Quotes About Heritage

Corn, beans, and squash are as constantly wedded in Indian cooking today as they were in the past. Sometimes meat is added: for the early Indians that meat would often have been puppy.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

My grandmothers were strong. They followed plows and bent to toil. They moved through fields sowing seed. They touched the earth and grain grew. They were full of sturdiness and singing. My grandmothers were strong. My grandmothers were full of memories Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay With veins rolling roughly over quick hands They have many clean words to say. My grandmothers were strong. Why am I not as they?

I realized Grant would not say kaddish for her, so I did, for the next year. As I was reciting the words, which were nonsense to me, day after day, just rhythmic syllables, I began to realize I needed to learn Hebrew. It was maddening and embarrassing that I had no idea at all what I was saying every day, facing east and thinking of my mother whose face I would never see again except in dreams -- in dreams again and again.

I call it Negroland because I still find "Negro" a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations; for social constructs and street corner flaunts. A tonal-language word whose meaning shifts as setting and context shift, as history twists, lurches, advances, and stagnates. As capital letters appear to enhance its dignity; as other nomenclatures

Traveling with more than a hundred men, from engineers, cartographers, and geologists to astronomers, meteorologists, and botanists, as well as soldiers and guides, Whipple trudged through present-day Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, into what would become Arizona, on a path that vaguely foreshadowed today's Route 66. The group was guided along the way by Indians — Creeks, Shawnees, and Zunis. But it was the Mohaves who would lead Whipple on the final leg of the journey.2 On

History calls them a defeated people, but the Metis do not feel defeated, and that is what is important. Today, as in the old days, they play their fiddles, sing, dance, and tell their children the old stories. They work hard, as they have always done. They do not mind when they are called Metis, halfbreeds, mixed bloods, Canadians or bois-brules. They know who they are: 'Ka tip aim soot chic' -- the people who own themselves" (40).

We soon got the idea that 'Italian' meant something inferior, and a barrier was erected between children of Italian origin and their parents. This was the accepted process of Americanization," Covello reflected in his memoir The Heart Is the Teacher. "We were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents.

At the heart of being a second-generation American meant feeling the shame of your heritage and the sting of family betrayal, creating an inner turmoil from which one never fully escaped.

My parents were both from Scotland, but had been resident in Lower Canada some time before their marriage, which took place in Montreal and in that city I spent most of my life.

No matter what you study, the thing that you know best is what you grew up with.

I love where I'm from. I don't live there because of the circumstances, but all my family is there. It's what's inside, it's not what's outside that determines the culture and the feeling.

Was it her imagination, or did everyone in town have roots that went back to the beginning of time, complete with ancestral home and pedigree? Was one of those pedigrees hers? Were some of her roots here in this bayside town? Jamie

I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.

This anthology is a testament to American Indian consciousness continuing to circulate, regardless of past or present genocidal attempts, whether cerebral, endemic, systematic, or otherwise.

A degree from UC Berkeley will never change the fact that I cannot understand my grandfather when he asks for more coffee." —Esther G. Belin (Navajo) from In the Cycle of the Whirl. L

I come from a long line of madwomen, and of this I am proud.

I say I'm Metis like it's an apology and he says, 'mmh,' like he forgives me like he's got a big heart and mine's pumping diluted blood

After all it is not what you make, it is what you keep or pass on.

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.

Cajun is country food by farmers and fisherman that arrived in Louisiana from Acadiana, Canada.

The duty of a good Cuisinier is to transmit to the next generation everything he has learned and experienced.

The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it.

No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.