Indigenous Feminism Quotes

Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of. As for hat we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilisations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

An indigenous feminism has been present in every culture in the world and in every period of history since the suppression of women began. ~ Robin Morgan

First off, as has been well stated by many Indigenous Feminists before us, the idea of gender equality did not come from the suffragettes or other so-called "foremothers" of feminist theory. It should also be recognized that although we are still struggling for this thing called "gender equality," it is not actually a framed issue within the feminist realm, but a continuation of the larger tackling of colonialism. So this idea that women of colour all of a sudden realized "we are women," and magically joined the feminist fight actually re-colonizes people for who gender equality and other "feminist" notions is a remembered history and current reality since before Columbus. The mainstream feminist movement is supposed to have started in the early 1900s with women fighting for the right to vote. However, these white women deliberately excluded the struggles of working class women of color and participated in the policy of forced sterilization for Aboriginal women and women with disabilities. Furthermore, the idea that we all need to subscribe to the same theoretical understandings of history is marginalizing. We all have our own truths and histories to live. ~ Erin Konsmo

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex. ~ Valerie Solanas

Do not settle for people who do not appreciate you, who do not know how lucky they are. Remember it is a privilege to be loved by you or even just to be touched by you. And the warmth of another body does not define your worth. ~ Sade Andria Zabala

This is the picture of a woman cast in the role of a learner, a pupil, even a rabbinic student. Quite obviously this is a prohibited role for women in those days and in that culture. Yet Jesus affirms Mary in that role. Martha, however, rebukes her. Martha demands that Jesus order Mary to abandon the pupil role for the more acceptable domestic role of assisting with the dinner preparations. Jesus supports Mary and defends her consciousness-raising act by stating that she has elected a higher choice. ~ John Shelby Spong

Indeed, I propose the idea that confusing strength with masculinity is in truth not a feminist ideal, but a misogynistic idea. He is no friend of woman who says women must act masculine to be equal to men, because that merely makes the word 'feminine' equal 'inferior'. ~ John C. Wright

But if I'm useless only because I haven't been properly educated, is that my fault? ~ Richard Aldington

We should celebrate that many more women are reconfiguring feminism and that grassroots activism is spreading like wildfire and millions of women are waking up to the possibility of taking ownership of our world as fully-entitled human beings
How's can we argue with that? ~ Bernardine Evaristo

Larsson was an active and lifelong feminist, partly for personal reasons but also because he saw that ending gender slavery was as crucial to next-stage evolution as ending race slavery was to the last stage. It's a noble fight, not least because the various fundamentalisms threatening Western democracy are united in their urgent need to re-cage women's sexuality. ~ Elizabeth Farrelly

The answers would come to her. No need to rush them. Ten years ago, but so well remember it was as if it had happened yesterday, she had suffered the repercussions brought on by thoughtless rushing. This time, she would wait. Not wait for him to act, like she had been doing these past months. She would wait to see how she would act. ~ Anne Cherian

I can weave threads of myself into a tapestry already designed by others. ~ Sara Raasch

I felt guilty all of a sudden, as if just by existing and talking to him I was leading him on. ~ Meredith Russo

To misbehave us to denounce the social norms that limit individuals based on who they are. That to make history is to upset patriarchy, a system that is intent on controlling and marginalising others. ~ Malebo Sephodi

I'm just a girl."
"It is tragic how well you have been taught to say that with sadness rather than triumph. ~ Patrick Ness

What bothers me most about my teeth is that they don't travel loin south, don't sprout from the Mother Mouth. Vagina dentata, come closah, say high. ~ Virginia Petrucci

My name is Nathan, just twenty-three and given to the curation of stories. I listen, retain, then polish and release them over the fire at night, when the others hush and lean forward in their desire to hear of the past. They crave romance, particularly when autumn sets in and cold nights await them, and so I speak of Alice, and Bethany, and Sarah, and Val, and other dead women who all once had lustrous hair and never a bad word on their plump lips. I can remember this is not how they were; I knew them, I knew them! Only six years have passed and yet I mythologize them as if it is six thousand. I am not culpable. Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea. We live in lonely, fateful flux, outnumbered and outgrown. ~ Aliya Whiteley

I find a difference between what gets called world music - a fusion of western music and music from different cultures in more of a modernized version - and Explorer Series stuff, which is completely undiluted indigenous folk music. That's a lot more powerful than a lot of the super-processed stuff that comes out now. ~ Glenn Kotche

It is commonplace observation that women are forever trying to straighten their hair if it is curly and curl it if it is straight, bind their breasts if they are large and pad them if they are small, darken their hair if it is light and lighten it if it is dark. Not all these measures are dictated by the fantom of fashion. They all reflect dissatisfaction with the body as it is, and an insistent desire that it be otherwise, not natural but controlled, fabricated. Many of the devices adopted by women are not cosmetic or ornamental, but disguise of the actual, arising from fear and distaste. ~ Germaine Greer

Abusive relationships exist because they provide enough rations of warmth, laughter, and affection to clutch onto like a security blanket in the heap of degradation. The good times are the initial euphoria that keeps addicts draining their wallets for toxic substances to inject into their veins. Scraps of love are food for an abusive relationship. ~ Maggie Young

Really I was open-minded about doing anything, but the one thing I didn't want to do was get myself into a corset, because I was worried I'd never get out again. ~ Emma Watson

If it were left to men, there'd be nothing in the world but mating and squabbling. ~ Judith Tarr

The nineteenth-century wave of feminism was started by older women who had been through the radicalizing experience of getting married and becoming the legal chattel of their husbands (or the equally radicalizing experience of not getting married and being treated as spinsters). ~ Gloria Steinem

Claiming the right to be nasty in resistance to gendered respectability politics is often done by women who continue to be positioned as respectable by the world at large. And the 'respectability' of bourgeois white women has been central to colonial narratives that construct us as superior to women marginalised by race and class. Affronts to this 'respectability' have justified fatal violence against men of colour. This position of race and class supremacy means that our anger may not always be as radical or transgressive as we might like. ~ Alison Phipps

Feminism is the ability to choose what you want to do. ~ Nancy Reagan

As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media. ~ Bell Hooks

P33- the wail of the living had answered the call of universal motherhood within her wild beast which the dead could not still. ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs

I hate dogma in any form. I hated it in the Catholic Church and Girl Scout troops of the 1950s, and I hate in in gay activism and established feminism today. ~ Camille Paglia

Also the fact that he's a guy. A girl screws around like Lotto and she's like diseased. Untouchable. But a guy can stick it to a million places and everyone just thinks he's doing what boys do. ~ Lauren Groff

There is something about the light, the heat (physical and perhaps metaphysical), the vibrancy of street life, and the rawness and disjointedness of much of the tropical world that has moved and disturbed me - in places where the indigenous culture is often transformed by an external northern culture (sometimes my own ... I suspect that one has a few serious creative obsessions in life. I certainly cannot seem to escape this one. ~ Alex Webb

That night, I wash myself. The silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I am newer than I have ever been. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I can critique the bad; I can take the good, and I can add whatever I want. ~ Justine Larbalestier

My family are doctors and pilots and people involved in indigenous First Nation land rights; not overtly artistic. ~ Deborah Kara Unger

Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women's movement of the late 1960s and '70s. ~ Camille Paglia

Marrying Cal, the scion of a family whose wealth dated to the Industrial Revolution and had multiplied through every turn of the American economy since, ought to have eased her worries about failing to climb as high as she believed she deserved. But the money was his, not theirs. The unspoken power this gave him kept her from asking: Why don't you stay home? ~ Amy Waldman

Matt Mason must be declared the poet laureate of the Midwest! No other native son celebrates the overlooked America, its unsung citizens (from the anonymous poets to the part-time English teachers), and its expansive indigenous landscape, as well as he does. Mason's poetry is humorous when he wants to be quirky, heartbreaking when he wants to be eloquent, and though he moves effortlessly into other moods and geographies, he always returns to his first and most enduring love (and to what he knows best)-his homeland. ~ Rigoberto Gonzalez

I am deeply committed to the cause of Indigenous Australians, and not just because of the Apology, but the big challenges which lie ahead in closing the gap. ~ Kevin Rudd

This is how women are trained to stay indoors, she thought, the idea echoing in her mind like a gravesong. This is how women are trained not to act. ~ Erika Johansen

I didn't wake up this morning worrying about what protest color I'd wear, or what the world would do without me because I didn't wake up feeling like the victimhood narrative was a part of my story. Real women don't have to remind the world every day that history once slighted them. ~ Tomi Lahren

Girls can fight with swords, too. Sometimes, even better than men can. They just have to want it badly enough that they're willing to work harder at it. ~ Nenia Campbell

In 2016, white conservatives elected as president a serial liar who is likely the most fearful and paranoid and wildly insecure white man who has ever run for office.
And those white folks elected him because they believe they are victims. Yes, I am a Spokane Indian-an indigenous American-who grew up with white folks who think this country is being stolen from them.
Hahahahahaahahahahaahahahaahahaha. ~ Sherman Alexie

DISARM ALL RAPISTS
But what will we do
With their legs? ~ Chocolate Waters

My spirit is willing to do what is right; and my flesh, I hope, is strong enough to accomplish the will of Heaven ~ Charlotte Bronte

If we constantly rewrite history to fit how we see things now, we forget how things used to be and, equally important to future scholars, how we used to see them. ~ Anne Summers

it is only in social relations that we are human...to be human women must share in the totality of humanity's common life. Women, forced to lead restricted lives, retard all human progress. Growth of organism, the individual or social body requires use of all of our powers in four areas: physical, intellectual, spiritual and social ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult. ~ Charlotte Whitton

I also noticed that humor was even more of a survival tactic here than in most women's groups. As one asked: What did Columbus call primitive? Answer: Equal women. ~ Gloria Steinem

I love saying "yes" and I love saying "please." Saying "yes" doesn't mean I don't know how to say no, and saying "please" doesn't mean I am waiting for permission. "Yes please" sounds powerful and concise. It's a response and a request. It is not about being a good girl; it is about being a real woman. ~ Amy Poehler

.all the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but their affections. - The Subjection of Women ~ John Stuart Mill