Indigenous Quotes - Page 2

• Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they've had forever. And they've been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.

  Alice Walker

  Thinking, Forever, Earth

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• 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

  Rocks, Views, Rivers

  Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay (2011). “What We Leave Behind”, p.274, Seven Stories Press

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• Indigenous languages are Canada's national treasures. They are our identity. We simply have to put greater effort into rejuvenating and revitalizing them. It is key to moving forward.

  Perry Bellegarde

  Moving, Effort, Identity

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• The problem in Guatemala is that there is no solution to the issue of human rights. The problem is militarization, it is the injust distribution of wealth. It is intolerance of the indigenous, it is discrimination and marginalization.

  Rigoberta Menchu

  Issues, Rights, Guatemala

  Source: www.indians.org

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• We focus on bringing back Indigenous languages, ceremonies, cultures, traditions - all that was lost over the past 150 years. This is how we'll generate hope - for all Canadian people.

  Perry Bellegarde

  Past, People, Focus

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• That's the way I do things when I want to celebrate, I always plant a tree. And so I got an indigenous tree, called Nandi flame, it has this beautiful red flowers. When it is in flower it is like it is in flame.

  Wangari Maathai

  Beautiful, Flower, Flames

  "Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai: A Global Icon Of Conservation" by Korva Coleman, www.npr.org. September 26, 2011.

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• Today the governments of Latin America should be ashamed of not havingexterminated the indigenous, at the end of the twentieth century, because weexist at the end of this century. We are not myths of the past, ruins in thejungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims ofintolerance and racism.

  Rigoberta Menchu

  Zoos, Latin, Past

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• Our prayers must spring from the indigenous soil of our own personal confrontation with the Spirit of God in our lives.

  Reverend Malcolm Boyd

  Prayer, Spring, Soil

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• You've got so many groups that have no voice in this world - the indigenous, the poor. So how can I use the resources that I have and bring them up, highlight them. And it's not that difficult. It's just choosing and concentrating and focusing.

  Anita Roddick

  Voice, Groups, Use

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• 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

  Country, Cities, Musician

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• The media and politics have never allowed our people to speak through them. The absolute marginalization of the indigenous peoples is a fact, as is sophisticated militarization. These have been the most significant ingredients in the silent war.

  Rigoberta Menchu

  War, Media, People

  Source: www.indians.org

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• In a country where nature has been so lavish and where we have been so spendthrift of indigenous beauty, to set aside a few rivers in their natural state should be considered an obligation.

  Frank Church

  Country, Rivers, Environmental

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• As Indigenous peoples, we know there is more to the world. We know spirits exist. We know as women, because we're especially attuned to this kind of knowledge, that spirits exist and have a presence in our lives. Some of us are gifted and can communicate with the spirit world. Not everyone has that gift and can perceive the borders between the living and the dead and our society actively discourages us of exploring the knowledge of what many of us have already always known in our cultures.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Borders, Culture, World

  "The Rumpus Interview With Sandra Cisneros". Interview with Olivia, January 13, 2016.

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• In my view, the Western model of influencing the development of third world countries is doomed to failure. The West does not understand how to deal with states that no longer have any authority and are threatened by dissolution. Their efforts failed in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. They are simply not capable of promoting the indigenous economy. Many billions of dollars flooded into Afghanistan, but without any significant effect.

  Ahmed Rashid

  Country, Effort, World

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Many years ago, I started a foundation [Wayuu Taya Foundation] to help improve the life of Latin American indigenous people, providing them with food, medical attention, education, and also focusing on sustainability.

  Patricia Velasquez

  Latin, Years, People

  "Patricia Velasquez - Supermodel, Actor and Author". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, nicheandnook.com. October 3, 2015.

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• As people who are women, who are Indigenous and live on Indigenous lands, we know, and this is something I understand the older I get, that they don't visit the same way the postman may visit but they do visit. They visit in ways that our modern society often disregards and considers immaterial or unreal.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Land, People, May

  "The Rumpus Interview With Sandra Cisneros". Interview with Olivia, therumpus.net. January 13, 2016.

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

  Michael Longley

  Art, Might, Firsts

  Scottish Review of Books Interview, www.scottishreviewofbooks.org. October 19, 2009.

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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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• 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

  Mother, Gun, Israel

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• If you're not smart enough to know what Fidel meant during the Cuban revolution, that - when they were on the Granma - Fidel was already a rock star in Cuba, and how important that was to the indigenous population, then you're not paying attention.

  Steven Soderbergh

  Stars, Smart, Rocks

  Source: therumpus.net

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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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• [Jazz] is a music of freedom and wonder. It's our indigenous art form, and I'm still blessed to travel around the world and people lay out the carpet for us, so it's quite touching.

  Charles Lloyd

  Art, Blessed, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Intellectual traditions emerging from populations that have always been the constitutive other in the development of the properly free citizen - indigenous people, populations labeled physically or mentally unfit, black people, migrants, women, prisoners - have always produced robust critiques of the what Dylan Rodriguez calls "white bourgeois freedom."

  Dean Spade

  White, People, Black

  "On Normal Life". Interview with Natalie Oswin, societyandspace.org. January 15, 2014.

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• Brambles, in particular, protect and nourish young fruit trees, and on farms bramble clumps (blackberry or one of its related cultivars) can be used to exclude deer and cattle from newly set trees. As the trees (apple, quince, plum, citrus, fig) age, and the brambles are shaded out, hoofed animals come to eat fallen fruit, and the mature trees (7 plus years old) are sufficiently hardy to withstand browsing. Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.

  Bill Mollison

  Animal, Years, Apples

  "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual". Book by Bill Mollison, 1988.

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• The most dangerous thing is a bored teenager. They have the stigma of being Indigenous, Aboriginal, and all the trappings that come with it. The connection does come a lot more from those kids, desert or not. They're stepping out into the world.

  Warwick Thornton

  Teenager, Kids, Bored

  Source: aboriginalartandculture.wordpress.com

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