Native Quotes - Page 14

• All distinctions of birth or of rank have been abolished. All citizens, whether native or adopted, are placed upon terms of precise equality. All are entitled to equal rights and equal protection.

  James K. Polk

  Rights, Citizens, Birth

  85 Copy quote

• It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the continuities of life are astonishingly complex, and cannot take place in islands of semiwilderness like the national parks.

  William Kittredge

  Islands, Continuity Of Life, Environmental

  11 Copy quote

• Native communities are focal points for the excrement of industrial society.

  Winona LaDuke

  Community, Environmental, Pollution

  7 Copy quote

• When you look at the Pueblo communities along the Rio Grande, when you talk to the Navajo people, the Ute people, and certainly the native peoples of California who still have their communities intact, it is what they have always known: that we are not apart from nature but a part of it.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  California, People, Community

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Teachers and librarians can be the most effective advocates for diversifying children's and young adult books. When I speak to publishers, they're going to expect me to say that I would love to see more books by Native American authors and African-American authors and Arab-American authors. But when a teacher or librarian says this to publishers, it can have a profound effect.

  Pat Mora

  Teacher, Children, Book

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'd like to invoke the Native American Navajo because their word for road is used as a verb. Their whole relationship to road has to do with how you travel it, who you are traveling it with, what the environment might be, where you're headed, in what direction, the weather and so on.

  Anne Waldman

  Native American, Weather, Verbs

  Source: logosjournal.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians (and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people) are carrying around is random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Native American, Mean, Dna

  "Ask the Author Live: Elizabeth Kolbert on Neanderthals". The New Yorker interview, www.newyorker.com. August 12, 2011.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have always been interested in mythology and history. The more I read, the more I realized that there have always been people at the edges of history that we know very little about. I wanted to use them in a story and bring them back into the public's consciousness. Similarly with mythology: everyone knows some of the Greek or Roman legends, and maybe some of the Egyptian or Norse stories too, but what about the other great mythologies: the Celtic, Chinese, Native American?

  Michael Scott

  Native American, People, Greek

  4 Copy quote

• As we maintain the vigil of peace, we must remember that justice is a vigil, too - a vigil we must keep in our own streets and schools and among the lives of all our people - so that those who died here on their native soil shall not have died in vain.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  School, Justice, People

  Remarks at Gettysburg on Civil Rights, teachingamericanhistory.org. May 30, 1963.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There's this whole notion of being an Indian - the idea that "warrior" is a positive description of us [Indians as native Americans]. When an Indian guy does well, he's a warrior, even now. He could be a computer salesman, but if he does well, he's a warrior. I'm not a pacifist by any measure, but I'm also fully aware that the reasons I might go to war could be very dubious.

  Sherman Alexie

  War, Native American, Ideas

  "Sherman Alexie: Don’t Call Me Warrior". Interview with Kiera Butler, www.motherjones.com. November/December 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.

  Henry David Thoreau

  War, Native American, Hunting

  Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.247

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Tired, Men, Issues

  Interview with Margery Fee, canlit.ca. September 1, 2014.

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• We spent a month in Japan last year, a week in Istanbul for the United Nations, and nearly three months in my native Nova Scotia, where my two brothers have homes; and we'll go back there this summer.

  Robert MacNeil

  Summer, Brother, Home

  8 Copy quote

• Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north.

  Jared Diamond

  Animal, Literature, West

  7 Copy quote

• We use a Native American tradition of the talking stick. You sit and pass it around and whoever has the stick has to talk. Some people just hold it. Others really share.

  Lisa Bonet

  Native American, Talking, Uprising

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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.

  Jared Diamond

  Animal, Pigs, Camels

  86 Copy quote

• We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.

  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Nature, Native Language, Lines

  "Science and Linguistics" (1946)

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• My beautiful, my own
  My only Venice-this is breath! Thy breeze
  Thine Adrian sea-breeze, how it fans my face!
  Thy very winds feel native to my veins,
  And cool them into calmness!

  Lord Byron

  Beautiful, Sea Breeze, Wind

  Lord Byron (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Lord Byron (Illustrated)”, p.1411, Delphi Classics

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The romantic myth of the artist says that you are the Source. I have no illusion about that. Native Americans don't believe they are the Source. They have access to the Source. Endless access. But don't get confused.

  Tori Amos

  Art, Confused, Believe

  Tori Amos, Ann Powers (2008). “Tori Amos: Piece by Piece”, p.2, Crown Archetype

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what 'was' and 'were,' we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.

  Buffy Sainte-Marie

  Native American, Kids, Usa

  9 Copy quote

• I like Celtic folk music, Native American music, and any kind of early music. There isn't a lot of music that I don't like... except for Show Tunes.

  Terri Windling

  Music, Native American, Tunes

  7 Copy quote

• And Americans realized that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing.

  Dennis Banks

  People, Moral, Standing Alone

  51 Copy quote

• The era of wild apples will soon be over. I wander through old orchards of great extent, now all gone to decay, all of native fruit which for the most part went to the cider mill. But since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no wild apples, such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up among them, are set out. I fear that he who walks over these hills a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Apples, Decay, Cider

  Henry David Thoreau, Joseph O. Valentine, Thoreau Society (2001). “Thoreau on Land: Nature's Canvas”, p.77, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into a second native land of the mind for me.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Land, Feelings, Mind

  Alexis de Tocqueville (1979). “Journeys to England and Ireland”, p.13, Transaction Publishers

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are referred to in the newspapers as blacks and African Americans must include Europe and Native America.

  Ishmael Reed

  Past, Europe, America

  Ishmael Reed (1995). “Airing Dirty Laundry”, Perseus Books

  5 Copy quote

  Show source