Explain to me
please, when did the change take place, from owners to wards of the selfish
state? Write down the reasons why the land under our feet became foreign soil
in perpetuity. (Chief Lindsay
Marshall)
Ultimately,
peacemaking is about healing. You cannot
order someone to heal or force someone to heal.
Fines and jail time are not tools for healing. Healing depends on a process that moves
people from "head-thinking" to "heart-thinking". (Robert
Yazzie, chapter: Indigenous Peoples and Postcolonial Colonialism)
Post-colonialism
will not arrive for Indigenous peoples until they are able to make their own
decisions. Colonialism remains when
national legislatures and policy makers make decisions for Indigenous peoples,
tell them what they can and cannot do, refuse to support them, or effectively
shut them out of the process. (Robert Yazzie, chapter: Indigenous Peoples and
Postcolonial Colonialism)
A great deal of
non-Indigenous communication is designed to compel the listener to accept the
position taken by the speaker. (Robert Yazzie, chapter: Indigenous Peoples and
Postcolonial Colonialism)
Culture comprises a
society's philosophy about the nature of reality, the values that flow from
this philosophy, and the social customs that embody these values. Any individual within a culture is going to
have his or her own personal interpretation of the collective cultural code;
however, the individual's worldview has its roots in the culture -- that is, in
the society's shared philosophy, values, and customs. (Leroy Little Bear, chapter: Jagged Worldviews
Colliding)
If everything is
animate, then everything has spirit and knowledge. If everything has spirit and knowledge, then
all are like me. If all are like me,
then all are my relations. (Leroy Little Bear, chapter: Jagged Worldviews
Colliding)
Noninterference is
respect for others' wholeness, totality, and knowledge. (Leroy Little Bear, chapter: Jagged Worldviews
Colliding)
For all its litany
of devastation and deprivation, postcolonial theory ultimately comes to rest on
this belief: that there are things that have survived, that they do have power,
that the margins are in fact the centres, and that the tide alternatives that
colonialism has somehow persuaded us to accept -- between the worthy and the
worthless, for example -- are extremely hazardous and in every sense ultimately
unholy. And that, if we don't get
understanding this, then we'll be living not a riddle, where two truths
co-exist, but a lie, where we give up on trying to reconcile them. (J Edward Chamberlin, chapter: From Hand to
Mouth: The Postcolonial Politics of Oral and Written Traditions)
For Pueblo people,
pottery is a prayer, realized in a physical form. (Gregory Cajete, chapter:
Indigenous Knowledge: The Pueblo Metaphor of Indigenous Education)
Knowledge is like a
cloud. Clouds come into being, they
form, and then they go out of being again somewhere else. The maps that we have in our heads as
Indigenous people are inherited and enfolded within our genes. Many Indian people and elders have said that
we don’t lose knowledge. Knowledge, like a cloud, comes in and out of
being. Knowledge comes to us when we
need it. It evolves and develops. (Gregory Cajete, chapter: Indigenous Knowledge: The Pueblo Metaphor of
Indigenous Education)
Indigenous knowledge
is derived from communal experience, from environmental observation, from
information received, and from the visions attained through ceremonies and
communion with spirits of nature. (Gregory Cajete, chapter: Indigenous Knowledge: The Pueblo Metaphor of
Indigenous Education)
Cognitive
imperialism, also known as cultural racism, is the imposition of one worldview
on a people who have an alternative worldview, with the implication that the
imposed worldview is superior to the alternative worldview. (Marie Battiste, chapter: Maintaining an
Aboriginal Identity, Language, and Culture in Modern Society)
Western scholars are
gradually realizing how important Aboriginal knowledge may be to the future
survival of our world. (Marie Battiste,
chapter: Maintaining an Aboriginal Identity, Language, and Culture in Modern Society)
Confronting cultural
racism in Canada is a difficult task because cultural racism cannot be
contained to any one portion of the state. (Marie Battiste, chapter: Maintaining
an Aboriginal Identity, Language, and Culture in Modern Society)
In most Aboriginal
languages, there are no fixed categories of objects, such as sun, wind, natural
resources, minerals, plants, animals, or peoples. These categories are English translations of
Aboriginal categories of being that describe the external patterns and
interactions of life-giving forces. (James (Sakej) Youngblood Henderson,
chapter: Ayukpachi: Empowering Aboriginal Thought)
In the Aboriginal
worldview, there are diverse ways of knowing: those of thinking, feeling, and
willing. Each is interwoven yet
distinct. Thinking is part of the flux,
feelings are a particular location in the flux, and willing is using thinking
and feelings. (James (Sakej) Youngblood Henderson, chapter: Ayukpachi:
Empowering Aboriginal Thought)
Aboriginal ways of
knowing are focused on caring about the world. (James (Sakej) Youngblood
Henderson, chapter: Ayukpachi: Empowering Aboriginal Thought)
Love is something
that you can leave behind when you die.
It's that powerful. (John (Fire)
Lame Deer)
