Quotes About Heritage

My parents came from poor people who came from poor people who came from poor people, all the way back to the very first poor people.

I had left the tribe, and I was being punished for that.

And finally this, when the sun was falling down so beautiful we didn't have time to give it a name, she held the child born of white mother and red father and said,' Both sides of this baby are beautiful'.

but I know somebody must be thinking about us because if they weren't we'd just disappear just like those Indians who used to climb the pueblos. Those Indians disappeared with food still cooking in the pot and air waiting to be breathed and they turned into birds or dust or the blue of the sky or the yellow of the sun. There they were and suddenly they were forgotten for just a second and for just a second nobody thought about them and then they were gone.

An Indian's wealth   Is determined by what they lose And not by what they save.

I realized that my mother had not taught us the tribal language because she knew her children would not be strong enough to carry the responsibility of being the last fluent speakers. She protected us from that spiritual burden. She protected us from that loneliness.

she braided my sister's hair with hands that smelled deep roots buried in the earth she told me the old stories how time never mattered when she died they gave me her clock

Sherman Alexie

More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.

Because I want to be remembered.

What is it like to be a Spokane Indian without wild salmon? It is like being a Christian if Jesus had never rolled back the stone and risen from his tomb.

Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear.

I was dancing for my soul and for the soul of my tribe. I was dancing for what we Indians used to be and who we might become again.

If you want to make a white man cry, despite the amount of time it's been since he last wept aloud, then all you have to do is employ "baseball" and "father" in three consecutive sentences.

A man doesn't grow up black in the USA without knowing a lot of crazy black folks, without being born to and giving birth to the breakable and broken.

Even Crazy Horse, the famous Oglala warrior, was named for his father. But nobody called him Junior, for rather logical reasons. "Look! There's the most feared and mysterious Indian of all time! Behold! It is Junior!

Perhaps everybody, indigenous and not, lives on their own kind of reservation.

Hey, Dad," I said. "What do Indians have to be so thankful for?" "We should give thanks that they didn't kill all of us." We laughed like crazy.

What greater grief than the loss of one's native land?

We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We weren't trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture.

My mother and grandmother's conversation doesn't belong in the cloud.   That old song is too sacred for the Internet.   So

After all, one doesn't choose his culture nearly as much as one trips and falls into it.

Why don't you call somebody with the Coeur d'Alene tribe? A historian or somebody? Or be really crazy and ask one of our cousins what they know." "I can't," I said. "I'm too embarrassed to let them know how much I don't know." "They're sure gonna

surrounded by five hundred years of convenient lies.