Quotes About Heritage

A great-grandmother from the circle pushes her walker up close to the microphone. "It's not just the words that will be lost," she says. "The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It's too beautiful for English to explain." Puhpowee.

It is good to remember that the original woman was herself an immigrant. She fell a long way from her home in the Skyward, leaving behind all who knew her and held her dear. She could never go back.

I love to hear elder Tom Porter hold a circle of listeners in the bowl of his hand.

The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It's too beautiful for English to explain.

Sweetgrass is best planted not by seed, but by putting roots directly in the ground. Thus the plant is passed from hand to earth to hand across years and generations.

But the Mohawk call themselves the Kanienkeha - People of the Flint - and flint does not melt easily into the great American melting pot

my heart grieves for the one who could have told me stories of sweetgrass. All my life I have felt that loss. What was stolen at Carlisle has been a knot of sorrow I've carried like a stone buried in my heart.

The Wisdom of the Elders

Each of us comes from people who were once indigenous. We can reclaim our membership in the cultures of gratitude that formed our old relationships with the living earth.

To be exact, there are twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in the human body, and each chromosome is packed with genes, and each gene holds myriad genetic information," Catherine explained. "My family

Mary had been raised in a family where blood was as thick as tomato sauce.

To have seen Italy without seeing Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything. —GOETHE, ITALIAN JOURNEY

I am all the daughters of my father's house, And all the brothers too. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth Night, ACT 2, SCENE 4

When she reaches the ground, she looks from the old woman to me. A moment of confusion. Then recognition. I know her too, because I've seen traces of her in my face in the mirror. My mother. My a-ma.

When you lose your home country, what do you preserve and what do you abandon?

The government labels the haenyeo a cultural heritage treasure—something dying out that must be preserved, if only in memory. How does it feel to be the last of the last?" If they're academics, they'll want to talk about Jeju's matrifocal culture, explaining, "It's not a matriarchy. Rather, it's a society focused on women.

We may look and act modern in many ways, but we can't escape what we are... obedient chinese daughters.

People keep asking me why I don't return to China. I tell them I can't return to a place I've never been. In

sociedad matrifocal.

My father always said I was a jade maiden and my future husband was a golden boy

Joy doesn't smart-tongue him. It's not because he tries to control her as a proper Chinese father should or that she's an obedient Chinese daughter. Instead, she's like a pearl in his palm - forever precious; to Joy, he's the solid ground on which she walks - forever steady and reliable.

For all the women in my family, for all the lives they've lived

This is how things were: heavyhearted, but done in the traditional manner. THE

I close my eyes. I hear the voices of the past in the wind and in the beating of my heart.