Lee Maracle Quotes

I always say to people, you have a banquet — you come to the table with your own culture, a full banquet. If you don't share it, it's not writing!

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

Don't be a passive soldier for corporate or military murder. With peace and harmony in your heart go out and spend great effort, strenuous effort, to change the story of Canada. Be active, be resolute, be caring, and we shall eventually have peace.

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.

Peaceful struggle is all about expending strenuous effort to live our lives free from strife, free from war, free from conditions that annoy the mind. It annoys my mind to think about clear-cutting; it annoys my mind to consider the invasion and death of the people of Oka. It annoys my mind to imagine golfers tromping on the graves of Mohawk grandmothers, children and loved ones. So I struggle to put a stop to it. I walk, I picket, and I block the road, and I speak because I cannot watch a people or any of the earth's relatives die an unjust death.

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.

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.

PEACE: tranquility, freedom from strife, freedom from warring conditions, freedom from conditions that annoy the mind. We have not had peace for some 281,614 days since Columbus first came here. Worse, our homeland has not experienced peace since this country's inception.

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.

Teachings are not dictums to be blindly followed. They are meant to be the beginnings of the development of governance or theory, but the individual is expected to interpret them personally.

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.

We are called upon to continuously grow from the realizations that we come to when we speak.

It is impossible to give a lecture or speak on any serious issue in the Indigenous world without placing it in the context of colonialism and our need for decolonization.

What is the point of presenting the human condition in a language separate from the human experience: passion, emotion and character...We all strive to be orators

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