Indigenous Culture Quotes

• If people can't acknowledge the wisdom of indigenous cultures, then that's their loss.

  Jay Griffiths

  Loss, People, Culture

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• We must respect each other's right to choose a collective destiny, and the opportunity to develop the legal and political rights for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples so that we may enjoy the right to maintain our culture, our heritage and our land, as a united Australia.

  Jackie Huggins

  Compassion, Opportunity, Destiny

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• This is a coca leaf. This is not cocaine. This represents the culture of indigenous people of the Andean region.

  Evo Morales

  People, Culture, Cocaine

  "Bolivian President Chews Coca During Speech At UN" by Ryan Grim, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 11, 2009.

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• As nations we should also commit afresh to righting past wrongs. In Australia we began this recently with the first Australians - the oldest continuing culture in human history. On behalf of the Australian Parliament, this year I offered an apology to indigenous Australians for the wrongs they had suffered in the past.

  Kevin Rudd

  Apology, Past, Years

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Thousands of years ago, civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with those of other continents. In those centuries, Africans were politically free and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their cultures truly indigenous.

  Haile Selassie

  Independent, Years, Civilization

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• We need to return to learning about the land by being on the land, or better, by being in the thick of it. That is the best way we can stay in touch with the fates of its creatures, its indigenous cultures, its earthbound wisdom. That is the best way we can be in touch with ourselves.

  Gary Paul Nabhan

  Fate, Land, Needs

  Gary Paul Nabhan (1994). “The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places”, Beacon Press (MA)

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• A lot of indigenous cultures are deeply involved in working with ancestor spirits, elemental spirits, and demons. Many of these cultures feel that, if you don't deal properly with ancestor spirits, then they come back and infest the living in the form of things like depression, addictive patterns, and neuroses. We in the modern West completely deny the existence of these spirits or other types of entities. And because we've denied them, we may have opened the gates for them to manipulate us in a lot of ways.

  Daniel Pinchbeck

  Culture, May, Neurosis

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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

  Sacrifice, Land, Knowing

  Jeremy Narby (1999). “The Cosmic Serpent”, p.119, Penguin

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• The role of globalization is to homogenize all cultures, and to turn them into commodified markets, and therefore, to make them easier for global corporations to control. Global corporations are even now trying to commodify all remaining aspects of national cultures, not to mention indigenous cultures.

  Jerry Mander

  Trying, Culture, Roles

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• There seems also to be a tremendous risk to indigenous cultures if we insist that all scholarship be conducted in English. We are, for example, dealing with ancient and very highly-developed cultures in Korea, Japan, China and the Middle East. What is the impact on cultural and scholarly vitality forcing everyone to do their work in English? I do not have an answer, but this issue has been very much on my mind.

  Henry Rosovsky

  Impact, Japan, Korea

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• 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

  Loyalty, Mother, Running

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• There is something about the light, the heat (physical and perhaps metaphysical), the vibrancy of street life, and the rawness and disjointedness of much of the tropical world that has moved and disturbed me - in places where the indigenous culture is often transformed by an external northern culture (sometimes my own... I suspect that one has a few serious creative obsessions in life. I certainly cannot seem to escape this one.

  Alex Webb

  Light, Creative, Culture

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• I started studying indigenous cultures and I was really inspired by their life styles and the way that they lived. Part of that was knowing how to survive in the wild and knowing how to heal themselves from the plants that grew around them.

  Shailene Woodley

  Knowing, Style, Culture

  Source: www.moviesonline.ca

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• There is a beginning and end to all life - and to all human endeavors. Species evolve and die off. Empires rise, then break apart. Businesses grow, then fold. There are no exceptions. I'm OK with all that. Yet it pains me to bear witness to the sixth great extinction, where we humans are directly responsible for the extirpation of so many wonderful creatures and invaluable indigenous cultures. It saddens me to observe the plight of our own species; we appear to be incapable of solving our problems.

  Yvon Chouinard

  Pain, Culture, Plight

  Yvon Chouinard (2016). “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual”, p.16, Penguin

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• Shamanism is a kind of universal spiritual practice with indigenous cultures around the world, and one important element of it is taking care of spirits.

  Daniel Pinchbeck

  Spiritual, Practice, Important

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• He [Hugo Chavez] put poverty at the heart of political debate. Rightly so, given the country's immense inequality and poverty. He invested heavily in social programs such as literacy, health clinics, and education. He promoted Venezuela's indigenous culture and urged compatriots to take pride in its pre-Columbian history. He called time on the US treating Latin America as its backyard.

  Rory Carroll

  Country, Latin, Heart

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• If the society that we're talking about is a society that starts wars all over the world, degrades indigenous cultures, is misogynistic in itself, if that's the society we're talking about, then it's not a bad thing if hip-hop did degrade that society.

  KRS-One

  War, Talking, Hip Hop

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• It seemed [there are] musical nodes on the planet where cultures meet and mix, sometimes as a result of unfortunate circumstances, like slavery or something else, in places like New Orleans and Havana and Brazil. And those are places where the European culture and indigenous culture and African culture all met and lived together, and some new kind of culture and especially music came out of that.

  David Byrne

  New Orleans, Musical, Together

  Interview with Chris Dahlen, pitchfork.com. July 17, 2006.

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