Native American Activists

"But I could see right away that this lost him points in the white men's book. Tenderness was not a quality of strength to them. It was unmanly, an act they considered soft and unworthy. (p281)"

"The infant Thomas W. Just was born on July 2, 1947, to much happiness and many pictures of his mother smiling down at him. It was the day just before the octopus left the water, walked on all eight legs across land and into Seal Cave. Sometimes young people made love in that cave. Sometimes boys escaped school and smoked cigarettes there. But on this day, the day after Thomas was born, the octopus walked out of the sea and they watched it..."

"Sometimes now I hear the voice of my great-grandmother, Agnes. It floats toward me like a soft breeze through an open window. (beginning of Prologue)"

"The Western belief that God lives apart from earth is one that has taken us toward collective destruction. It is a belief narrow enough to forget the value of matter, the very thing that soul inhabits. It has created a people who neglect to care for the land for the future generations. ("Creations" p85-6)"

"Change was in the air. It was palpable, a strong presence in the room. (chapter three, p51)"

"Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places. (p53)"

"I was seventeen when I returned to Adam's Rib on Tinselman's Ferry. It was the north country, the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water so that the maps showed places both bound and, if you knew the way in, boundless. The elders said it was where land and water had joined together in an ancient pact, now broken. The waterways on which I arrived had a history. They had been crossed by many before me..."

"it has always been Ama’s skill to live with the world and not against it. (Chapter 3, p47)"

"Between earth and earth's atmosphere, the amount of water remains constant; there is never a drop more, never a drop less. This is a story of circular infinity, of a planet birthing itself. ("Stories of Water" p106)"

"All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one. (p116)"

""Right or wrong. For us, it is such a simple thing, only a matter of whether a wrong has been done, or someone harmed. But they have books filled with words, with rules about how the story can and cannot be spoken. There is not room enough, nor time, to search for the real story that lies beneath the rest." (p341)"

"I was told Ammah was a silent god and rarely spoke. The reason for this was that all things--birdsongs, the moon, even my own life--grow from rich and splendid silence. (p265)"

"From my many grandmothers, I learned how I came from a circle of courageous women and strong men who had walls pulled down straight in front of them until the circle closed, the way rabbits are hunted in a narrowing circle, but some lived, some survived this narrowing circle of life. (chapter seven, p107)"

"It’s a good feeling to be empty-handed, to feel naked as if a whole life was blown off my back by a storm. (Chapter 5, p105)"

""Your mother was a door...Always closed. But sometimes I thought she was a window, instead, because through her I glimpsed scenes of suffering." Even young, I understood this in a way. I understood already from what the women said that my mother was stairs with no destination. She was a burning house, feeding on the air of others. She had no more foundation, no struts, no beams. Always, a person would think she was one step away from collapsing. But she remained standing."

"“What do you know and what do you just believe?” I thought about that for the longest time. I know nothing, I only believe in things. (Chapter 3, p67)"

"I feel watched. By nature. I think now. It’s what I felt watching me, all along. It knows us. It watches us. The animals have eyes that see us. The birds, the trees, everything knows what we do. (Chapter 3, p59)"

"The inward may have been, all along, the wrong direction to seek. A person seems so little and small, and without is the river, the mountain, the forest of fern and tree, the desert with its lizards, the glacial meltings and freezings and movements of life. The cure for soul loss is in the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of sunlight, the waking human in a world infused with intelligence and spirit."

"I looked down, embarrassed, but she said only, "Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing." (p125)"

"I can hear everyone in the living room watching TV. They are together, as if to show that now I am outside this family. I am the source of their problems. I have brought them closer together, joined them in their judgement of me. (p94)"

"Blessed are they who listen when no one is left to speak."

"The literature contemporary Indian women write is a necessity. It is existence and survival given shape in written language. It is more than poetry and prose. It is an expression of entire cultures and their perceptions of the world and universe. It is often a transmission, through written language, of the oral traditions that were, and still are, passed on by word of mouth."

"By incorporating history, by remembering, Indian women continue to define themselves. It is through this remembering that we survive. It is through this speaking out that our history is preserved more whole and intact than it was in the past."

"Feminism is a complicated issue for Indian women because what affects the women also affects the entire community. As individual nations, we have allegiances to the members of our tribes that seldom exist for non-Indian American women. Political and economic injustices are practiced against entire tribes, and are not limited to just the women. The issue of survival affects all people and the major efforts of Indian feminists have been struggles against the dominant society."

"Day is breaking through doors. Earth has made another revolution."

"The desperate need to articulate this was what went into these early poems, the need to say what hadn't been spoken, to tell an untold story of our lives. They are home speaking through me. Home is in blood, and I am still on the journey of calling myself home."

"If, when you are there, you see women wading on the water and clouds in the valley, the smell of rain, or a lotus blossom rises out of round green leaves, remember there is always something besides our own misery."

"lies are the first recognition of truth. (p45)"

"Like the water, the earth, the universe, a story is forever unfolding. It floods and erupts. It births new worlds. It is circular as our planet and fluid as the words of the first people who came out from the ocean or out of the cave or down from the sky. Or those who came from a garden where rivers meet and whose god was a tempter to their fall, planning it into their creation along with all the rest. (p288)"

"The gifts of the Earth are so precious and they are free. Mother Earth puts on a constant show and never charges admission. What I now see is incredible. I know that, as I continue to be in nature, I will be gifted with more and more sight."

"Most of us think of the earth as a living being and that we must live upon it with care and love and respect. The idea of subjugating the earth is the product of another mind. Even environmentalists, she maintains, are of another mind because they are not concerned so much with the sacred as with the idea of stewardship."

"There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is relationship with ourselves, but even then we are part of something larger. ("All My Relations" p41)"

"We need to acknowledge the differences and their spectrum of human being, the significance of accepting all and not wishing for a monoculture. Diversity is a way of being, and the attempt to find an absolute is yet another part of the separate matrixes. Tribal peoples do not require a sameness of thought or belief. We come from different stories, different origins, and we respect the differences."

"We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabulary of science we desire. We want a language of that different yield. A yield rich as the harvests of the earth, a yield that returns us to our own sacredness, to a self-love and resort that will carry out to others. ("A Different Yield" p60)"

"these words, these words are proof there is healing"

"Even when we have been sent away from that place or have not learned our own languages, we still have it; from subtle gesture and learned ways of being, it is passed down to us. This is "How It Is." The knowledge is in the manner of being, even when the words are not spoken. Our philosophies come of being from a place and a community, of knowing a place and respecting its boundaries."

"Even today we focus on diversity as part of Earth's creativity while Euro Americans still search for the universal, an absolute, something that can be understood, spoken, be assimilated into their own system of knowledge. The Native understands the world as more complex and not the static that is implicit in an absolute where all communication remains within a narrow circle of like-minded. One group emphasizes the individual as part of the whole. The Euro emphasizes the individual. There is "we" and there is "I.""

"For Native peoples, our systems of knowledge are not about beliefs but about ways of knowing and how we know, through experience itself. It is not what is taught in books, not in ordinary classes, but what lies beneath all the new ideas."

"beginning and end together the way sunlight on skin is still connected to the fiery storms of its origins"

"The anthropologists and those studying tribal peoples too often write their own interpretation of what is said because they are unable to see larger, to think beyond their own thinking enough to come to what is really spoken, meant, and known about the world. For indigenous peoples, each place has its own intelligence, its own stories."

"I know this telling is the first part of the ceremony, my part in it. It is story, really, that finds its way into language, and story is at the very crux of healing, at the heart of every ceremony and ritual in the older America. ("All My Relations" p37)"

"fire flashes from the gun like a flower that blooms madness and is gone."

"What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earth's own elements to wound it. ("Deify the Wolf" p66)"

"The physical space we all share may be the same, but the philosophical space isn't."

"community lies beyond family within the surrounding, enfolding environment. We are co-creators in the universe, the world, within all the rest, all fluid, shifting movement, and without the emphasis on measurement. The world is there in its entirety, not in segments. And we inhabit it. This is what makes us human."

"We feel it, long for them, without even knowing what it is that we feel and yearn toward. We try to replace what is lost with possessions, with belief, with false hope. Longing, as poet Ernesto Cardenal said, for something beyond what we want. (p 204)"

"I write out of respect for the natural world, recognizing that humankind is not separate from nature. Some of this work connects the small world of humans with the larger universe, containing us in the same way that native ceremonies do, showing us both our place and a way of seeing. (Preface)"

"we are a story, each of us, a bundle of stories (p 205)"

"A bird killed in the name of human power is in truth a loss of power from the world, not an addition to it. ("The Feathers" p15)"

"Writing begins for me with survival, with life and with freeing life, saving life, speaking life. It is work that speaks what can't be easily said. It originates from a compelling desire to live and be alive. For me, it is sometimes the need to speak for other forms of life, to take the side of human life, even our sometimes frivolous living, and our grief-filled living, our joyous living, our violent living, busy living, our peaceful living. It is about possibility. It is based in the world of matter. I am interested in how something small turns into an image that is large and strong with resonance, where the ordinary becomes beautiful. I believe the divine, the magic, is here in the weeds at our feet, unacknowledged. What a world this is. Where else could water rise up to the sky, turn into snow crystals, magnificently brought together, fall from the sky all around us, pile up billions deep, and catch the small sparks of sunlight as they return again to water?"