Indigenous Languages Quotes & Sayings

So "Embrace Of The Serpent" is told from the points of view and in the languages of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. He [Guerra] went there before shooting began, with a script written mostly in Spanish. — Tom Cole

Mowaljarlai rarely answered questions with an abstract explanation; he always told a story. His was not a fragmented world, divided into the convenient disciplinary languages and jargon that seem to be required for the understanding of concepts and principles in, for example, mathematics, physics, art and literature. Not only did he not have these languages; he thought this was a strange way to arrive at understanding the way in which the world lives in itself. It baffled him that whitefellas developed their knowledge by busting things up, reducing things to little pieces separate from everything else that contributes to their nature. For him, everything in creation is not only living and interconnected, but exists in a story and story cycle. Yet his knowledge of what whitefellas call 'science' was extraordinary."
p80-1. — Hannah Rachel Bell

Art is never decoration, embellishment; instead, it is work of enlightenment. Art, in other words, is a technique for acquiring liberty. — Bruce Lee

This is one of the consequences of a superior education, you see. In this independent, hundred-per-cent-empowered and fully and totally indigenous blacker-than-black country, a superior education is one that the whites would value, and as whites do not value local languages at the altar of what the whites deem supreme. So it was in colonial times, and so it remains, more than thirty years later. — Petina Gappah

Another reason we know that language could not determine thought is that when a language isn't up to the conceptual demands of its speakers, they don't scratch their heads dumbfounded (at least not for long); they simply change the language. They stretch it with metaphors and metonyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or coin new slang and jargon. (When you think about it, how else could it be? If people had trouble thinking without language, where would their language have come from-a committee of Martians?) Unstoppable change is the great given in linguistics, which is not why linguists roll their eyes at common claims such as that German is the optimal language of science, that only French allows for truly logical expression, and that indigenous languages are not appropriate for the modern world. As Ray Harlow put it, it's like saying, Computers were not discussed in Old English; therefore computers cannot be discussed in Modern English. — Steven Pinker

You have inherited a lifetime of tribulation. Everybody has inherited it. Take it over, make the most of it and when you have decided you know the right way, do the best you can with it. — Murray Bowen

If we're not careful, we can replace study of the Bible with study about the Bible. — Anonymous

Teachers were powerful enough to kill the indigenous languages: they are not powerful enough to bring them back to life. — Andrew Dalby

The passions are the winds which fill the sails of the vessel; they sink it at times, but without them it would be impossible to make way. — Voltaire

I grew up about 30 minutes north of Boston in a town that was a virtual melting pot - I was exposed to all different backgrounds, cultures, and religions, fueling my personal interests in global issues. — Alex Newell

There's something boring about people who have to go to an office for a living. — Karl Lagerfeld

In New Guinea, as in other hot spots of endangerment, indigenous languages are a user's guide to ecosystems that are increasingly fragile and - in the face of climate change - increasingly irreplaceable. — Anonymous

It's a cold bowl of chili when love lets you down. — Neil Young

Cuzco - the place that my friends and the aforementioned anthropologists inhabit - is a socionatural territory composed by relations among the people and earth-beings, and demarcated by a modern regional state government. Within it, practices that can be called indigenous and nonindigenous infiltrate and emerge in each other, shaping lives in ways that, it should be clear, do not correspond to the division between nonmodern and modern. Instead, they confuse that division and reveal the complex historicity that makes the region "never modern" (see Latour 1993b).5 What I mean, as will gradually become clear throughout this first story, is that Cuzco has never been singular or plural, never one world and therefore never many either, but a composition (perhaps a constant translation) in which the languages and practices of its worlds constantly overlap and exceed each other. — Marisol De La Cadena