Lee Maracle Quotes

I stand between my infinite grandchildren and my infinite grandmothers. The farther... backward in time I go, the more grandmothers I have. The farther forward, the more grandchildren. And I am obligated to that whole lineage: this lineage holds up the spirit of all things - trees, flora, fauna, human. That's what that word ["God"] means. And it's likewise the same in their language when they were translated.

our body has a memory of all time

This story deserves to be told; all stories do. Even the waves of the sea tell a story that deserves to be read. The stories that really need to be told are those that shake the very soul of you.

There is another way to be, to think, to know, and when Canadians witness another way, perhaps the colonial domination can begin to end. I believe, too, that each time any one of us has a thought, others do so as well, and it is in this way that the journey to collective consciousness continues. Writing those thoughts down hastens our journey toward a common consciousness.

I think I've done what I set out to do, which is give Canada a glimpse of who we are.

What I’m hoping is that people will get that they have to know their original language. And I think that’s why the Six Nations have a constitution that guarantees you your original language. And it’s a thousand years old. So for a thousand years we’ve known this. That the body speaks to itself. And it speaks the original language. It won’t give it up. And that makes me laugh because my old folks used to say, “You know, the body’s very conservative. It doesn’t want you to try things. But the spirit is a revolutionary. It wants to just go!” So if you’re not communicating with your body, you won’t take care of it. You have to appease the body by making a logical plan. And that’s feeling/thinking, or the heart and the mind. The heart and the mind consults with itself and figures out how to do this in the safest way possible. And otherwise you’re a child.

I am a caretaker. Every single Indigenous person here is a caretaker. Caretaker. Take care. Take care of creation. Creation is not inactive. To take care of creation is an active process, an imaginative process, and a process full of wonderment. It requires strenuous effort, it means healing ourselves of what we call "amber elbow disease." It cannot be done by people who are intoxicated, seeking the pleasure of parties. It cannot be done by disempowered people. It cannot be done by people who cannot imagine a different world, who cannot dream of a life of peace in which all creation is respected and cared for everywhere on this earth.

Creation is not a passive process. Our mother, the earth, knows it is not a passive process; the earth is not a passive mother. She knows birth is active. It takes hurricanes, thunder, lightning and volcanic eruptions to move from winter to spring, to summer, to fall and back to winter. Creation is a struggle.

I have seen many of you at book launches, panels, conferences, gatherings of all sorts, including protests against some injustice or other of which there are so many. Not a single Canadian has ever approached me to say: ‘Why are there so many injustices committed against Indigenous people?’ or ‘Why is there not a strong movement of support for justice and sovereignty for Indigenous people’s sovereignty movement in Canada?’ Canadians love causes, but they love the causes that are far away — out of their backyard, so to speak.

I am not a passive woman. I was there, bearing down and shedding blood in the creation process of my children, and I will be there should anyone obstruct my right to nurture them. Does that make me violent? No. It makes me a profound lover of creation. I will be there should anyone decide to invade my tree relatives in the Stein, and I will be there for the Mohawks at Oka, should the police run amok again and organize themselves to attack them. I don't confuse peace with passivity. I don't confuse defense with aggression.

Academicians waste a great deal of effort deleting character, plot and story from theoretical arguments

people...keep talking about decolonization like it’s a head problem — they’re really talking about undoing racism. They don’t realize it’s a territorial issue.

There has to be humour to open up the person to the subject of change, the possibility of change. You have to be open. Humour opens people up.

(You write about how reconciliation is a misnomer, that Indigenous people are still dying — what should we be talking about instead?) LM: The first part — truth. No truth, no reconciliation.

I love speaking. I love our orality, its rhythm, its ease, the way we can slip into poetry, story, even song and dance, break the tedium with a joke, particularly an anti-colonial joke. I love how the speaker gets to wander around and through a subject with the audience. On paper, though, the words can lose much of the personality of the speaker, jokes don't fit, and the sidebars, the off-the-cuff remarks, detract and can even trivialize the thoughts shared. When you speak you deliver a voice; everyone knows that what you think is also what you feel. In speaking, there is no problem delivering the integrity of your emotionality. But in writing you evoke, instead of expressing, your feelings. When the immediacy that links speaker and audience is absent on the page, you must find other ways of sharing the feelings that give rise to your thoughts.