Lee Maracle

"I have seen many of you at book launches, panels, conferences, gatherings of all sorts, including protests against some injustice or other of which there are so many. Not a single Canadian has ever approached me to say: ‘Why are there so many injustices committed against Indigenous people?’ or ‘Why is there not a strong movement of support for justice and sovereignty for Indigenous people’s sovereignty movement in Canada?’ Canadians love causes, but they love the causes that are far away — out of their backyard, so to speak."

"This story deserves to be told; all stories do. Even the waves of the sea tell a story that deserves to be read. The stories that really need to be told are those that shake the very soul of you."

"Academicians waste a great deal of effort deleting character, plot and story from theoretical arguments"

"What is the point of presenting the human condition in a language separate from the human experience: passion, emotion and character...We all strive to be orators"

"It is impossible to give a lecture or speak on any serious issue in the Indigenous world without placing it in the context of colonialism and our need for decolonization."

"We are called upon to continuously grow from the realizations that we come to when we speak."

"I love speaking. I love our orality, its rhythm, its ease, the way we can slip into poetry, story, even song and dance, break the tedium with a joke, particularly an anti-colonial joke. I love how the speaker gets to wander around and through a subject with the audience. On paper, though, the words can lose much of the personality of the speaker, jokes don't fit, and the sidebars, the off-the-cuff remarks, detract and can even trivialize the thoughts shared. When you speak you deliver a voice; everyone knows that what you think is also what you feel. In speaking, there is no problem delivering the integrity of your emotionality. But in writing you evoke, instead of expressing, your feelings. When the immediacy that links speaker and audience is absent on the page, you must find other ways of sharing the feelings that give rise to your thoughts."

"Teachings are not dictums to be blindly followed. They are meant to be the beginnings of the development of governance or theory, but the individual is expected to interpret them personally."

"There is another way to be, to think, to know, and when Canadians witness another way, perhaps the colonial domination can begin to end. I believe, too, that each time any one of us has a thought, others do so as well, and it is in this way that the journey to collective consciousness continues. Writing those thoughts down hastens our journey toward a common consciousness."

"PEACE: tranquility, freedom from strife, freedom from warring conditions, freedom from conditions that annoy the mind. We have not had peace for some 281,614 days since Columbus first came here. Worse, our homeland has not experienced peace since this country's inception."

"Creation is not a passive process. Our mother, the earth, knows it is not a passive process; the earth is not a passive mother. She knows birth is active. It takes hurricanes, thunder, lightning and volcanic eruptions to move from winter to spring, to summer, to fall and back to winter. Creation is a struggle."

"I am not a passive woman. I was there, bearing down and shedding blood in the creation process of my children, and I will be there should anyone obstruct my right to nurture them. Does that make me violent? No. It makes me a profound lover of creation. I will be there should anyone decide to invade my tree relatives in the Stein, and I will be there for the Mohawks at Oka, should the police run amok again and organize themselves to attack them. I don't confuse peace with passivity. I don't confuse defense with aggression."

"Peaceful struggle is all about expending strenuous effort to live our lives free from strife, free from war, free from conditions that annoy the mind. It annoys my mind to think about clear-cutting; it annoys my mind to consider the invasion and death of the people of Oka. It annoys my mind to imagine golfers tromping on the graves of Mohawk grandmothers, children and loved ones. So I struggle to put a stop to it. I walk, I picket, and I block the road, and I speak because I cannot watch a people or any of the earth's relatives die an unjust death."

"I am a caretaker. Every single Indigenous person here is a caretaker. Caretaker. Take care. Take care of creation. Creation is not inactive. To take care of creation is an active process, an imaginative process, and a process full of wonderment. It requires strenuous effort, it means healing ourselves of what we call "amber elbow disease." It cannot be done by people who are intoxicated, seeking the pleasure of parties. It cannot be done by disempowered people. It cannot be done by people who cannot imagine a different world, who cannot dream of a life of peace in which all creation is respected and cared for everywhere on this earth."

"Don't be a passive soldier for corporate or military murder. With peace and harmony in your heart go out and spend great effort, strenuous effort, to change the story of Canada. Be active, be resolute, be caring, and we shall eventually have peace."

"I think I've done what I set out to do, which is give Canada a glimpse of who we are."

"I always say to people, you have a banquet — you come to the table with your own culture, a full banquet. If you don't share it, it's not writing!"

"humour is like a push. When you want to sit down, humour stands you up and pushes you forward...You need that motivating force, which is a little bit a push every now and then. And that's [the role] humour serves in all of our stories."

"All these things occurred in each village but a village doesn’t make a nation and that’s what I got from him (Khahtsahlano) – yea, we were a nation once and we can be again."

"people...keep talking about decolonization like it’s a head problem — they’re really talking about undoing racism. They don’t realize it’s a territorial issue."

"I think welcoming newcomers now is more important than ever because we brought all these white men in and gave them land and now they say no to people of colour — it doesn’t work that way. Not for me, anyway."

"(You write about how reconciliation is a misnomer, that Indigenous people are still dying — what should we be talking about instead?) LM: The first part — truth. No truth, no reconciliation."

"People demand honesty, which is in the moment, but the truth is, we need to be at peace. And we need to reconcile to ourselves. So sometimes, the lie is better. Makes us more peaceful."

"peace is always what is necessary. That whatever you do, let it contribute to peace."

"What I’m hoping is that people will get that they have to know their original language. And I think that’s why the Six Nations have a constitution that guarantees you your original language. And it’s a thousand years old. So for a thousand years we’ve known this. That the body speaks to itself. And it speaks the original language. It won’t give it up. And that makes me laugh because my old folks used to say, “You know, the body’s very conservative. It doesn’t want you to try things. But the spirit is a revolutionary. It wants to just go!” So if you’re not communicating with your body, you won’t take care of it. You have to appease the body by making a logical plan. And that’s feeling/thinking, or the heart and the mind. The heart and the mind consults with itself and figures out how to do this in the safest way possible. And otherwise you’re a child."

"our body has a memory of all time"

"the government had a very deliberate plan to eliminate Indians, and it still pretty much carries out that plan- eliminate us culturally and intellectually in every way possible. Even in the recent Native studies programs that they have in university, we study what they did to us, we don't study us...The plan is for us to know them, not to know ourselves. That's always been the plan, and it still is. We're to integrate, yeah? And now there's very few of us left, I think, that have any kind of a foundation in the culture, in the knowledge. Most of our knowledge was expropriated and distorted, bowdlerized, and then sold back to us in transformed form. That's anthropology, and we had to purchase it."

"There has to be humour to open up the person to the subject of change, the possibility of change. You have to be open. Humour opens people up."

"The only reason that I write is to bring about a change of heart. But I wanted to do that when I was five, when I first endured racial discrimination. I would like to change that person's mind and heart about the way they see me, about the way they feel about me. But I had no power then, and I have power now. It's called a pen. Or in this case a computer, yeah?"

"I think of everybody as my audience. I write to be read in the year 2525, you know. I write forever. When I lay a word down on that page, some tree had to perish, and that tree is my relative, and I believe that. (interviewer: "So you better make the word good.") LM: Words are sacred, just like that tree. I took a life so that this book could exist. So everybody is my audience and all of their ancestors...I have a huge caring for the direction that humanity's currently travelling in, I care about that direction. And my writing serves that. Serves to alter that direction. All we've got to do is make an about-face and turn this wheel the other way. It's not just us that's heading for destruction, you know? The world is a terrible place right now, but it's also a wonderful place (knock on wood) because there's so many people coming forward trying to alter the direction and the course we're currently on, and it's only terrible for human beings. The Earth will survive; she knows how to take care of herself. But we may not."

"I stand between my infinite grandchildren and my infinite grandmothers. The farther... backward in time I go, the more grandmothers I have. The farther forward, the more grandchildren. And I am obligated to that whole lineage: this lineage holds up the spirit of all things - trees, flora, fauna, human. That's what that word ["God"] means. And it's likewise the same in their language when they were translated."

"[about her and Jeannette Armstrong] we both believe that we must be able to deliver the culture in English as well as in our own language, that it will take time to recover our languages. And I'm not sure that we'll actually be successful at that, so my whole orientation is to take in a story that's a traditional story or a ceremony that's a traditional ceremony, like Family Reconciliation and Clearing the Path (that's a ceremony), taking that and creating story from it, like a mythmaker, create new myths out of the old myths, directly from the old myths."

"Even as she acquired awards and accolades, she never became complacent. She continued to fight for Indigenous sovereignty and reject the hypocrisy of a nation more interested in talking about reconciliation than enacting it. She was a fierce critic of appropriation, indifference, ignorance, and all the other subtler methods of colonial violence that continue to oppress Indigenous people. She made readers and listeners confront their complicity; she refused to be silent. Perhaps this is why so many obituaries have referred to her as “combative” or “aggressive”; I think it’s more accurate to say she was a tireless critic of injustice, puncturing the national self-image of Canadians as nice people."

"Maracle often said that women are the keepers of culture, of the inner lives of Indigenous people. As she said in her Margaret Laurence lecture, “If you do not read the women, you will not know who we are.” We are so fortunate that there are so many Indigenous women publishing now, too many to name: Eden Robinson, Alicia Elliott, Terese Marie Mailhot, Lisa Bird-Wilson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Tanya Talaga, Katherena Vermette, Tanya Tagaq, Cherie Dimaline, Michelle Good, Tracey Lindberg. Maracle dreamed of a world where their stories would be honoured and heard, and then she created it for them. That was her gift to all of us."