native-americans

"I don’t like to feel like I have to stay within a certain style. I like to see things progress and turn into other things. I’m all about adventure."

"I liked the way they looked. They were easy to work with my hands. The drawings turned into these magical things."

"My grandmother, my mother, and me, each one of us progressed into our own work, “I take a great deal of pride in being different from my family. Yet I know my mother would absolutely love my work. As a woman, I think she’d be very proud that I’ve chosen to do things in my own style.”"

"I had this internal need to be a healer. My mom was ill a lot when I was a kid. When she got cancer, I became interested in the progression of the disease and how she was being treated,"

"I’m in a position where I don’t have to be labeled… I don’t have to call myself an Indian artist to sell my work, and I decided that it was more to my advantage not to label myself as a particular kind of artist, based solely on my genealogy… now I know that I can be part of something, part of that lineage, without being defined by it."

"“I want my children to be happy. I want them to find their own purpose in life rather than fall into a life that’s already set up for them"

"I spent my formative years on the Choctaw Indian reservation in Philadelphia, Mississpi, and in Missoula, Montana, where I loved playing outdoors, watching farm animals, and observing everything around me. I believe living in these settings motivated me to explore and respect nature."

"Reach out to teachers and school counselors who can connect you to science and engineering camps."

"If having access to instruments impacts other students as it did me, kids would have more opportunities to engage with a broader group of people and to gain greater understanding of the world."

"You don’t hear about these Black people, how many of them died. How many of the Black babies that died because there wasn’t any milk for them, after their mother had nursed the other babies."

"When you have documentaries about the Trail of Tears, you don’t see these Black people carrying all the loads."

"I say that Freedmen descendants must continue to use all legal avenues to pull down the barriers of racism, apartheid and second-class tribal membership."

"For the Native, queer, feminist, literary world: Beth is a home, reminding us that we are not alone in our movements towards liberation."

"Her life was too short, like so many of our people. Colonial poverty and oppression took away some of our best sons and daughters. Beth left early, but she had accomplished so much. She inspired a generation of two-spirited authors who followed her to publication. There would be not have been a Johnny Appleseed without there first being a Beth Brant. There would have been no Connie Fife without Beth Brant. There would be no I Am Woman without Beth Brant. We were feminists when everyone objected. Feminism is a white thing, they said. Beth's response, so is patriarchy, and then she told us about the friendship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and an Iroquoian woman that sparked the suffragettes - made sense to me."

"The purpose of ritual, ceremony, and prayer is to open ourselves to that power, to bring into our everyday, existence the knowledge and memory of that time, to reinvoke it and reparticipate in it. And the gate through which we enter the dream world, the world of time immemorial; the place of inception, conception, and perception, is language. For without language, there are no stories; there is no speaking and singing the world into existence."

"It has been two days since they came and took the children away. My body is greatly chilled. All our blankets have been used to bring me warmth. The women keep the fire blazing. The men sit. They talk among themselves. We are frightened by this sudden child-stealing. We signed papers, the agent said. This gave them rights to take our babies. It is good for them, the agent said. It will make them civilized, the agent said. I do not know civilized. (from "A Long Story")"

"I would suggest that any time a group of people participates in an antilinear thinking, any time a group of people practices customs and beliefs, contrary to the norm, any time a group of people begins to speak negatively and unflatteringly of God and the state, any time a group of people organizes itself into a cohesive whole with a language that tells the truth as it knows it and experiences it-and calls that language art, poetry, song, sculpture, work, study, lovemaking, child-rearing, or what have you then the powers that be order in the troops. And the troops stand guard, infiltrate, imprison, and in various ways attempt to control all of those who would subvert the "natural" order of things, the construction of the world as we know it today: patriarchal and imperious, bloated on its own self-importance, pompous, cruel, and dominating."

"I look on Native women's writing as a gift, a give-away of the truest meaning. Our spirit, our sweat, our tears, our laughter, our love, our anger, our bodies are distilled into words that we bead together to make power. Not power over anything. Power. Power that speaks to hearts as well as to minds."

"Beth saw her writing as an enacting of responsibility-the responsibility to help bring us all to the knowledge of how to live with integrity, as good human beings: in balance, centered in the heart's knowledge, hopeful, not vengeful, not small, but with generosity. Whether she achieved this in her own life to her own satisfaction, I don't know, and it is not mine to say. But in my view, that is where her writing is meant to take us: to ignite the imagination, to provide it with a kind of knowledge about how to care about those who suffer, and about how to walk in one's full posture, in a sacred way, looking at the world with vision."

"words are sacred"

"Lesbian images and language, especially the images and language of lesbians of color-because we have lost more than many others may be some of the most subversive texts being written today. It isn't just the challenge to the state's notions of normalcy as represented by someone like Jesse Helms. Our challenge to authority does not come alone in the area of reimagining and reconstituting our sexuality. For years now we have reconstituted on some level the family, the community, the schools, and perhaps even the military. The meaning and value of these institutions have come under scrutiny and reevaluation and change by those of us who have functioned in and survived them. We lesbian writers have taken it as our responsibility to articulate our survivals and transformations in this war on our integrity. We represent a challenge to the Western way of thinking at a primal level. The more we tap into those tribal roots and quench our thirst on the milk and honey of our mother tongue, the more we can withstand the shock of living in this deadly and soul-annihilating system. We have to scramble their messages and learn to read the code we devise out of it. We have to go into the place of the great solitary vision of our own being - a being intimately attached to and integrated with the net of all being and beings - and humble ourselves and ask for a song, a vision, a dream, a language that promotes and heals, that nurtures and provides. We have to humble ourselves, perhaps before the little bug that causes the mirage or before the northern flight of birds, on whose shiny backs we may find the words that ensure our survival and the survival of those who come after us."

"Beth Brant gave us Indigenous feminism and Indigenous queer theory even before we had a name for these practices, all wrapped up in the most beautiful storywork."

"I am tired of hearing Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson held up as the matriarchs of feminist and/or women's literature. Woolf was a racist, Dickinson was a woman of privilege who never left her house, nor had to deal with issues beyond which white dress to wear on a given day. Race and class have yet to be addressed, or if they are discussed, it is on their terms not ours"

"Oral tradition requires a telling and a listening that is intense, and intentional. Giving, receiving, giving-it makes a complete circle of Indigenous truth. First Nations writing utilizes the power and gift of story, like oral tradition, to convey history, lessons, culture and spirit. And perhaps the overwhelming instinct in our spirit is to love. I would say that Native writing gives the gift of love. And love is a word that is abused and made empty by the dominant culture. In fact, the letters l-o-v-e have become just that, blank cyphers used frivolously to cover up deep places of the spirit."

"Mother, I am gay. I have AIDS." The telephone call that it almost killed him to make. The silence. Then, "Come home to us."

"The old women are gathered in the Longhouse. First, the ritual kissing on the cheeks, the eyes, the lips, the top of the head; that spot where the hair parts in the middle like a wild river through a canyon. (beginning of "Native Origin")"

"Two-Spirit writers are merging the selves that colonialism splits apart."

"Homophobia is the eldest son of racism; they work in concert with each other, whether externally or internally. Native lesbian writing names those twin evils that would cause destruction to us."

"Beth had an understanding of the road to freedom, the path to love, and the story we would have to create to get there. The pearls in her stories lie in a shell of words that need only to be opened; read Beth's work and we can all come together, transgendered, heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, fluid gendered, disabled, and abled, white, and non-white. We do not have to be stuck where corporate colonialism consigned us. There was room for everyone in Beth's heart. We can reach out and resist. The world is ours; we just need to go get it. This was Beth's philosophy."

"Beth Brant is a writer of great depth and brilliant talent."

"...myth, mythology, is the body of knowledge a people possess. That's not a very satisfactory explanation. But a myth is not a story. Mythology is the body of knowledge. It's usually expressed in symbols. One of the most important ones is language. Our mythology is embedded in our language. Okay? The way we express it, however, is kind of a literary thing. We express it through ceremony. We express it through, which is the way you say, "I am a Lakota." Or, "I am a Dakota." Or we express it in ritual, which is the way you talk to God. Or you express it in storytelling. Or you express it in dance, art, and music, and so on."

"One of things you have to have, if you're going to be a voice in this dilemma, is you have to have a core of knowledge, I guess, or a core of something. And my core is, historically speaking, there are no two sides to this history of the United States and its relationship to people who have lived here for thousands of years. There are no two sides to that story. You have no right to displace people, to steal their resources, and steal their lives. No human right, no human being has the right to do that to another human being. That's my core resistance. I don't do that to you or to you or to you. I very often go back to that. What directs a lot of my writing is: there are no two sides to this story. That's not very scholarly. It's not acceptable because there are two sides to everything, maybe this and maybe that. Part of the empirical evidence that history tells you is that for a while this was true and now that's true, and so on. That's the empirical evidence. That's not the evidence that I use. I say, there are no two sides to this story. What America has done is criminal. And they're still doing it. Sooner or later, a capitalistic democracy is going to be seen for what it is. It's simply not going to be sustainable."

"I had this grandmother who said this to me earlier, "You don't even own your own life, my dear. You're only taking care of it for the next generation." That's fairly profound when you think about it. It is really what the Dakotas think about themselves and the world. It has, on the one hand, been their weakness because it's been exploited. But on the other hand, it is also their strength. It is what will make them, in the end, the winners in this conflagration. We're not protesting so much as we are saying: we have the right to our place in this universe. Maybe I'm the last generation of people who talks like that. The young people ought to think about it once in a while."

"At the time when descendants of Goethe had begun their massive, secret march through Belgium, in those years before the United States entered World War I, there lived near Fort Pierre, South Dakota, one Joseph Shields, a fifty-year-old Sioux Indian who in his own way knew something of the rise of brutal doctrines, something of the destruction of ancient civilizations, something of a change of worlds."

"The dedication that is apparent in Ella Deloria's lifelong quest to preserve traditional Sioux language and culture was deeply rooted in her concern for the future of her people. She articulated this concern in relation to her own work in a letter written December 2, 1952, to H. E. Beebe, who provided her with funds to have the manuscript on social life typed for publication: "This may sound a little naïve, Mr. Beebe, but I actually feel that I have a mission: To make the Dakota people understandable, as human beings, to the white people who have to deal with them. I feel that one of the reasons for the lagging advancement of the Dakotas has been that those who came out among them to teach and preach, went on the assumption that the Dakotas had nothing, no rules of life, no social organization, no ideals. And so they tried to pour white culture into, as it were, a vacuum, and when that did not work out, because it was not a vacuum after all, they concluded that the Indians were impossible to change and train. What they should have done first, before daring to start their program, was to study everything possible of Dakota life, and see what made it go, in the old days, and what was still so deeply rooted that it could not be rudely displaced without some hurt. . I feel that I have this work cut out for me and if I do not make all I know available before I die, I will have failed by so much. But I am not morbid about it; quite cheerful in fact.""

"I like to use language to try to explain who I am and what I think of the world...That's the purpose of writing, to find out what you know in order to think."

"imagination and inventiveness are common human potentialities. All people invent."

"Anthropology has always been the handmaiden of colonialism all over the world. Not just here. Not just in Indian Country. Everywhere."

"All progress depends on contacts and the resulting exchange of new ideas."

"the truth is democracy has failed. In Indian Country, we've known it a long time. America hasn't come to that conclusion yet. But I'm not talking about the kind of democracy that has been imposed on Indian nations, which in itself is fairly criminal. When you put democracy in a broader sense, capitalist democracy is not going to proceed as it has in its exploitative way because it is not sustainable."

"Thus Dakota education was promoted: informally, through their ceaseless practice in human relations within the kinship circle; formally, in the teachings of the ceremonies, as well as in legends. Manual education - how to do this or do that-was the least of it. That simply came in the doing. Children were generally not given menial tasks to discourage them at the outset. They were given new materials to start on, so as to sustain their interest. Normal skill thus came in the actual doing. (7: Education)"

"All human beings learn from each other, we have been saying. The Indians, belonging to the great human family, have the same innate powers, inborn intelligence, and potentialities as the rest of mankind. They have imagination and inventiveness. They can copy what they see and adapt it to their own special needs. These are all common human traits."

"All human progress was slow at the beginning, but at least it was cumulative as long as peoples could occasionally get in touch with each other."

"there certainly have been excellent storytellers and writers within anthropology. That’s one of the reasons I co-edited the book Women Writing Culture (1996) because I was really interested in finding the canon of women writers within anthropology who had written well. Anthropologists like Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, and Barbara Myerhoff, among others, have been amazing writers."

"Waterlily forms a valuable part of Deloria's legacy, the treasure trove of material preserving the Sioux past that she has bequeathed to us all, Indian and non-Indian alike. Today, fifty years after most of her interviews were recorded, we realize how irreplaceable those records are, and how fortunate we are that Ella Deloria devoted her life to their collection and translation. As more of her writings become published at long last, we can appreciate how splendidly she achieved her life's mission. For above all, Ella Deloria's work of transcription, translation, and cultural interpretation has provided the data and insight from which we can come to understand the Sioux people of the last century in the way that she intended, as fellow human beings."

"Mendoza was a little man; puny, you might say. But that was not the reason he took two Dilantin every day. Nor was it the reason that he carried with him quantities of multivitamins, which he ate like candy throughout the tedious days and sleepless nights. The puniness may have been the effect, rather than the cause. In any case, you noticed the smallness of the man right away. What you didn't notice at first was the other thing...the indefinable thing that made you forget about him as soon as he passed out of your field of vision. It was as though you saw him but that he wasn't really there amidst the bus passengers when you looked away, and it wasn't your eyes fell upon him later that he became real. That thing, whatever it was, Mendoza knew. And he tolerated it."

"At a time when minorities, including Native Americans, were subjected to considerable economic and social discrimination, Anderson’s determination to attend college and return the benefits of her education to her community was notable. Her role as educator, legislator, and public health reform leader aided the Native American community as well as the whole of society."

"For the rest of her life, she never quit her quest to help others."

"She also championed the fight to recognize Native American fishing rights on Huron Bay."

"Indigenous literature is Indigenous knowledge; Indigenous writers and poets are the instigators of that knowledge."