn out, cutting the umbilical cord as if this was a routine birth in a peaceful city hospital. She was holding my baby up at the window for everybody to see, and there was drumming outside, and the singing of the AIM song, and tears and laughter, and hugging all around. “I am here at the Knee because I believe in life,” Grandma Wawasik told me. I will remember her forever.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“Children are torn from their families for the flimsiest reasons, to wind up in white foster homes or orphanages. We also oppose the many attempts by white childless couples to adopt our kids. A child adopted out of its tribe is lost to us. Our kids are our greatest hope for the future and we cannot afford to lose them.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“In some tribes we have had instances of incest. This is something absolutely new, the result not only of alcoholism, but of too much contact with white America’s “civilization.” In the past, incest and child molesting by close relatives were unknown because this crime violated the most important taboo among Native Americans. The fear and abhorrence of incest was so pronounced and widespread that it led to so-called avoidance taboos, which made: it impossible for a mother-in-law to speak to or come near a son-in-law, or for a father-in-law to even have a conversation with his daughter-in-law. But now, the vices and crimes of the white, dominant society trickle onto our reservations as the result of the suppression of our old religion, which formed a bulwark against them.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“There was a man and his wife, I won’t mention their names. They seemed to have a good marriage and to be happy together. One day he got into drinking the hard stuff, more than usual. He went berserk and killed her. He doesn’t know why he did it, doesn’t even have the slightest remembrance of it. The day before, I saw them laughing and joking together, Another friend of mine was found dead in her home, strangled with a nylon stocking. A young woman, Nellie, was discovered early one morning, lying dead among some trash cans at St. Francis. She was badly beaten up. I used to be good buddies with her. She had a brand-new baby. On the res, death is a way of life.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“The nicer ones say: “Warrior woman, let’s make a little warrior.” Nine months later the woman is nursing her little warrior, but the big warrior is over the hills and far away.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“I have a feeling that many of our men resent women, and I know the reason. The men can’t hunt anymore, can’t find jobs, can’t provide. There is nothing they can do. A woman can still make beadwork to sell to tourists, or wait on tables in the tourist traps along the highway, or clean up in the many motels. The women get the welfare checks, the Aid to Dependent Children. Often the husband has to leave because his wife won’t get her welfare as long as there is a husband around. So the roles are reversed.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“As a Cheyene proverb puts it: “As long as the hearts of our women are high, the nation will live. But should the hearts of our women be on the ground, then all is lost.” Centuries ago, Iroquois women had become sick and tired of the eternal warfare between the tribes and went on strike, refusing to sleep with the men, or bear children, until peace was made. And they won.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman