33 quotes
There is a permanent wilderness in the blood of an Indian, a wilderness that will endure as long as the grass grows, the wind blows, the rivers flow, and one Indian woman remains alive.
The Sacred Hoop (1986)
Democracy by coercion is hardly democracy, in any language, and to some Indians recognizing that fact, the threat of extinction is preferable to the ignominy of enslavement in their own land.
The Sacred Hoop (1986)
You can take the Indian out of Indian country but you can’t take the Indian out of the Indian.
The Sacred Hoop (1986)
No people is broken until the heart of its women is on the ground. Then they are broken. Then will they die.
The Sacred Hoop (1986)
The true nature of being is magical and that the proper duty of the creatures, the land, and human beings is to live in harmony with what is.
The Sacred Hoop (1986)
Indians believe that the basic unit of consciousness is the All Spirit, the living fact of intelligence from which all other perceptions arise and derive their power.
The Sacred Hoop (1986)
Our heart is in the sky. We understand that woman is the sun and the earth: she is grandmother; she is mother; she is Thought, Wisdom, Dream, Reason, Tradition, Memory, Deity, and Life itself.
The Sacred Hoop (1986)
Myth is a story of a vision; it is a presentation of that vision told in terms of the vision’s symbols, characters, chronology, and import. It is a vehicle of transmission, of sharing, of renewal, and as such plays an integral part in the ongoing psychic life of a people.
The Sacred Hoop (1986)
We are busily stealing the thunder back, so it can empower the fires of life we tend, have always tended, as it was ever meant to.
The Sacred Hoop (1986)
We are the dead and the witnesses to death of hundreds of thousands of our people, of the water, the air, the animals and forests and grassy lands that sustained them and us not so very long ago.
The Sacred Hoop (1986)
Violating taboos is very dangerous to all life, and while most Americans can blithely avoid the immediate consequences of disrespect, the human community over most of the world pays a very high price for our violations.
Grandmothers of The Light: A Medicine Woman's Sourcebook (1991)
Indians endure—both in the sense of living through something so complete in its destructiveness that the mere presence of survivors is a testament to the human will to survive and in the sense of duration or longevity.
The Sacred Hoop (1986)
The cultural bias of the translator inevitably shapes his or her perception of the materials being translated, often in ways that he or she is unaware of. Culture is fundamentally a shaper of perception, after all, and perception is shaped by culture in many subtle ways. In short, it’s hard to see the forest when you’re a tree.
The Sacred Hoop (1986)