Quotes About Native cultures

Until the passage of the Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, it was illegal for Native citizens to practice our cultures. This included the making and sharing of songs and stories. Songs and stories in one culture are poetry and prose in another. They are intrinsic to cultural sovereignty. To write or create as a Native person was essentially illegal.

Cautionary stories of the consequences of taking too much are ubiquitous in Native cultures, but it's hard to recall a single one in English. Perhaps this helps to explain why we seem to be caught in a trap of overconsumption, which is as destructive to ourselves as to those we consume.

It's the logical consequence of removing valuable artefacts from native cultures. This sort of pandering to American greed, at the expense of the dignity and self-determination of the cultures concerned, is certain to cause long-term results—

Like Las Casas, Bancroft believed that Indians had existed in societies without change—except that Bancroft regarded this timelessness as an indication of sloth, not innocence.

More than that, in the five hundred years of European OCCUPATION, Native cultures have already driven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient.

As did every expedition leader, Álvarez de Pineda surely kept a log. In it would have been the only first-person observations of native cultures of the upper Gulf at the time of contact. According to secondhand accounts, he came across as many as forty native groups, which would have exhibited the fullness of aboriginal life, thousands of years old, before the sweeping carnage of European pathogens, biological imports transported on every ship crossing the Atlantic