PEACE: tranquility, freedom from strife, freedom from warring conditions, freedom from conditions that annoy the mind. We have not had peace for some… - Lee Maracle

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.

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.

the government had a very deliberate plan to eliminate Indians, and it still pretty much carries out that plan- eliminate us culturally and intellectually in every way possible. Even in the recent Native studies programs that they have in university, we study what they did to us, we don't study us...The plan is for us to know them, not to know ourselves. That's always been the plan, and it still is. We're to integrate, yeah? And now there's very few of us left, I think, that have any kind of a foundation in the culture, in the knowledge. Most of our knowledge was expropriated and distorted, bowdlerized, and then sold back to us in transformed form. That's anthropology, and we had to purchase it.