Indigenous Quotes & Sayings

After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race's agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages' sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think of your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with? — David Mitchell

I was shocked when I moved to Sydney how very few indigenous people I came across. And so when I go to places like Maroubra or Redfern or Waterloo or Erskineville, I feel more at home because of the people I'm around - anywhere I can see a face that reflects someone that looks like my family, I feel much more at home. — Shari Sebbens

I heard a delightful - and possibly apocryphal - story about what happened when the British introduced golf to India in the 1820s. Upon building the first golf course there, the Royal Calcutta, the British discovered a problem: Indigenous monkeys were intrigued by the little white balls and would swoop down out of the trees and onto the fairways, picking them up and carrying them off. This was a disruption, to say the least. In response, officials tried erecting fences to keep the monkeys out, but the monkeys climbed right over. They tried capturing and relocating the monkeys, but the monkeys kept coming back. They tried loud noises to scare them away. Nothing worked. In the end, they arrived at a solution: They added a new rule to the game - "Play the ball where the monkey drops it. — Ed Catmull

Despite all the hype about local or green food, the single biggest impediment to wider adoption is not research, programs, organizations, or networking. It is the demonizing and criminalizing of virtually all indigenous and heritage-based food practices. — Joel Salatin

Our immigrant plant teachers offer a lot of different models for how not to make themselves welcome on a new continent. Garlic mustard poisons the soil so that native species will die. Tamarisk uses up all the water. Foreign invaders like loosestrife, kudzu, and cheat grass have the colonizing habit of taking over others' homes and growing without regard to limits. But Plantain is not like that. Its strategy was to be useful, to fit into small places, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds. Plantain is so prevalent, so well integrated, that we think of it as native. It has earned the name bestowed by botanists for plants that have become our own. Plantain is not indigenous but "naturalized." This is the same term we use for the foreign-born when they become citizens in our country. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

There are no quick fixes to Indigenous poverty and social disaster. — Malcolm Fraser

We have reached a pivotal time in Indigenous affairs when for the first time, national attention is being paid to the horror of Indigenous family violence in this country. For the first time, an Australian Prime Minister has held a summit in the national capital to listen to concerns and ideas on this issue from a group of Indigenous leaders. — Jackie Huggins

The Finns are part of the Finno-Ugric group of peoples, and are related to many different indigenous peoples that stretch right across the belt of forest and tundra regions of Russia and Siberia, as far as the Pacific. — Tim Cope

We've got to think now, in real terms, for that seventh generation . . . We've got to get back to spiritual law if we are to survive. — Oren Lyons

I don't really think of most non-English as people, more or less indigenous squirrels that I fancy to kick around with my snakeskin French Persian Boots — Thom Yorke

There are certain regions in the country where the indigenous people eat dogs. — Jessica Hagedorn

All religions, all indigenous traditions, all origin stories provide a large map of where you are. — David Christian

At this time, the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century, had a plebiscite been taken amongst all the inhabitants of the world, by far the great number of them, occupied as they were throughout the planet with daily business of agriculture of the slash and burn variety, warfare, metaphysics and procreation, would have heartily concurred with these indigenous Siberians that the whole idea of the twentieth century, or any other century at all, for that matter, was a rum notion. Had the global plebiscite been acted upon in a democratic manner, the twentieth century would have forthwith ceased to exist, the entire system of dividing up years by one hundred would have been abandoned and time, by popular consent, would have stood still. — Angela Carter

We are at last being recognised as the indigenous people of this country whom must share in its future. This is not a day of national mourning for us. We must leave history behind us and look forward. — Galarrwuy Yunupingu

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. — Friedrich Engels

Result-oriented, low-tech, low-cost, shamanic medicine, uses natural elements, spirit, and the healing power of a caring community, as practiced by indigenous societies for millennia. — Itzhak Beery

From this vantage point, Christianity has nothing - absolutely nothing - to teach Indigenous people about how to live in a good way on this land. In fact, Christians have only demonstrated that there is something profoundly wrong with the cosmology and worldview behind more than five centuries of carnage - carnage that has yet to even slow down. Christians have so much negative history and dogma to overcome within their own tradition, I do not believe the religion is even salvageable. The world is deep in the throes of an ecological crisis based in Western economies of hyper-exploitation. The planet will not survive another 500 years of Christian domination. — Brian McLaren

A good government is one with a duty to help everyone, to maximise his or her potential: Indigenous people, people with disabilities, and our forgotten families.We will not leave anyone behind. — Warren Mundine

In many Latin American countries, the historic ties of Catholic bishops with the political elite rendered them less sensitive to the conditions of the poor and especially of indigenous people. — Moises Naim

I was the first Arts Council official in the archipelago to do something for what you might call indigenous music. — Michael Longley

An indigenous culture with sufficient territory, and bilingual and intercultural education, is in a better position to maintain and cultivate its mythology and shamanism. Conversely, the confiscation of their lands and imposition of foreign education, which turns their young people into amnesiacs, threatens the survival not only of these people, but of an entire way of knowing. It is as if one were burning down the oldest universities in the world and their libraries, one after another - thereby sacrificing the knowledge of the world's future generations. — Jeremy Narby

No one can question the talent of India's youth after the success of the Mars Mission. Everything indigenous! — Narendra Modi

Here's the reality. The image of a white Jesus has been used to justify enslavement, conquest, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples. There are literally millions of human beings whose lives have been snuffed out by people who conquered under the banner of a white god. — Tim Wise

Knowing European manhood's boundaries to be porous and needing reinforcement, and meeting Indigenous possibilities that threw such boundaries into question, early conquerors invoked berdache as if assigning a failure to differentiate sex to Indigenous people, but they did so to define sexual normativity for them all. Thus, if colonial observers invoked berdache to mark Indigenous difference, the aim was to teach both colonial and Indigenous subjects the relational terms of colonial heteropatriarchy. — Scott L. Morgensen

I'd like to talk about free markets. Information in the computer age is the last genuine free market left on earth except those free markets where indigenous people are still surviving. And that's basically becoming limited. — Russell Means

So what, simply put, is the Third Covenant? It is the recalibration, the reawakening of that which is truly human, truly holy. It is truly catholic, kata-holos (Greek "according to the whole"), truly universal, sacred, and unitive. It is made manifest by a unitive noosphere, one that embraces the Monosacred present in all Abrahamic, Indigenous, Chinese, Indian, and any and all other cultures. It embraces the whole biosphere, the whole planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe. It both precedes and succeeds space and time. — Albert J. LaChance

Freud ... showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind ; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty. — Lionel Trilling

Jodi Byrd writes: "The story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime." It is necessary, she argues, to start with the origin of the United States as a settler-state and its explicit intention to occupy the continent. These origins contain the historical seeds of genocide. Any true history of the United States must focus on what has happened to (and with) Indigenous peoples - and what still happens. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

To annihilate indigenous populations eventually paves the way to our own annihilation. They are the only people who practice sustainable living. We think they are relics of the past, but they may be the gatekeepers to our future. — Arundhati Roy

The provision of basic material needs is not sufficient to make minority groups and indigenous peoples feel they are truly part of the greater national entity. For that they have to be confident that they too have an active role to play in shaping the destiny of the state that demands their allegiance. — Aung San Suu Kyi

A warrior confronts colonialism with the truth in order to regenerate authenticity and recreate a life worth living and principles worth dying for. The struggle is to restore connections severed by the colonial machine. The victory is an integrated personality, a cohesive community, and the restoration of respectful and harmonious relationships. — Taiaiake Alfred

It was not the right-wing Russians or the gun-toting settlers who carried out the Nakba. The Nakba is the legacy of Zionism's putatively socialist wing. It was the grandfathers and mothers of the "enlightened public" of today's Israel who literally drove tens of thousands of indigenous Palestinians into the sea in 1947-48 all along the Mediterranean coast, or who marched them at gunpoint to Ramallah. — Max Blumenthal

My reluctance to enter any relationship with men has been affected by the fact that many Aboriginal men are very wounded and are not able to be in a healthy relationship due to historical damage and with non-Native men because I no longer want to educate them about Indigenous Issues. I'm tired of being the educator or nurse. — Marilyn Dumont

I think we have to keep working enormously hard to see that every single Indigenous child - every Australian child - has true equality of opportunity. We've got to work harder at it. I think, you know, the heartland issue for us is the gap; the gap in life expectancy in this country. — Quentin Bryce

I only hope that one day, America will recognize what the rest of the world already has known, that our indigenous music - gospel, blues, jazz and R&B - is the heart and soul of all popular music; and that we cannot afford to let this legacy slip into obscurity, I'm telling you. — Quincy Jones

PORTUGUESE, n.pl. A species of geese indigenous to Portugal. They are mostly without feathers and imperfectly edible, even when stuffed with garlic. — Ambrose Bierce

In Britain, chinoiserie was eclipsed by the medievalism of Sir Walter Scott and the Gothic Revival, while in Europe japonisme would be chinoiserie's successor. Japonisme never compelled the general middle-class British taste as did the indigenous medieval style. Nonetheless, through extensive importations to Britain of Japanese art and artifacts, notably by the shop Liberty's of London, as well as through the artists James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the architect E.W. Godwin, and the writer Oscar Wilde, the Japanese style of decoration was known in Britain well before 1894. — Linda Gertner Zatlin

The war machine is a concept that Deleuze and Guattari pulled from Pierre Clastres who said that indigenous and nomadic peoples live in such a way that war isn't a thing that sometimes interrupts peace, but war is actually a common condition that peace sometimes interrupts. And war isn't just lethal violence at all times, there's also a playful element to it. — Anonymous

The indigenous peoples of the great tourist spots seem to lose their souls. All cultural, religious, and political efforts and ideals are crippled since the culture is engaged only in luring ever more tourists. It is not the contact with an essentially foreign population that corrupts the inhabitants of the great foreign resorts. It is the contact with great masses of people who are seeking fir the moment only well-being and not salvation that weakens and devalues the indigenous population. — Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig

All of this got me thinking about the history of the westward expansion, and got me to wondering how the exploration of the Solar System would be changed if there were an indigenous presence out there. — Sarah Zettel

Let's all understand that these guiding principles cannot be discarded for short-term political gains. They represent what this country is all about. They are indigenous to the American idea. And these are principles which are not negotiable. — Barbara Jordan

If one looks into the genealogies of many 'old families,' one discovers episodes of slave trafficking, bootlegging, gun running, opium trading, falsified land claims, violent acquisition of water and mineral rights, the extermination of indigenous peoples, sales of shoddy and unsafe goods, public funds used for private speculations, crooked deals in government bonds and vouchers, and payoffs for political favors. — Michael Parenti

Our indigenous herbalists say to pay attention when plants come to you; they're bringing you something you need to learn. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

Argentina is really in a different category because they butchered all their Indian or indigenous people in the war of the desert in 1850s. Which sets them aside from their neighbors in a macabre way. — John Gimlette

The thing we often forget to talk about, or perhaps we take for granted, is our country's dazzling beauty. Our natural environment is so much a part of Australia's art, writing, music and culture, both indigenous and non indigenous. — Quentin Bryce

To put this even more bluntly, one might think about the difference between adding traditional and contemporary Indigenous art to the National Gallery of Canada's historical Canadian wing and imagining the entire gallery curated from an Indigenous perspective of what a "National Gallery of Canada" might mean.37 Put slightly differently, the project of Indigenous representation in the gallery in Canada has been defined as "bringing aboriginal art in to the history of Canadian art" rather than of incorporating settler history into the history of Aboriginal art.38 Would such reimaginings mean, for example, a move away from the primacy of a liberal politic and of the artist genius as a cultural application of that politic? — Lynda Jessup

A couple of things are missing from Indigenous affairs. We tend to go and process, we tend to spend a lot of money for very limited outcomes, and we have got to change that. — Yitzhak Rabin

Wherever wolves run free, indigenous cultures have revered them as symbols of loyalty, free will, fearlessness and unity. But wolves haven't had it easy in North America, where negative myths prevail. Fear-based stereotypes and use of public lands for cattle ranching have resulted in Mother Nature's dogs being aggressively persecuted to the point of near extinction. — Zoe Helene

The key to successful change is sensitivity towards that which is indigenous and, in the long run, diversity will always be more resilient than monoculture despite the current unsustainable trends in the opposite direction. — Jonathan Watts

What Australia was before is the fullest Australia has ever been ... as created and made and valued by indigenous people. The white man came here and took it away, took it away and replaced it ... — Galarrwuy Yunupingu

So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us. — Derrick Jensen

Along with the mystical wonderment and sense of ecological responsibility that comes with the recognition of connectedness, more disturbing images come to mind. When applied to economics, connectedness seems to take the form of chain stores, multinational corporations, and international trade treaties which wipe out local enterprise and indigenous culture. When I think of it in the realm of religion, I envision smug missionaries who have done such a good job of convincing native people everywhere that their World-Maker is the same as God, and by this shoddy sleight of hand have been steadily impoverishing the world of the great fecundity and complex localism of belief systems that capture truths outside the Western canon. And I wonder - if everything's connected, does that mean that everything can be manipulated and controlled centrally by those who know how to pull strings at strategic places? — Malcolm Margolin

As ever, the original inhabitants of Turtle Island are entirely overlooked. Mysteriously, the only time indigenous people are guaranteed a mainstream Amerikkan mention is on Thanksgiving.
Again, to contextualize, this would be be kinda like someone busting into your house and robbing you blind, then sending you postcards once a year to remind you how much they are enjoying all of your stuff, and getting annoyed with you if you don't respond with appreciation for their thoughtfulness. — Inga Muscio

I noticed - and this is one of the people don't understand of Tony [Abbot] - he grew. To me he grew as opposition leader. He come in - he wasn't really good at the beginning when he was opposition leader. He won the confidence of the Australian people and got the job as Prime Minister. He grew in Indigenous affairs. To me, we just totally disagreed in it, but now we're very much one on one on it. — Warren Mundine

Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season. — Nadine Gordimer

It is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and food sovereignty, for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people. When climate justice wins we win the world that we want. We can't sit this one out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to gain. . . . We are bound together in this battle, not just for a reduction in the parts per million of CO2, but to transform our economies and rebuild a world that we want today. — Naomi Klein

I am your enemy. Your enemy in this world. The whole universe is filled with mankind, and there are many planets out there where men forget they are a part of something larger, greater. And I am only one among many who have come to remind you planetary retrogrades of precisely that. You are not some indigenous species of this world. You are only one outreaching hand of mankind. — Bruno Goncalves

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass. — James W. Loewen

The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans. — Robert Mugabe

I am against the fact that a settler minority should impose an entire system of values on an indigenous people. — Steven Biko

The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral - into the indigenous American berserk. — Philip Roth

We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means
all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity. — Derrick Jensen

I think the relationship of indigenous people to their environment ... that those were ethical omnivores. — James Cromwell

I have never declared myself an Indigenous politician; I am not an Indigenous Chief Minister. — Adam Giles

Indeed the offset market has created a new class of "green" human rights abuses, wherein peasants and Indigenous people who venture into their traditional territories (reclassified as carbon sinks) in order to harvest plants, wood, or fish are harassed or worse...The added irony is that many people being sacrificed for the carbon market are living some of the most sustainable, low-carbon lifestyles on the planet. — Naomi Klein

I can cope with, and even somehow enjoy, the sinking melancholy of Venice, just for a few days. Somewhere in me I am able to recognize that this is not my melancholy; this is the city's own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it. This is a sign, I cannot help but think, of healing, of the coagulation of my self. There were a few years there, lost in borderless despair, when I used to experience all the world's sadness as my own. Everything sad leaked through me and left damp traces behind. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Within the gendered institution of prostitution, race and class create a hierarchy with indigenous women at its lowest point. — Melissa Farley

Using the latest in science and technology to shatter today's economic paradigm of 'insatiable individuals competing for scarce resources,' Planetary Citizenship brings us full circle to the ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples and the sacredness of creation. — Rebecca Adamson

The idea of regularly acknowledging our indebtedness to the natural world and giving thanks for the many gifts we receive from it, or considering other species to be our close "relations" which many indigenous peoples still do, couldn't be more alien to most of us. — Charlie Cook

Native people - about two-thirds of the uranium in the United States is on indigenous lands. On a worldwide scale, about 70 percent of the uranium is either in Aboriginal lands in Australia or up in the Subarctic of Canada, where native people are still fighting uranium mining. — Winona LaDuke

Many people who are drawn to work about racism and transphobia may be new to thinking deeply about colonialism and indigenous resistance in their North America. — Dean Spade

The fact is that when the frequency of your DNA hits the Schumann Resonance, your experience of time stops completely. These are truths that are still experienced and embodied by many of the indigenous cultures alive on our planet today. To live closely to the earth's natural rhythms is to experience the wisdom and clarity that comes of moving more slowly through the world. — Richard Rudd

We are dealing with a multidimensional paraphysical phenomenon which is largely indigenous to planet earth. — Brad Steiger

Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed:
1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer;
2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind. — Eric Hoffer

The indigenous understanding has its basis of spirituality in a recognition of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all living things, a holistic and balanced view of the world. All things are bound together. All things connect. What happens to the Earth happens to the children of the earth. Humankind has not woven the web of life; we are but one thread. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. — Rebecca Adamson

Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Britain, the latter the colonial administrator, forcibly removed the indigenous inhabitants of the islands, the Chagossians. Most of the two thousand deportees ended up more than a thousand miles away in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they were thrown into lives of poverty and forgotten. The purpose of this expulsion was to create a major US military base on one of the Chagossian islands, Diego Garcia. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

There are certain aspects of me that can be bad-ass sometimes, but being able to push it to the extreme is something I'd love to play. You don't get those roles, as a female, and especially as an indigenous female. There aren't those roles out there, so I want that. I want women to see a strong, sexy female without showing her body too much. — Tinsel Korey

I think that indigenous women's wisdom is crucial. So much of the care of the Earth has come from the mothers. I think it's imperative we turn to their wisdom in how to take care of the planet. — Alice Walker

Many Indians have told me that the most basic difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that Westerners view the world as dead, and not as filled with speaking, thinking, feeling subjects as worthy and valuable as themselves. — Derrick Jensen

I am deeply committed to the cause of Indigenous Australians, and not just because of the Apology, but the big challenges which lie ahead in closing the gap. — Kevin Rudd

Canada is a country of ingredients without a cuisine; we're a country with musicians without an indigenous instrument; Toronto's a city that doesn't even have a dish named after it. — Mike Myers

One of the movements we have developed is to say that, just as intellectual property rights protect the inventions of individuals, common rights are needed to protect the common intellectual heritage of indigenous peoples. These are rights that are recognized through the Convention on Biological Diversity. We are working to make sure that they become foundations of our jurisprudence. — Vandana Shiva

In every Indigenous community I've been in, they absolutely do want community infrastructure and they do want development, but they want it on their own terms. They want to be able to use their national resources and their assets in a way that protects and sustains them. Our territories are our wealth, the major assets we have. And Indigenous people use and steward this property so that they can achieve and maintain a livelihood, and achieve and maintain that same livelihood for future generations. — Rebecca Adamson

We want to govern with our indigenous ancestors' models: That means a different concept of participation, community work and honesty ... — Evo Morales

In more recent years, I've become more and more fascinated with the indigenous folklore of this land, Native American folklore, and also Hispanic folklore now that I live in the Southwest. — Terri Windling

There are people all over Australia who use their homes as hubs that they travel from, and they encourage their indigenous people to continue to stay there. — Andrew Forrest

Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit. I came to understand quite sharply when I began my training as a scientist that science privileges only one, possibly two, of those ways of knowing: mind and body. As a young person wanting to know everything about plants, I did not question this. But it is a whole human being who finds the beautiful path. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

Language and material culture have greatly increased the mobility of the world's population, and some researchers believe that this will lead to an unhealthy and irreversible diminishing of variation in our genome. As more and more humans breed across the boundaries of genetic variation, we become a blander, more homogenous bunch than our diverse parent groups. This could be a problem because variation is important to the evolutionary health of a species, for the more we are the same, the easier it is for one single thing to make us extinct. Indeed, some genetic variants of the human species are disappearing altogether as small indigenous groups die out. — Christine Kenneally

Statistically after six months, if an Indigenous or non-Indigenous person has come off welfare, even long-term welfare, and has stuck in that's job for six months, then they've really broken in their own psychology the welfare reliance mentality. They're up on their own two feet. — Andrew Forrest

So, in "Melting Pot" the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, "America was the new world and Europe was the old," in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe. — Tim Wise

The Waorani carry out a similar diet with their arrow poison, called curare or, in their language, oomae. This is another amazing product of the indigenous science, a most sophisticated technology that the Waorani extrapolated from an ancient myth. — Jonathon Miller Weisberger

The problem now is that young people, young indigenous people, are not so interested in preserving traditional knowledge. So for them, seeing that it was important for us and for the outside world, this traditional knowledge, it was a big deal to them. — Ciro Guerra

As stripped of our ancestral knowledge as we Settlers seem to be, we defy the position of patriarchal dominance and undermine the notion of cultural superiority when we reclaim the roots of our authentic indigenity. It is our birthright as human beings to declare our true status as People of the Earth (as it is for all cultural groups), and if we collectively reject the delusional separation from nature that Empire has forced upon us, we move back into right relationship with Earth Community. Anchoring ourselves deeply into our earth-honoring culture and reclaiming our EIK (European Indigenous Knowledge) is a powerful blow against the monolith of cultural imperialism. (Page 43, Chapter 6, "We All Have IK") — Pegi Eyers

I'm certainly not ready to go changing the world overnight right now. I'm completely uninformed about a lot of our issues, a lot of the nation's issues, not just Indigenous issues. — Cathy Freeman

With THC in your system, you don't dream. And you need to. Otherwise it is like losing one of your senses. Dreams are part of your wholeness ... when you're dreaming, you're not the one calling the shots. So it's a reprieve ... the dream world had rules in it. You couldn't read a clock in your dreams. It would not give you the time. If the lights were on in a room, you could not turn them off in a dream ... in indigenous tribes all over the world, the dream world was like church. [p. 247] — Anne Lamott

Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine. — Brad Jensen

Just as Hitler had predicted, it was rival empires more than indigenous nationalists who propelled the process of decolonization forward. — Niall Ferguson

Being an indigenous talent of the African race; — Harriet Beecher Stowe

I think of some of my friends who have passed to the spirit world but are who here with me when I go to events and when I walk in my own community. My sisters, Ingred, my sister Marsha, and my sister Nielock. All cofounders of the Indigenous Women's Network with me. All long time women activists in the native community. — Winona LaDuke

let us start by picturing the Japan archipelago lying in the sea by the Chinese mainland. If its proximity allowed it to become part of the Sinosphere and acquire a written culture, its distance benefited the development of indigenous writing. The Dover Strait, separating England and France, is only 34 kilometers (21 miles) wide. A fine swimmer can swim across it. In contrast, the shortest distance between Japan and the Korean Peninsula is five or six times greater, and between Japan and the Chinese mainland, twenty-five times greater. The current, moreover, is deadly. . . . Japan's distance from China gave it political and cultural freedom and made possible the flowering of its own writing. — Minae Mizumura