From everyday is a good day, ed. by wilma mankiller
“so much has happened to contribute to my learning these past few years. This knowledge is there for all of us if we are receptive to becoming connected to and responsible for the sacred beings that are all around us. I believe sacrifice, humility, and suffering provides access to this relatedness. Our people used to live on the edge of survival, always in extreme hardship. As a walking culture, they were so close to everything in the natural world. They knew all of their relatives in the natural world intimately and depended on the spirits of the ancestors to survive. Their prayers, which arose from pain and suffering, were the sincerest form of prayer. They found beauty in hardship and expressed their reverence in their art. They composed ceremonial songs in the face of the cold, biting north wind- songs of gratitude and humility.” - rosalie little thunder
“the main difference I see between the larger society and being Comanche is the value we place on our kinship system. We have a sense of responsibility to one another, and it is reciprocal. Even in the ancient Comanche way, these kinship relationships did not have to be blood kin. The relationships were established and maintained on the basis of what you did for one another. They were based on reciprocity. We even think about animals, the Earth, the Sun, in kinships terms. And when one thinks of others in kinship terms, one has a responsibility for them.
Within that kinship system and frame of reference, we don't accumulate material wealth for ourselves; we accumulate things so we can do well for others. The Comanche have a very flat society. The more honored and privileged you are, the more you have to give back. It is your responsibility to redistribute what you have. In the old ways, most tribal cultures had giveaways, potlatches, or other forms of redistributing their wealth. Giveaways are a form of honoring, and they help keep the community level so that one group or set of families will not be on a higher economic scale than the others. In contemporary times we still give away material goods, but we also give away knowledge, ideas, and resources. It is important to find ways to fit traditional values into our contemporary lives. I sift everything through my Comanche values, and if I can't understand it within the context of my Comanche values, or if it doesn't feel right, it sends up a huge red flag. When I have tried to push my traditional values behind me, I have been less successful. I do well when I am just myself, a Comanche woman. Our young people are trying to figure out how to continue to maintain their traditional values when they live and work away from their communities. It drives me crazy when people say we have to live in two worlds. We can't live in two worlds. We have to live in one world and carry those values with us and live them every day wherever we live. People become dysfunctional when they adopt situational values. You can't live one way in a tribal community and then go out of the community and have a totally different set of values. One has to be creative and think about how to continue to hold onto their traditional values, to be sharing, to be respectful no matter where they are.” -LaDonna Harris
“stories count, footnotes inhibit and control. Too much history is written as if the people of any era were just puppets responding to the great issues of the day. Too many of the biographies concentrate on the important events when the course of daily life has provided the context within which people make their decisions, often based on considerations that have little historical meaning but immense and intense concern for the people around us.” - vine deloria jr.
“when people relearn their language, the first thing they wish to do is pray in it.” -darrell kipp
“if this is what constitutes reality in american culture, it doesn't hold much appeal to the women at this gathering who struggle to remain genuine in a world where material wealth reigns supreme, many people are distant from the natural world, and kindness is perceived as weakness.” -wilma mankiller
“the major differentiating characteristic between tradition-oriented indigenous people and non-tradition oriented people, both indigenous and nonindigenous, is the nature of our spirituality, specifically the role it plays in determining our identity with regard to our way of life and orientation to the world. Though my professional career has focused on indigenous language, my greatest efforts have been explaining who we are as indigenous people. As an educator, this has involved countless hours promoting and defending Native educational methodology and curriculum. Even today, most professional educators have not been properly prepared to work with indigenous, or even culturally diverse, students. Contributing to this deficit in the education profession, our educational philosophy as indigenous people has not been adequately articulated for the general society, which still expects Native students to be educated with national cultural values that are often counter to Native values. Our schools, therefore, have failed to develop our Native human resources that are so vital for Nation building. We need to develop educational policies that respect and integrate indigenous philosophical perspectives.” -octaviana valenzuela trujillo
“The government and the outer community accuse Indian people of losing their culture because they don't speak their language or dress every day in traditional clothing or look like the Italians who play Indians in the movies. Whites don't dress in pilgrim clothing either and are not readily identifiable as Greek or Portuguese or English or Irish. Why then do they insist that all American Indians should look alike or that they can readily identify who is Indian and who is not? Can we readily identify who is Irish? Culture is not race and race is not culture. They can both apply at the same time but not necessarily. . .Though language carries a lot of cultural information, there are other facets to culture, such as slang, humor, gestures, dance, music, art, literature, taboos, and more.” -Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
“sovereignty is the ability to carry out your own direction.” -Audrey Shenandoah
“Sovereignty in an indigenous context implies self-reliance, independence, and self-determination. Autonomy seems to be the common ground we indigenous people seek for our contemporary societies.” -Octaviana Valenzuela Trujillo
“Most of our best leaders are defending the land, wildlife, sacred sites, and protecting our lifeways. To these people, leadership is not about self. They are truly selfless people.” -Rosalie Little Thunder
“Octaviana Velenzuela Trujillo acknowledges she has benefited from the Women's Rights and Civil Rights movements but questions the relevance of mainstream feminism to some indigenous women. She characterizes mainstream feminism as the 'struggle to be recognized primarily as an individual and not as a member of a gender class. This has multiple implications for all women, as well as special implications for indigenous women who consider the traditional values of indigenous cultures paramount to the self-determination of the individual.'” -Wilma Mankiller
“Feminism is a Euro-American response to a misogynist problem created by Euro-Americans.” -Rosalie Little Thunder
“While I am working on my music, poetry, or stories, I am constantly diving down and coming back with amazing things that are much larger than I am. . . The overriding theme of my life has been transformation and how to keep moving, despite the tests.” -Joy Harjo
“the sort of universe anyone has control over is internal.” -Linda Aranaydo
“The most important challenge we face this century is assuring our basic cultural survival within a society that has either denied or actively oppressed the perpetuation of our culture. After nearly two centuries of existence in an oppressive society, many indigenous peoples' sense of survival is constrained within the framework of American values, which promote a lifestyle of physical comfort and convenience at the expense of other human beings and the natural world. It is this long-term oppression that sometimes blinds us to the greater challenge of being responsible for the survival of humanity and all of the relatives. Because we are silenced and devalued, it is much harder to maintain our knowledge system and culture and pass it on to future generations. . . To do things without ishikiei shui, or any expectation of reciprocity, is one of the hardest disciplines to achieve but one with the greatest rewards.” -Rosalie Little Thunder
