Native American Dancing Quotes

Rick smiled mischievously and said, "I think I'm going to learn 'Kisses sweeter than wine'. It's a fun one."
Amelia laughed. "What it about?"
"It's about a guy who falls in love with this girl who has kisses sweeter than wine. As you know, folk songs have a story to tell. Well, he asked her to marry him. At first she wouldn't accept his proposal, so he had to beg and plead with her."
"Why didn't she want to marry him?"
"I think she was worried about how it would change her life. She'd been on her own for quite some time and she had to get used to the idea."
Amelia bit her lip and glanced down at her lap. With curiosity, she asked, "Did she finally accept his proposal?"
"Yup. It just took her a while to realize he was the best thing that ever happened to her." Rick grinned. "She sort of reminds me of someone else I know. ~ Linda Weaver Clarke

I need to keep my dancing on the right side of weird, otherwise it might get a bit like "American Idol." ~ Matthew Healy

The Holy Land is everywhere ~ Black Elk

What did the Revolution mean to the Native Americans, the Indians? They had been ignored by the fine words of the Declaration, had not been considered equal, certainly not in choosing those who would govern the American territories in which they lived, nor in being able to pursue happiness as they had pursued it for centuries before the white Europeans arrived. Now, with the British out of the way, the Americans could begin the inexorable process of pushing the Indians off their lands, killing them if they resisted. In short, as Francis Jennings puts it, the white Americans were fighting against British imperial control in the East, and for their own imperialism in the West. ~ Howard Zinn

We who lose our footing have lost our way. ~ Anasazi Foundation

Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a person is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. ~ Black Elk

There was nothing physical she could do to stop Mario from carrying out whatever he wished. She shivered at the thought of what that sleazy, other world leftover might do should she launch an attack on him. ~ G.G. Collins

During 1866 and 1922, Native Americans and black soldiers often intermingled in the American west, on the frontier. ~ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

He carried her over the Owl Creek mountain range without stopping," he said, quietly this time. "He carried her until he reached one of the hot springs around what became Chapin, and then he walked into the water with her and held her there for three days. He had about given up when she opened her eyes and whispered his name. ~ Laura Anderson Kurk

If a child is inclined to be grasping, or to cling to any of his or her little possessions, legends are related about the contempt and disgrace falling upon the ungenerous and mean person ... ~ Charles Alexander Eastman

We need help from above if we are to make progress in our journeys. ~ Anasazi Foundation

Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren't looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

But if the Vision was true and mighty, as I know, it is true and mighty yet;for such things are of Spirit, and it is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost. ~ Black Elk

Our land is more valuable than your money. It will last forever. It will not even perish by the flames of fire. As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land will be here to give life to men and animals. We cannot sell the lives of men and animals. It was put here by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not belong to us ~ Crowfoot

It is better to have less thunder in the mouth and more lightning in the hand. ~ Apache Proverb

As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Thanksgiving began in 1621 when Native Americans sat down with a bunch of undocumented pilgrims. They had dinner and the pilgrims never left. ~ Jay Leno

We use a Native American tradition of the talking stick. You sit and pass it around and whoever has the stick has to talk. Some people just hold it. Others really share. ~ Lisa Bonet

Josephy visited several leading Manhattan bookstores and sadly discovered the explanation [from his agent] to be generally correct; books about Indians were shelved in the back of the stores alongside books about natural history, dinosaurs, plants, birds, and animals rather than being placed alongside biographies and histories of Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, and other great world cultures. Puzzled, Josephy began asking bookstore managers for a justification of this marketing tactic and was informed that Indian books had "just always been placed there." The longer he pondered booksellers' indifference toward Indians, the more annoyed Josephy became with the realization that bookstore marketing tactics were simply a reflection of the pervasive thinking throughout the United States in 1961: Americans believed Indians to be a vanished people. "Thinking about it made me angry," Josephy wrote in his autobiography, "and I vowed that someday, some way, I would do something about this ignorant insult. ~ Bobby Bridger

Before the war, a white man named Jonathan Edwards came to Stockbridge to teach my people about sin, but I doubt very much he could see sin in this. You defended yourself against a man who would otherwise have killed you and your friends. Perhaps you feel no regret because your spirit knows you did what was right. ~ Pamela Clare

I bring you the dance. I bring you the idea that is going to revolutionise our entire epoch. Where have I discovered it? By the Pacific Ocean, but the waving pine-forests of Sierra Nevada. I have seen the ideal figure of youthful American dancing over the top of the Rockies. The supreme poet of our country is Walt Whitman. I have discovered the dance that is worthy of the poem of Walt Whitman. I am indeed the spiritual daughter of Walt Whitman. For the children of America I will create a new dance that will express America. I bring to your theatre the vital soul that it lacks, the soul of the dancer. For you know...that the birth of the theatre was the dance, that the first actor was the dancer. He danced and sang. That was the birth of the tragedy, and until the dancer in all his spontaneous great art returns to the theatre, your theatre will not live in its true expression! ~ Isadora Duncan

Unfortunately, modern man has become so focused on harnessing nature's resources that he has forgotten how to learn from them. If you let them, however, the elements of nature will teach you as they have taught me. ~ Anasazi Foundation

Obviously neither 'American Idol' nor 'Dancing With the Stars' is a variety show in the classic sense, but the way they incorporate elements of drama, comedy and suspense is moderately ingenious. ~ Tom Shales

You will go. And you will live a good life with my people. But bad things will happen. They always do. And when they do, you must not blame yourself. You must enjoy life in spite of bad things. ~ K.B. Laugheed

Hanging a banner from the front of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building that proclaimed it to be the "Native American Embassy," hundreds of protesters hailing from seventy-five Indigenous nations entered the building to sit in. BIA personnel, at the time largely non-Indigenous, fled, and the capitol police chain-locked the doors announcing that the Indigenous protesters were illegally occupying the building. The protesters stayed for six days, enough time for them to read damning federal documents that revealed gross mismanagement of the federal trust responsibility, which they boxed up and took with them. The Trail of Broken Treaties solidified Indigenous alliances, and the "20-Point Position Paper,"14 the work mainly of Hank Adams, provided a template for the affinity of hundreds of Native organizations. Five years later, in 1977, the document would be presented to the United Nations, forming the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. ~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

I saw him with her last week, at a coffeehouse near my apartment. They were holding hands. She's captivated him."
"The Lakota Captive." Leta made a line in the air with her hand. "I can see it now, the wily, brave Lakota warrior with the brazen white woman pioneer. She carries him off into the sunset over her shoulder…"
Cecily whacked her with a strand of grass she'd pulled.
"You write history your way, I'll write it my way," Leta said wickedly.
"Native Americans are stoic and unemotional," Cecily reminded her. "All the books say so."
"We never read many books in the old days, so we didn't know that," came the dry explanation. She shook her head. "What a sad stereotype so many make of us-a bloodthirsty ignorant people who never smile because they're too busy torturing people over hot fires."
"Wrong tribe," Cecily corrected. She frowned thoughtfully. "That was the northeastern native people."
"Who's the Native American here, you or me?"
Cecily shrugged. "I'm German-American." She brightened. "But I had a grandmother who dated a Cherokee man once. Does that count?"
Leta hugged her warmly. "You're my adopted daughter. You're Lakota, even if you haven't got my blood. ~ Diana Palmer

'He'll probably end up angling for a threesome. Then I'll have to get my animal name so I can be a part of the group. So Native American of you white boys. I'll probably go for something like Falcon. Or Wolf.'
'Jackass suits you better,' Anna intones. ~ T.J. Klune

I'm even taller in person, because photographs shrink you down and steal your soul native american. ~ Thom Yorke

Who can declare that money is not a power which rulers of the world cannot withstand? ~ S. Alice Callahan

The time will soon be here when my grandchild will long for the cry of a loon, the flash of a salmon, the whisper of spruce needles, or the screech of an eagle. But he will not make friends with any of these creatures and when his heart aches with longing, he will curse me. Have I done all to keep the air fresh? Have I cared enough about the water? Have I left the eagle to soar in freedom? Have I done everything I could to earn my grandchild's fondness? ~ Chief Dan George

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it. ~ Willa Cather

A distorted sense of danger isn't just psychologically taxing; it also encourages us to perceive risk where there isn't any. Steeping in ominous stories can make people into threats themselves. The news is full of examples of how ambient anxiety gets turned against people of color going about their daily lives - taking a nap in the student lounge; walking down the street; selling lemonade. I thought of the woman who called the cops on two Native American brothers who were on a college tour at Colorado State. The teenagers made the woman "nervous," she told the 911 operator. "If it's nothing, I'm sorry. But it actually made me like feel sick and I've never felt like that." Many people are feeling sick these days, for many reasons. But we should all be careful about the stories we tell ourselves to explain why. ~ Rachel Monroe

WEST SALEM ~ October 2011
A sudden vision, fraught with malevolence and darkness, obscured her sight. The face of a menacing figure turned from the shadows of his grisly handiwork and stared at Sorcha.
Her muscles tensed. By the Goddess, could he see her?
Please! No!
She wanted to scream, to run, but the vision ensnared her into the horrific moment like a fly in a spider's web. ~ Cherie De Sues

If you don't have a bed, or a dresser or a wall, or a book or a toy you are oppressed. An African American in a white world. A Jew in a Christian world. A gypsy. A Native American. A Chinese American. Let's say, you were born deprived. ~ Gerald Stern

In the Native American tradition ... a man, if he's a mature adult, nurtures life. He does rituals that will help things grow, he helps raise the kids, and he protects the people. His entire life is toward balance and cooperativeness. The ideal of manhood is the same as the ideal of womanhood. You are autonomous, self-directing, and responsible for the spiritual, social and material life of all those with whom you live. ~ Paula Gunn Allen