Quotes About First Nations
Cherie Dimaline
“She hated him, this man, and these men: the ones who picked her up without expression and used her without emotion. The ones who picked her up with no more regard than they had for picking lint off the collars of their well-pressed suits. She preferred the sweaty nervousness of young virgins or the eager speediness of excited old vets with their knobby fingers and waxy breath to these cold, hard men. These were the ones who called her squaw. Who called her half-breed, the ones who would just as soon slap her than bother to put on the condom she always handed them. She often wondered why they didn’t just keep the $80 it cost to be with her and drive their comfortable, bucket-seated SUVs home to the suburbs. They could kiss their wives hello and then slip into very hot showers to jerk off for free. Their peckish wives could spend the money they saved spending an afternoon getting the silk wraps and pedicures that would goad them into putting out anyways. To these men she had no name and no face. She was a hole. Consequently, she held no regard for these bastards. She gave them the calculated respect accorded to dangerous dogs.”
― Cherie Dimaline, Red Rooms

Joseph Boyden
“I passed the friendship centre and nodded to an old couple on the porch. Kookum smiled back and nodded, a cotton kerchief on her head. Moshum’s eyes squinted, too, but never looked straight at me, just glanced my presence once, and that was enough. Old school. I knew that when they stood up to hobble home, he would lead a few feet ahead, and she would follow. They grew up in the bush and still walked the same way, as if the wide road was nothing more than a narrow path through the muskeg and spruce.”
― Joseph Boyden, Through Black Spruce
tags: cree, first-nations, spruce 2 likes Like
Frederic M. Perrin
“Schoolteachers teach what they and others know. Forest teachers – bear, wolf, lynx, beaver, bird, every flower and tree – teach us how to live, love, and grow.”
― Frederic M. Perrin, Rella Two Trees – The Money Chiefs

Frederic M. Perrin
“Destroy us, land and forest takes forever from your children. Walk the circle of life. Have no fear. Together, let us love and protect our children, respect the land and forest, giving back what we have taken.”
― Frederic M. Perrin, Rella Two Trees – The Money Chiefs
tags: fantasy, first-nations, first-peoples, inspirational 2 likes Like
“When I started school in 1958 there were no books written by Aboriginals in the school system and everything about Native life was written by white people through their eyes.

Now, Aboriginal writers can tell their stories. They have always been our narratives to tell, not others.”
― Rick Revelle, I Am Algonquin
Lynda A. Archer
“Writing about Aboriginal themes means joining the dots from the colonial policies of the past to the problems faced by First Nations, Métis, and Inuit today. It means acknowledging the wrongs and the pain.”
― Lynda A. Archer, Tears in the Grass
tags: aboriginal, aboriginal-history, canada, first-nations 1 likes Like
“The eventual religious affiliation of Indian tribes depended not only on the success of missionaries in making first contact but on the compatibility of their social patterns with the types of Christianity from which they were able to choose. The Oblates were delighted with the response of the tractable Déné of the far northwest. Anglicans had greater success with the Tudukh, whom they found ‘more lively and affectionate’ although ‘more superstitious’ than the Déné. In British Columbia the Roman Catholics were able to plant missions among the interior Salish, who liked their ceremonies and readily accepted their disciplined approach to community life. From the warlike Kwakiutls, Haidas and Tsimshians of the coast they met only rebuffs, but it was among these tribes that the more emotional Methodists were able to establish themselves.”
― John Webster Grant, The Church in the Canadian Era
Frederic M. Perrin
“Teach them a spider does not spin a web. Spiders spin meaning. Cut one strand and the web holds. Cut many, the web falls. With the web’s fall, so too falls the spider. Break the web. Break the spider. So breaks the circle of life.”
― Frederic M. Perrin, Rella Two Trees – The Money Chiefs
tags: fantasy, first-nations, first-peoples 1 likes Like
Frederic M. Perrin
“May your footsteps leave only friends behind.”
― Frederic M. Perrin, Rella Two Trees – The Money Chiefs
tags: aboriginal, fantasy, first-nations, first-peoples, inspirational 1 likes Like
Frederic M. Perrin
“Long I have known and feared this day would come. Like the circle of Earth, the circle of life is changing. Here in the north, there are those who can still feel, see, and smell the changes wrought in and around Earth by Money Chiefs. The air is no longer clean, winter grows warmer, rivers flood without a sign, and the soil, once dark and rich, lies pale and weak. Bears, wolves, and other forest Spirits will soon go the way of the buffalo, for their food dwindles like birds that once ruled the skies.”
― Frederic M. Perrin, Rella Two Trees – The Money Chiefs
tags: aboriginal, fantasy, first-nations, first-peoples, inspirational 1 likes Like
“We want trumpets that sound like thunder, and men to act as though they were going to war with those corrupt and degrading principles that rob one of all rights, merely because he is ignorant, and of a little different color. Let us have principles that will give every one his due; and then shall wars cease, and the weary find rest.”
― William Apess, Eulogy on King Philip