Songs Our Native Daughter Quotes

Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign. But the city made us new, and we made it ours. We didn't get lost amid the sprawl of tall buildings, the stream of anonymous masses, the ceaseless din of traffic. We found one another, started up Indian Centers, brought out our families and powwows, our dances, our songs, our beadwork. We bought and rented homes, slept on the streets, under freeways; we went to school, joined the armed forces, populated Indian bars in the Fruitvale in Oakland and in the Mission in San Francisco. We lived in boxcar villages in Richmond. We made art and we made babies and we made way for our people to go back and forth between reservation and city. We did not move to cities to die. The sidewalks and streets, the concrete, absorbed our heaviness. The glass, metal, rubber, and wires, the speed, the hurtling masses - the city took us in. ~ Tommy Orange

Well of course man. We Indians have lost everything. We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we lost our songs and dances. We lost each other. We only know how to lose and be lost. ~ Sherman Alexie

We are lied to by our love songs. ~ Helen Fisher

Economically, New Mexico ranks low, but we know the real treasure lies in the people, the landscape, and the history of its many communities. Here, people have struggled and survived for years, and they have not lost sight of the prize. We believe our region is a spiritual corridor; the earth nurtures us, and our deities can be invoked for the good of the community. Here, Native Americans have been saying prayers and keeping the world in balance for thousands of years. It's difficult to make a living here, but beneath the daily struggle there exists a fulfilling spiritual sense. This is sacred space for us. ~ Rudolfo Anaya

our tragedy begins humid.
in a humid classroom.
with a humid text book. breaking into us.
stealing us from ourselves.
one poem. at a time.

it begins with shakespeare.

the hot wash.
the cool acid. of
dead white men and women. people.

each one a storm.

crashing. into our young houses.
making us islands. easy isolations.
until we are so beleaguered and
swollen
with a definition of poetry that is white skin and
not us.
that we tuck our scalding. our soreness.
behind ourselves and
learn
poetry.
as trauma. as violence. as erasure.
another place we do not exist.
another form of exile
where we should praise. honor. our own starvation.

the little bits of langston. phyllis wheatley.
and
angelou during black history month. are the crumbs. are the minor boats.
that give us slight rest.

to be waterdrugged into rejecting the nuances of
my own bursting
extraordinary
self.
and to have
this
be
called
education.

to take my name out of my name.
out of where my native poetry lives. in me.
and
replace it with keats. browning. dickson. wolf. joyce. wilde. wolfe. plath. bronte. hemingway. hughes. byron. frost. cummings. kipling. poe. austen. whitman. blake. longfellow. wordsworth. duffy. twain. emerson. yeats. tennyson. a ~ Nayyirah Waheed

Through all my years
enslaved,
I've listened to
ancestral voices
echoing through
my weariness,
giving me strength
to withstand injustice,
to believe in myself
and survive.

May our songs and stories
keep alive in us
the will to grow in learning.
The longing to be free! ~ Ashley Bryan

Pig! Pig! Daughter of Pigs! she said, because to call a native a pig is the worst insult of all. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

Miley Cyrus made some chinky eyes
Standing behind an Asian guy
I don't know if this should fly
As if there wasn't enough to despise
I wasn't necessarily a fan of
Her, her dad, or Hannah Montana
I tend to prefer the songs of Rihanna
Racism against Asians is simply bananas!
Oh Miley!
Chinky eyes make you look wily
prejudice isn't thought of so highly
it doesn't make us all smiley
Why is there nothing that Asians can do?
To make fun of other races as easily as you
Why isn't racism against Asians taboo?
Why are we always so racially screwed!
All you have to do is pull at your face
To make your eyelids resemble our race
This kind of joke has no proper place
Miley Cyrus is a disgrace! ~ Margaret Cho

The typical Western is kind of a good-guy/bad-guy thing, and that's great, but initially when I heard about 'Into the West,' and what I love about it is it delves into both sides of our cultural past, and it puts more of a human face on the Native Americans. ~ Matthew Settle

The first question we needed to address in response to the popular "Take America Back for God" slogan concerned the precedent of Jesus, and in this light we must judge that the slogan can lead us into temptation. The second concerns the meaning of the slogan itself. I, for one, confess to being utterly mystified by the phrase. If we are to take America back for God, it must have once belonged to God, but it's not at all clear when this golden Christian age was.

Were these God-glorifying years before, during, or after Europeans "discovered" America and carried out the doctrine of "manifest destiny" - the belief that God (or, for some, nature) had destined white Christians to conquer the native inhabitants and steal their land? Were the God-glorifying years the ones in which whites massacred these natives by the millions, broke just about every covenant they ever made with them, and then forced survivors onto isolated reservations? Was the golden age before, during, or after white Christians loaded five to six million Africans on cargo ships to bring them to their newfound country, enslaving the three million or so who actually survived the brutal trip? Was it during the two centuries when Americans acquired remarkable wealth by the sweat and blood of their slaves? Was this the time when we were truly "one nation under God," the blessed time that so many evangelicals seem to want to take our nation back to?

Maybe someone would suggest that the golden age o ~ Gregory A. Boyd

If you walk a city, if you love a city, if you put in your miles and years with open heart and mind, the city will reveal itself to you. Maybe it won't become yours, but you will become its - its chronicler, its pilgrim, its ardent lover, its nonnative son or native daughter or defender. ~ Rebecca Solnit

I will never be a brain surgeon, and I will never play the piano like Glenn Gould.

But what keeps me up late at night, and constantly gives me reason to fret, is this: I don't know what I don't know. There are universes of things out there - ideas, philosophies, songs, subtleties, facts, emotions - that exist but of which I am totally and thoroughly unaware. This makes me very uncomfortable. I find that the only way to find out the fuller extent of what I don't know is for someone to tell me, teach me or show me, and then open my eyes to this bit of information, knowledge, or life experience that I, sadly, never before considered.

Afterward, I find something odd happens. I find what I have just learned is suddenly everywhere: on billboards or in the newspaper or SMACK: Right in front of me, and I can't help but shake my head and speculate how and why I never saw or knew this particular thing before. And I begin to wonder if I could be any different, smarter, or more interesting had I discovered it when everyone else in the world found out about this particular obvious thing. I have been thinking a lot about these first discoveries and also those chance encounters: those elusive happenstances that often lead to defining moments in our lives.

[…]

I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thi ~ Debbie Millman

We live in a world with "free" content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights. ~ Lawrence Lessig

Laughter is the loaded latency given us by nature as part of our native equipment to break up the stalemates of our lives and urge us on to deeper and more complex forms of knowing. ~ Jean Houston

We kind of just got more mature and more realistic with what we're doing. We kinda said, "We quit our jobs and we quit college to do this, and we're going to be playing these songs every day just about, y'know, on a stage ... so let's write songs that we're never gonna get sick of playing." Songs that aren't just gonna follow a trend of what's going on right now, y'know? ~ Jordan Buckley

Everybody's creative. We create our songs and our paintings, our families and our children. Every one of us is on the cutting edge of the future. ~ Buffy Sainte-Marie

My son, you are now flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. By the ceremony performed this day, every drop of white blood was washed from your veins; you were taken into the Shawnee Nation ... ~ Chief Blackfish

A child's cry touches a father's heart, and our King is the Father of his people. If we can do no more than cry it will bring omnipotence to our aid. A cry is the native language of a spiritually needy soul; it has done with fine phrases and long orations, and it takes to sobs and moans; and so, indeed, it grasps the most potent of all weapons, for heaven always yields to such artillery. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Prayer is being consciously in God's presence, focusing our eyes on him, on who he is, on what he's like. My prayer took the form of singing hymns and songs of praise, sitting, kneeling, standing, hands raised high, or falling on my face before God. We are flesh and blood. We must pray with our bodies. My prayer was also contemplation, meditation, listening to God's voice, sometimes writing letters to God, even e-mails. ~ Linda McCullough Moore

Bad and cruel as our people were treated by the whites, not one of them
was hurt or molested by our band. ( ... )
The whites were complaining at the same time that we were intruding upon
their rights. They made it appear that they were the injured party, and
we the intruders. They called loudly to the great war chief to protect
their property.
How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right
look like wrong, and wrong like right. ~ Black Hawk

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

I don't think any of our lyrics have ever been erotic in a sexual term, because I haven't really written, touched on, that subject too often. But, uh ... I mean, I suppose they could point the finger at us for violence maybe in certain songs. ~ Scott Ian

Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you're mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time. ~ Tom Waits

Unfortunately the hostility that the European displayed toward the native cultures he encountered he carried even further into his relations with the land. The immense open spaces of the American continents, with all their unexploited or thinly utilized resources, were treated as a challenge to unrelenting war, destruction, and conquest. The forests were there to be cut down, the prairie to be plowed up, the marshes to be filled, the wildlife to be killed for empty sport, even if not utilized for food or clothing.

In the act of 'conquering nature' our ancestors too often treated the earth as contemptuously and as brutally as they treated its original inhabitants, wiping out great animal species like the bison and the passenger pigeon, mining the soils instead of annually replenishing them, and even, in the present day, invading the last wilderness areas, precious just because they are still wildernesses, homes for wildlife and solitary human souls. Instead we are surrendering them to six-lane highways, gas stations, amusement parks, and the lumber interests, as in the redwood groves, or Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe-though these primeval areas, once desecrated, can never be fully restored or replaced. ~ Lewis Mumford

Reality sucks, that's probably why we dream. Why our bodies need sleep. So we can escape. Escape this earth, at least just for a little while. Everynight, we get to go away. Sleep is the only time I feel safe. The only time I can leave this place. This reality that feels like needles sticking into my flesh. This hell that is so hot it makes my hair sweat. Makes mymind melt. In my sleep I hear music, I see faces, songs and smiles and dad hugging me tight. Never letting me go. Telling me to be strong. Telling me not to give up hope. Sometimes I wake up crying. Sometimes I wish I didn't wake up at all - jamie adoff ~ Jamie Adoff

Yeah, if someone's selling downloads and collecting money for our songs I would be unhappy about that but if they're trading it I don't mind, obviously if I make a thousand records or CDs or whatever, I like to sell a thousand. ~ Ian MacKaye

...All who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost death, you lost life, in order to save yourself. Yourself! Your immortal self! What is it? Who are you?"
"I am myself. My body will not decay and die-"
"A living body suffers pain, Cob; a living body grows old; it dies. Death is the price we pay for our life and for all life."
"I do not pay it! I can die and in that moment live again! I cannot be killed; I am immortal. I alone am myself forever!"
"Who are you, then?"
"The Immortal One."
"Say your name."
"The King."
"Say my name. I told it to you but a minute since. Say my name!"
"You are not real. You have no name. Only I exist."
"You exist: without name, without form. You cannot see the light of day; you cannot see the dark. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself. But you have no self. All that which you sold, that is yourself. You have given everything for nothing. And so now you seek to draw your world to you, all that light and life you lost, to fill up your nothingness. But it cannot be filled. Not all the songs of earth, not all the stars of heaven, could fill your emptiness. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free. ~ Anna Akhmatova

...to be an American adult has always been to be a symbolic figure in someone else's coming-of-age story. And that's no way to live. It is a kind of moral death in a culture that claims youthful self-invention as the greatest value. We can now avoid this fate. The elevation of every individual's inarguable likes and dislikes over formal critical discourse, the unassailable ascendancy of the fan, has made children of us all. We have our favorite toys, books, movies, video games, songs, and we are as apt to turn to them for comfort as for challenge or enlightenment. ~ A.O. Scott

You could say singing is in our genes. Both our parents sang and made up songs constantly. ~ Isaac Hanson

15 p Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, 16 p making the best use of the time, because q the days are evil. 17Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what r the will of the Lord is. 18And s do not get drunk with wine, for that is t debauchery, but u be filled with the Spirit, 19addressing one another in v psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, 20 w giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father x in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, 21 y submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. ~ Anonymous

When history textbooks leave out the Arawaks, they offend Native Americans. When they omit the possibility of African and Phoenician precursors to Columbus, they offend African Americans. When they glamorize explorers such as de Soto just because they were white, our histories offend all people of color. When they leave out Las Casas, they omit an interesting idealist with whom we all might identify. When they glorify Columbus, our textbooks prod us toward identifying with the oppressor. When textbook authors omit the causes and process of European world domination, they offer us a history whose purpose must be to keep us unaware of the important questions. Perhaps worst of all, when textbooks paint simplistic portraits of a pious, heroic Columbus, they provide feel-good history that bores everyone. ~ James W. Loewen

On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, 'Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.'" John 7:37-38 (NIV)

As soon as we were old enough to understand fairy tales, we were told to start looking for the one.

Someday my prince will come.
Someday I'll find my love.

As we got older, Prince Charming looked a bit different. Our teenage hearts thrilled when the latest vocal sensation sang about finding us and how our love would last forever.

Wherever we turned, we were told our soul mate was waiting. And we were led to believe we were "less than" if we didn't find the one who would complete us!

Even now, whether we're 15, 45 or 75, the equation hasn't changed: "Guy + Me = Valuable."

So, if the movies, books and songs are so right, how come when we find the one, we can still feel like we're missing something? Why are there married people who are lonely with an emptiness that marriage can't fill? Our hearts can get confused if our reality doesn't match fantasy and we wonder:

Maybe my one isn't really the one? Or, whether we're married or single, we might wonder, is the one for me still out there?

In this place of uncertainty our hearts can grow perplexed. If we find ourselves in this vulnerable place of questioning, and all of a sudden a guy who seems ~ Lynn Cowell

I am surprised you didn't whack your head on an overhanging branch back there. I have never seen anyone leap straight up off the ground the way you did when you saw that snake! It would make a good move for our next dance. Do you think you could teach the others? The snake jump? ~ Jennifer Frick-Ruppert

Songs give you incredible opportunity to convey a tremendous amount in a relatively short period of time. The first thing that John Powell, our composer, says is, "Is the song engaging you to tap your toe?" If you're not tapping your toe, it doesn't matter what you're doing in the song, it's not going to work. But, if you can get the audience to be engaged by the song, then it gives you the opportunity to accomplish so much, in a very concise way. ~ Christopher Meledandri

There is no place in this world warmer than our native land. ~ Khem Veasna

We 'preserve' folk songs, at the same time that our way of life destroys the singer…we are proud of our museums, where we display the damning evidence of a way of life that we have made impossible. ~ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy