Women Activists From The United States

"people ask me all the time, if you know your land is going to go, why are you still fighting?...I don’t know what they’re expecting, you know? We going down swinging if we going."

"there are all of these researchers who were looking at South Louisiana before Katrina, many people concerned about sea level rise and all of these things for a very long time, but it wasn’t common knowledge. It wasn’t information brought to the communities. The universities knew it, but the communities didn’t know."

"And that was a moment where you sort of have this — it’s surreal. You don’t — who can believe your land won’t be there anymore? Most people still can’t conceptually understand that."

"it was the most honest answer I’d ever gotten."

"This is not about greenhouse gas reduction. This is about do we value people equally? And if we do, we’ve got some recalibrating to do, as a planet."

"TV didn’t show the places around New Orleans. So driving across the bridge on Lake Pontchartrain, you have to go through a swamp, and everything that was so green all of my life was brown and stinky. And it was just death. I’d never smelled death like that. Everything died. The salt water intrusion killed all the vegetation in the swamp that you have to drive through."

"I don’t have this law degree for nothing. And the laws as they are written right now are not meant for me, and they’re not meant for my community, and they’re not meant to help people, and they’re not meant to save people, and they’re not meant to do those things with the utmost humanity and dignity. They are meant to preserve a middle-class tax base, period, almost every law that we have. How does this affect the taxpayer? is the analysis that is used."

"We’re going to lose everything, and my last name is Battle. What am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to fight. I’m supposed to fight, but I’m supposed to fight with tools that build people up, not tools that take people down and take them out. And that’s love. That’s patience. That’s all of those things that they taught you in Sunday school. They were right."

"Creole people were free people of color, and they could own land before many Black folks could. And so my family had been there before it was America, before it was the U.S."

"I think that’s the part that scares me the most. We’re losing generations of people who know the anatomy of these things. And we’re getting new people into our space who have no clue what a hurricane is, and the hurricanes that we know to describe are not the ones we’re facing now."

"now the land is perpetually saturated, because the water is rising, the water table is rising, the lake is rising"

"the sea level rise is real, and for those of us who are very close to the sea, we can see it."

"I can’t believe that it is the U.S. government — it’s our government, it’s our representatives, under every administration in these international talks — that are stopping the conversation that says: finance the work needed for the people who are feeling the impacts of climate; finance that, because you caused it. It’s our country saying no. That, to me, is like, come on now. We’re better than that. This is lives we’re talking about. This is mass migration. This is people’s lives. This is heat deaths. This is fires. This is storms. Put everything into this. We’re fighting over whether or not people should have the right to vote? We’re fighting over whether or not people should have the right to their bodies? That is child’s play compared to what this climate crisis is. Where is the righteous indignation on this issue? And why can’t we get past that?"

"They went on the air and labeled the union top and all the union leadership as communist that night at midnight (before an election)."

"Paul Robeson, they came and told us he had been to Russia and what communism was."

"We had one voting place in Winston-Salem, Forsyth County, for blacks, Fairview School. And when we started our drive to get people to register, actually pulled it to its height, it was at that school. That's where the policeman came out there, in gear, to arrest everyone of us."

"I surround myself with people. I know my limitations. And I'll surround myself with people that I can designate to be sure it's carried out...And if you can't do that, you're not an organizer."

"They called us niggers, communists, everything in the book."

"And when we went down there, they told us, "You niggers can register but you're not going to have a nigger. We're not ready for a nigger to be elected officer." They didn't say Negroes, a nigger. And we sat there and looked at them."

"When we once got the union, I think people began to realize, I've got a crutch, and they began to tell some things. See, some things would happen to people that maybe they were afraid. Self-preservation, I've got to work. I'm head of a household. I'm feeding children. Even though you ain't making but $9.35. That $9.35 meant survival. And once we got the union, they felt like, well, I've got some protection. I've got somebody that really cares. They didn't feel like it was a little group here and there. It was 10,000 on check-off, and 10,000 members makes you feel good, you know. You're surrounded. And the grievances became more."

"My training, I guess, came from coming from a mother and working in the church and in the school. I'd always participated in PTAs, and we had organizations. And I was head of an organization in the church. I got lots of my training from my pastor too."

"Shiloh was the only church that we could go into."

"In the beginning of the union we set up, because we had poor people, they didn't have enough. And you couldn't go to the welfare or nothing if you were black. If you were black and had a clean house, you went to the welfare, you didn't get nothing. They'd tell you if you had a little old raggedy radio set, sell the radio and use that money. So we had clothes banks and things, and churches would contribute to that."

"We'd go to singing and he'd say, "Velma, how can you sing? They're working the hell out of you." And I said, "I'm singing the hell out of you."...it made you forget how hard you were being worked and the treatment you were going through. Singing is something that is good for the soul, and we used to do lots of it. We had to."

"We felt like that instead of those nationals sending in white organizers that would go to 256, we wanted them to go where the white workers were."

"They can say anything they want to about it, but we carried it out democratically. Ain't going to say we didn't make mistakes. Hell, I made mistakes, you have, and they did. But some of the mistakes they made, we talked about them."

"They knew I'm going to fight you for...what I feel like is for the workers."

"Having a union made a lot of difference."

"The women were the backbone of that union."

"They were afraid of black people. They just couldn't stand to see, their nerves would not allow them to meet with ten black people without an attorney, whole lots of us."

"Dear Zitkala-Sa: I thank you for your book on Indian legends. I have read them with exquisite pleasure. Like all folk tales they mirror the child life of the world. There is in them a note of wild, strange music. You have translated them into our language in a way that will keep them alive in the hearts of men. They are so young, so fresh, so full of the odors of the virgin forest untrod by the foot of white man! The thoughts of your people seem dipped in the colors of the rainbow, palpitant with the play of winds, eerie with the thrill of a spirit-world unseen but felt and feared. Your tales of birds, beast, tree and spirit can not but hold captive the hearts of all children. They will kindle in their young minds that eternal wonder which creates poetry and keeps life fresh and eager."

"It would be false to say that Zitkala-Ša launched an American Indian literary tradition, but it is possible, in examining the cameo of her life and literature, to say that she struggled toward a vision of wholeness in which the conflicting parts of her existence could be reconciled. That she did not fully succeed is evident in her work, which is a model of ambivalences, of oscillations between two diametrically opposed worlds, but is also a model of retrieved possibilities, a creative, human endeavor that stands at the beginning of many such endeavors eventually to culminate in the finely crafted work of contemporary American Indian writers."

"During the Progressive era, Native Americans also began to serve as public advocates for their people. A generation educated in white institutions had gained familiarity with the dominant culture and acquired the political skills needed to speak for themselves. Their goal was to undo the economic and political dependency that had resulted from late nineteenth-century Indian policy. Gertrude Simmons Bonnin was the leading woman in this first generation of modern Indian activists. Known by her Yankton Sioux name Zitkala-Ša, she advocated both preserving Native culture from destruction and securing full rights of citizenship for Native peoples. She became the secretary of the first secular national pan-Indian reform organization established by Native peoples, the Society of American Indians."

"Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, also known by her Lakota name Zitkála-Šá, is one of the most widely written about women of SAI. Bonnin was a multitalented Native renaissance woman who wrote several books and was an accomplished musician (she wrote the first Native American opera, The Sundance Opera), teacher, editor, and political activist. Perhaps her greatest influence during the Progressive Era came through her leadership in the National Council of American Indians."

"I'm careful about what I write. I don't want to hurt or alienate anyone, but I feel there are some things that have to be said. When Gertrude Bonnin Simmons wrote about the young Indian men who went to college, returned and sold out their own people, cheated elderly people off the land, I'm sure she was unpopular for speaking it, but she told the truth."

"Poets sing of a coming federation of the world, and we applaud. Idealists dream that in this commonwealth of all humanity the divine spark in man shall be the only test of citizenship, and we think of their dream and future history."

"Today the Indian is pressed almost to the farther sea. Does that sea symbolize his death?"

"He loved the inheritance of his fathers, their traditions, their graves; he held them a priceless legacy to be sacredly kept. He loved his native land. Do you wonder still that in his breast he should brood revenge, when ruthlessly driven from the temples where he worshiped? Do you wonder still that he skulked in forest gloom to avenge the desolation of his home? Is patriotism a virtue only in Saxon hearts? Is there no charity to cover his crouching form as he stealthily opposed his relentless foe?"

"Let it be remembered, before condemnation is passed upon the Red Man, that, while he burned and tortured frontiersmen, Puritan Boston burned witches and hanged Quakers, and the Southern aristocrat beat his slaves and set bloodhounds on the tracks of him who dared aspire to freedom. The barbarous Indian, ignorant alike of Roman justice, Saxon law, and the Gospel of Christian brotherhood, in the fury of revenge has brought no greater stain upon his name than these."

"To take the life of a nation during the slow march of centuries seems not a lighter crime than to crush it instantly with one fatal blow."

"Unfortunately civilization is not an unmixed blessing. Vices begin to creep into his life and deepen the Red Man's degradation. He learns to crave the European liquid fire. Broken treaties shake his faith in the newcomers. Continued aggressions goad him to desperation. The White Man's bullet decimates his tribes and drives him from his home."

"We clasp the warm hand of friendship everywhere. From honest hearts and sincere lips we hear the hearty welcome and Godspeed."

"We must put our thoughts into practice every day in the most complex business matter, in the most simple home duty."

"Let us develop our powers by thinking and acting for ourselves. That is the way we grow. We have been told organization is necessary to bring about results. We have been scattered to the four winds. Are we going to organize?"

"we must all work for this thing — that the American Indian must have a voice. He must say what is in him and by exchanging opinions, we are going to grow."

"Shall we think or shall somebody think for us? We are on this earth to think and do the best we can according to our light."

"Use the words that come to you, that which is in the heart and mind."

"Now we are meeting a civilization from a race that came from Europe. We have to meet it each day — there is no dodging, and it is not easy. It is going to take courage; it is going to test your strength. It is going to test your faith in the Greatest of All. It is going to be hard, but let us stand the test, true to the Indian blood. Let us do that. Let us teach our children to be proud of their Indian blood and to stand the test bravely."

"my mother said to me. “You must learn the white man’s language so when you grow up you will talk for us and for the Indian and the white man will have a better understanding.” I said, “I will.” It has not always been easy, but I said, “I am going to do the best I can and then I am going to let the Great Spirit do the rest.”"

"The first time you stand up for right and it is refused you, shall you quit? Then you do not believe in it. We must continue speaking and claiming our human rights to live on this earth that God has made, so that we may think our thoughts and speak them — that we may have our part in the American life and be as any other human beings are."