Quotes About Culture

Consciousness - what we call our identity- is always unstable, always at risk of sabotage from the unacceptable feelings of loss and desire which we have to repress into our unconscious in order to conform to the demands of culture.

Tolstói viajou duas vezes ao exterior, mas estava enraizado de corpo e alma na Rússia.

The history of transformational phenomena—the Internet, for example, or paradigm shifts in science, or the spread of a new religion—suggests that transformation happens less by arguing cogently for something new than by generating active, ongoing practices that shift a culture's experience of the basis for reality.

Irene nodded. She couldn't say it but she knew she was destroying a world. A little culture. It was the known and safe way of behaving in the family. All the rituals, wrong or sick, it didn't matter, good or bad, would be useless. All the strategies. They knew the familiar treacheries, but now they would be open to new dangers.

They drew their water from sloughs or tiny springs, lighted their homes with kerosene. Yet here they were, each person, presenting themselves in worn immaculate clothing. As Indians had for generation after generation, they were attempting to understand a white man reading endlessly from a sheaf of papers.

I've been told by a couple of knowledgeable elders that you should not wear red at a funeral, or for a year after someone close to you dies. Red is the fire, the doorway to the spirit world. Who knows how long until they are done walking. When the dead see flashes of red as they pass on their journey, they are confused. They think a door is opening and it distracts them from their task, which is to reach a place where we are nothing to them.

Thomas Wazhashk: I am not sure what study the information about our advancement, financially speaking, was based on. But I will tell you it was faulty. Most of our people live on dirt floors, no electricity, no plumbing. I haul my own water like most Indians in this room. I consider myself advanced only because I read and write. Should I not be an Indian person because I read and write?

Words The word used for ejaculation—baashkizige—is also used for shooting off a gun. The word used for condom—biinda'oojigan—means gun case. Millie entered these words into her notebook. Fascinating.

she realized that here in Washington she'd seen people shot, a thing she'd never seen before, even on the reservation, a place considered savage by the rest of the country.

But also, he resisted the idea that his endless work, the warmth of his family, and this identity that got him followed in stores and ejected from restaurants and movies, this way he was, for good or bad, was just another thing for a white man to acquire. "No," he said gently, "you could not be an Indian. But we could like you anyway.

In English there was a word for every object. In Ojibwe there was a word for every action. English had more shades of personal emotion, but Ojibwe had more shades of family relationships.

Things started going wrong, as far as Zhaanat was concerned, when places everywhere were named for people—political figures, priests, explorers—and not for the real things that happened in these places—the dreaming, the eating, the death, the appearance of animals.

They haven't got to you. They'll come around yet. It's in their religion to change Indians into whites." "I thought that was a government job." "It's in their holy book. The more we pray, the lighter we get." "I could stand to drop a few pounds." "Not that kind of lighter," Martin laughed. "They think if you follow their ways your skin will bleach out. They call it lightsome and gladsome.

The thing is, most of us Indigenous people do have to consciously pull together our identities. We've endured centuries of being erased and sentenced to live in a replacement culture.

His generation would have to define themselves. Who was an Indian? What? Who, who, who? And how? How should being an Indian relate to this country that had conquered and was trying in every way possible to absorb them?

What was it that made the black robes desperate to gather up the spirits of the Anishinaabeg for their god? Fleur decided that the chimookoman god was greedy, which made sense as all the people she had seen of their kind certainly were, grabbing up Anishinaabeg land, hunting down every last animal and wasting half the meat, swiping all they could.

Bernadette thought she could trust young Nector Kashpaw because he'd been exposed to the withering light of the government school.

Sure, it's not good for you, but Asema says it's grandma food, 'bad for the arteries but good for the heart.

Short Perfect Novels Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabal Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haien Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje Euphoria, by Lily King The Red and the Black, by Stendhal Luster, by Raven Leilani Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy

The Uninvited Guests, by Sadie Jones Ceremonies of the Damned, by Adrian C. Louis Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice Father of Lies, by Brian Evenson The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead Asleep, by Banana Yoshimoto The Hatak Witches, by Devon A.

Many books and movies had in their plots some echoes of my secret experiences with Flora. Places haunted by unquiet Indians were standard. Hotels were disturbed by Indians whose bones lay underneath the basements and floors -- a neat psychic excavation of American unease with its brutal history.

Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong, by Paul Chaat Smith

Boarding School Seasons, by Brenda J. Child They Called It Prairie Light, by K. Tsianina Lomawaima To Be a Water Protector, by Winona LaDuke