Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just do not dare express themselves as we did.
-Sophie Scholl, The White Rose Society
Hold on to what is good, even if it’s a handful of earth. Hold on to what you believe, even if it’s a tree that stands by itself. Hold on to what you must do, even if it’s a long way from here. Hold on to your life, even if it’s easier to let go. Hold on to my hand, even if I’ve gone away from you.
-Pueblo Prayer
American Southwest
One of the things that I find is that people will fall back on how they were raised and what happened to them, saying, Well, my father was a cruel man, and I have low self-esteem, and I can’t comprehend what you are teaching me about love and kindness and giving. And I say, Do not fall back on that kind of garbage. The Creator gave you a sound mind and an incredible spirit and a way of being so that you can do anything right now! You can change that attitude same as you wake up in the morning and it’s a new day. Your mind and everything else can be new. I’ve lived through hardships and horror, and I’m a loving, caring, and giving person because I choose to be that way. I choose to listen to the other side to guide me. We all have the ability with our spirit to change things right now.
-Rose Auger
Woodland Cree, Canada
The great beautiful thing i learned from the Lakota people is “mitakuye oyasin”: all my relations. When they say that, the way it was explained to me, it’s so beautiful. it’s so immense because it includes everyone who was ever born, or even unborn, in the universe, all the two-legged, the four-legged, birds, animals, rocks, and everyone who’s here today. The trees, plants, mountains, sun, moon, stars, and everyone who ever will be born! How immense can a statement be? All my relations. I marvel at the beauty of that word; it’s so powerful.
-Janet McCloud
Tulalip tribe, Washington State
Ideas of superiority, delusions of grandeur and megalomania probably emerged with the first consciousness of man that his racial group was different from others. Wherever we meet the superiority theories, in antiquity or modern times, they are all extraordinarily alike. They constitute the faith of the unenlightened, maintained, of course, by the stupidity of the many and cunning of the few.
-Franz Boas
Anthropologist
We have to articulate what we mean by change, define what we perceive as essential to our way of life. We have to refuse to accept blindly other’s perceptions of progress.
-Patricia Locke
Lakota Indian
Young white kids come to me, New Age kids, and oh god, I love them, but sometimes they are a handful. They come to me and say, “Oh, Janet, please, please, you got to help me. I’ve got to get back to nature.” I say, “Do you need a laxative, or what?” That’s crazy, how can you get back to nature? We are nature! We are a part of nature, we are part of this earth, we are a part of everything that lives. We are a part of you and me and this air that connects us all together. There is no esoteric chant or mantra or anything that’s going to give these New Agers instant spiritualization. “Give me a pill, give me a chant, I need to be spiritual, right now!” I say you have to learn to be a human being first. If you don’t know how to be a human being, you’ll never be spiritual.
-Janet McCloud
Tulalip tribe, Washington state
The Human has been possessed by a creative urge since very ancient times. Forever impelled to experiment and explore, it is as if he senses something within him which he must extract and examine so that, seeing it, he will know something of his own personality.
-Ivar Lissner
Ethnologist
One afternoon during a visit to a neighboring village we observed a most unusual practice: a group of about fifty young women (and some of their children) had formed a circle around a single older woman. They were dressing the happy woman in colorful beads and cloth and singing to her. They paraded her through the village, chanting a beautiful chorus to her… After a few more songs and cheers and a brief dance form the delighted older woman, the group quietly disbanded and all went back to their respective huts, their soft laughter trailing as they slowly disappeared. When we inquired about this ceremony, we were told that from time to time the young and middle-aged women of the village select and older woman who is single or widowed and pay her a special tribute by decorating her in bright colors, parading her throughout the villages, and singing songs to her that say she is still beautiful and still loved by the people of the village. These compassionate, so-called primitive people seemed in many ways so much more advanced than many of their counterparts in the United States.
-S. Allen Counter
I Sought My Brother, On the Bush-African-Americans in the interior of Surinam
South America
He looked upon us as sophisticated children — smart but not wise. We knew many things and much that is false. He knew nature, which is always true. His were the qualities of character that last forever. He was kind; he had courage and self-restraint, and though all had been taken from him, there was no bitterness in his heart. His soul was that of a child, his mind that of a philosopher.
-Dr. S. T. Pope
Ishi’s closest friend, in Ishi: Last of the Yahi tribe
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