Native Quotes - Page 16

• Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Balance, Pieces

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• We are not better than native born Americans, and of course not smarter. We’ve just been to the last stop of this bus.

  Sergei Dovlatov

  Lasts, Born, Bus

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• During the election, I had three male opponents and we went into a runoff. The front runner for the men was a native of Dallas who had run at large before, but I had a higher profile than him from my community service.

  Eddie Bernice Johnson

  Running, Men, Community

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• In the present, the way benevolence is expressed is in conceptualizing the Native as a historical relic; US people have to be constantly reminded that there are still existent Indigenous peoples and communities in North America, but whether left or right, recent immigrant or descendants of settlers, even descendants of enslaved Africans, the Native presence is not a consideration in the day to day life of individuals and municipal, state and national governments.

  Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  America, Government, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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

  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Nature, Native Language, Lines

  "Science and Linguistics" (1946)

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• I think there's a good case for antinatalism. Stephen Hawking has told us recently that we must colonise space to survive, not long after telling us to beware of aliens because they'll probably just do to us as the conquistadors did to the native peoples of the Americas. So . . . exactly why do we want to go on and on, to go forth and multiply in a hostile final frontier? Why?

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Thinking, Space, Long

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.

  Robert Bly

  Native American, Thinking, Culture

  Source: www.utne.com

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• Our agreements on creating the conditions for preparing a peace treaty [with Japan] should be rooted in this trust. This may be achieved, for example, by large-scale economic activities that will also cover the Kuril Islands. It may be achieved by solving purely humanitarian issues, for instance, unhindered visa-free travel by former residents of the Southern Kuril Islands to where they used to live: visiting cemeteries, native places and so on.

  Vladimir Putin

  Creating, Issues, Islands

  Source: www.rt.com

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• In Hollywood Westerns even in the Thirties and Forties, history was mythologized to accommodate some kind of moral code. And what really affects me deeply is when you see it taken to the extent where Native Americans become mythical people.

  Jim Jarmusch

  Taken, Native American, People

  Source: www.jonathanrosenbaum.net

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• In one of his final acts in office, President Obama shortened the sentences of 209 prisoners, pardoned 64 individuals .The list included Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, longtime imprisoned Puerto Rican independence activist Oscar López Rivera and retired U.S. Marine Corps General James Cartwright. But missing from the list is 71-year-old Native American activist Leonard Peltier.

  Amy Goodman

  Native American, Marine, Army

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• The creative core of New York has never been native New Yorkers; it's people from all over the world.

  Steve Earle

  New York, People, Creative

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• I know the activists I deal with, we sort of try and check each other to make sure that we haven't gone native, that you come to Washington thinking it's a cesspool, you don't want to end up thinking it's really a hot tub and getting used to it. So that's something one has to keep an eye on all the time.

  Grover Norquist

  Eye, Thinking, Trying

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• We must always embrace individual liberty and enforce the constitutional rights of all Americans-rich and poor, immigrant and native, black and white.

  Rand Paul

  Black And White, Rights, Liberty

  "Sen. Rand Paul's Speech at Howard University". www.realclearpolitics.com. April 10, 2013.

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• There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

  Steven Pinker

  Intellectual, Guilt, Western Culture

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• She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone save her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Moving, Soul, Feelings

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• I wonder what it felt to move to a country where you didn't grow up. I had thought about that often since my sister got married. Do you become a character in a story native to that land, or do you, somewhere in your heart, want to return to your homeland.

  Banana Yoshimoto

  Country, Growing Up, Moving

  Banana Yoshimoto (1995). “N.P.: A Novel”, p.87, Simon and Schuster

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• One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

  Wallace Stegner

  Home, Optimistic, Quality

  "Wallace Stegner, the Rural West, and Me" by John McChesney, web.stanford.edu. July 05, 2011.

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• One of our people in the Native community said the difference between white people and Indians is that Indian people know they are oppressed but don’t feel powerless. White people don’t feel oppressed, but feel powerless. Deconstruct that disempowerment. Part of the mythology that they’ve been teaching you is that you have no power. Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.

  Winona LaDuke

  Teaching, White, Differences

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• And in "Elbow Room" the cast sings the glories of westward expansion in the United States, which involved the murder of native peoples and the violent conquest of half of Mexico. Among the lines in the song is one that intones, "There were plenty of fights / To win land right / But the West was meant to be / It was our Manifest Destiny?" Let it suffice to say that happily belting out a tune in which one merrily praises genocide is always easier for those whose ancestors weren't on the receiving end of the deal.

  Tim Wise

  Song, Fighting, Winning

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• Everywhere is the center of the world. Everything is sacred.

  Black Elk

  Native American, World, Sacred

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• All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new.

  Sherman Alexie

  Spiritual, Native American, Thinking

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• What we did in the 1960s and early 1970s was raise the consciousness of white America that this government has a responsibility to Indian people. That there are treaties; that textbooks in every school in America have a responsibility to tell the truth. An awareness reached across America that if Native American people had to resort to arms at Wounded Knee, there must really be something wrong. And Americans realized that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing. From that, our own people began to sense the pride.

  Dennis Banks

  School, Responsibility, Native American

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• I certainly don't object to [writers] trying to imagine the lives of other societies, but you have to do it with a certain amount of humility and respect. If it were not for the ethnographic material that had been collected by missionaries and anthropologists and so forth, much of past Native American society would no longer be accessible. What I object to is making kitsch of things that are very serious.

  Michael Dorris

  Humility, Native American, Past

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• It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

  Louise Erdrich

  Writing, People, Impossible

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• It is my land, my home, my father's land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among those mountains. If this could be I might die in peace, feeling that my people, placed in their native homes, would increase in numbers, rather than diminish as at present, and that our name would not become extinct.

  Geronimo

  Father, Home, Land

  Geronimo, S. M. Barrett (2016). “Geronimo's Story of His Life: As Told to S. M. Barrett”, p.105, Open Road Media

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