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)"

""Why are only white laws followed? This will kill the world. What is the law if not the earth's?" (p283)"

"Decisions are made in a person's life by small moments of knowing, each moment opening until, like pieces of a quilt, one day everything comes together in a precise, clear knowing. It enters the present, as if it had come all of a piece. It was in this year that I began to understand who I was. Every piece of myself was together anew, a shifted pattern. For my people, the problem has always been this: that the only possibility of survival has been resistance. Not to strike back has meant certain loss and death. To strike back has also meant loss and death, only with a fighting chance. To fight has meant that we can respect ourselves, we Beautiful People. Now we believed in ourselves once again. The old songs were there, come back to us. Sometimes I think the ghost dancers were right, that we would return, that we are still returning. Even now. (p325)"

"There are such cruel tricks I have wondered about in nature, the way a whale must surface to breathe in the presence of its waiting killers, the way the white tails of deer and rabbit are so easily seen as they run from danger. There is something, too, in some human beings that wants to die, that drives us to our own destruction. There is something that makes us pretend to be less than we are, less than the other creatures with their grace and dignity. Perhaps it is this that makes us bow down to an angry god when we might better have knelt at the altar of our own love. (p344)"

"It has been my lifelong work to seek an understanding of the two views of the world, one as seen by native people and the other as seen by those who are new and young on this continent. It is clear that we have strayed from the treaties we once had with the land and with the animals. It is also clear, and heartening, that in our time there are many-Indian and non-Indian alike-who want to restore and honor these broken agreements. (Preface)"

"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)"

"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)"

"Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do. I love what will consume us all, the place where the tunneling worms and roots of plants dwell, where the slow deep centuries of earth are undoing and remaking themselves. ("The Caves" p30)"

"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)"

"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 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)"

"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)"

"To walk on this earth is to walk on a living past, on the open pages of history and geology. ("Creations" p79)"

"Emptiness and estrangement are deep wounds, strongly felt in the present time. We have been split from what we could nurture, what could fill us. And we have been wounded by a dominating culture that has feared and hated the natural world, has not listened to the voice of the land, has not believed in the inner worlds of human dreaming and intuition, all things that have guided indigenous people since time stood up in the east and walked this world into existence, split from the connection between self and land. ("Creations" p82)"

"it is only recently, in earth time, that the severing of the connections between people and land have taken place. Something in our human blood is still searching for it, still listening, still remembering. ("Creations" p83)"

"We seek our origins as much as we seek our destinies. And we desire to see the world intact, to step outside our emptiness and remember the strong currents that pass between humans and the rest of nature, currents that are the felt voice of land, heard in the cells of the body. ("Creations" p84)"

"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)"

"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)"

"Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands. ("Walking" p159)"

"This is the place where clouds are born and I am floating. (beginning of Chapter 1)"

"It’s as if everything breathes, hard and desperate, the land, the house, the water. The wind is a living force. We Taiga call the wind Oni. It enters us all at birth and stays with us all through life. It connects us to every other creature."

"Believing and knowing are two lands distant from each other. (Chapter 2, p40)"

"I think again of breath, and how we Taiga people have that word -Oni- for breath and air and wind. It is a force. Oni is like God, it is everywhere, unseen. I think I heard this word spoken in the rush of weather. I’m sure of it. The wind said it’s own name, “Oni”. (Chapter 2, p41)"

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

"I have already forgotten such things as music exist. Ama doesn’t hear it, though, she only hears the deer walk. “Listen to its hooves,” she says, and I wonder how, always, she puts this world away as if it never happened and how she hears the little feet of the deer. (Chapter 3, p54)"

"It is also honest land. It doesn’t lie or hide anything. Neither does Ama. Everything she is, everything she is about to do, is clear in her face and in her movement and in her words. The way everything is open to view when sunlight comes down through the hold where all life entered this world. (Chapter 3, p55)"

"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)"

"“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)"

"Whatever has ended, whatever has begun, is strong in the air. (Chapter 3, p73)"

"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)"

"bacteria and enzymes grow new life from decay out of darkness and water. It’s into this that I want to fall, into swamp and mud and sludge, and it seems like falling is the natural way of things; gravity needs no fuel, no wings. It needs only stillness and waiting and time. (p95)"

"Two worlds exist. Maybe it’s always been this way, but I enter them both like I am two people. Above and below. Land and water. Now and then. (Chapter 4, p97)"

"resurrection ferns that wait for a rain like dead things and then open up new and green and beautiful like they are doing right now out on the hurricane felled trees, like they didn’t know it was catastrophe that gave them life. Maybe, I think, I am like those ferns. Ama’s like the rain. (Chapter 5, p101)"

"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)"

"...I hate the smell of school, but I’ve been good at it, this world where we study war and numbers that combine to destroy life. (Chapter 5, p105)"

"She has a storied career of advocating and working on issues for both the Cherokee Nation and Indian Country in general, these two attributes make her appointment as the first-ever delegate an easy decision and I am happy to support her nomination and Chief Hoskin's efforts to exercise our treaty rights."

"We know this is just the beginning and there is much work ahead, but we are being thorough in terms of implementation and ask our leaders in Washington to work with us through this process and on legislation that provides the Cherokee Nation with the delegate to which we are lawfully entitled."

"Ms. Teehee has a wealth of experience working in Washington, DC with representatives from both sides of the aisle."

"It is an interesting time. It's also an historic time because we've seen, on one hand, an administration that has prioritized native issues."

"It would be small measure of justice for those who lost their lives on a forced march."

"A Cherokee Nation delegate to Congress is a negotiated right that our ancestors advocated for, and today, our tribal nation is stronger than ever and ready to defend all our constitutional and treaty rights."

"We are a sovereign nation that is capable of exercising a sovereign right to move forward with appointing a delegate to honor our treaties."

"Even though I’d be representing the governmental interests of the Cherokee Nation, I imagine I wouldn’t see myself as any different than being an extra voice to not only represent the governmental interests of my tribe but also to aid in advancing Indian Country generally."

"Extraordinary responsibility and is grateful for an opportunity to serve the Cherokee Nation. This journey is just beginning and we have a long way to go to see this through to fruition."

"That the United States fulfills its treaty rights would send a huge message, not only to the Indian tribes of this country but internationally."

"Allowing me to take up the seat, values its indigenous populations and honors legal documents through the treaties that they signed with the Indians even if it’s nearly 200 years later."

"Teehee’s fingerprints are on a wide variety of policy and laws affecting Indigenous people, from the Violence Against Women Act to the creation of Congress' first Native American caucus"

"We came on here and I pleaded- at least my father did - and of course my father asked for that same reservation back again. Says he 'I did not do anything'. He said 'my people did not do anything'. He said that our people had saved the lives of white people, and were now scattered everywhere and why should my people be punished like that?"

"But here came an order from the President to take all the five hundred Piutes under your care there and take them across the Blue Mountains, and across the Columbia River, to Yakama Reservation'. This order came in December. Imagine what a severe winter it is out there at that time. They could not disobey the order although everything was said that could be in our behalf. But we took up the march and the soldiers had good buffalo shoes and buffalo robes and prepared for their comfort, and here were my people. They were poor and had no clothing and no blankets and no buffalo robes, and nothing to make them warm, because we did not belong to a buffalo country. We took up our march and marched over drifting snow, my people carrying their little children. Well it took us a good while. Some times, after we camped here and there, some would come along making a great noise crying. Some white people would mimic and mock them. Women would be coming along crying, and it was not because they were cold, for they were used to the cold. It was not because they were sick, for they suffered a great deal. The women were crying because they were carrying their little frozen children in their arms"

"I would not forget that the pale-faced missionary and the hoodooed aborigine are both God's creatures, though small indeed their own conceptions of Infinite Love. A wee child toddling in a wonder world, I prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. Here, in a fleeting quiet, I am awakened by the fluttering robe of the Great Spirit. To my innermost consciousness the phenomenal universe is a royal' mantle, vibrating with His divine breath. Caught in its flowing fringes are the spangles and oscillating brilliants of sun, moon, and stars."