Tony Hillerman Quotes

Any direct experience that I have with indigenous peoples and their plights may feed into the nature of the story I choose to tell. In fact, it almost certainly will.

Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans.

A dear friend of my early childhood has worked as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea for much of her life, and from the tiny island where her main work has been focused, she has brought me many funny and beautiful stories over the years.

Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what 'was' and 'were,' we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.

When I was in South Africa, I went for dinner with some friends, and I knew more about their history than they did - it just hasn't been told.

I have four relatively small children, and around fourth grade, they start doing big projects on Native Americas: everything is Native Americans in elementary school. Do you know how many Native American dresses I've sewn, on and on; it's a full yearlong study. And then never again. As journalists, we never even cover Native Americans.

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

Every book in the 'Dreams' cycle dramatizes a particular epoch in the ongoing cultural collision between North America's native peoples and its European colonizers.

I know what I write about seems exotic to a lot of people, but not for me. I pulled up to an old trading post and saw a few elderly Navajos sitting on a bench. I felt right at home.

This land was our land; it was taken from us illegally …. John Smith did not bring a civilization here. There was already civilization here…. We should have burned the boat and killed them. all.

Simply put, 'Redskins' is offensive to Indian people. Whether it is considered offensive by non-Indians is not the issue. It is offensive to us.

They [Native Americans] should not be allowed to come into the settlements, for every visit an Indian makes to a town, it is more or less injury to him.

It's amazing to me that some kids are surprised to find out Indians are still alive.

I haven't studied history - I couldn't give a discourse in medieval literature - but I am a personal historian, and I do a lot to take in the histories of the people around me.

I think that is what we do by preserving and telling our stories. If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change. So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.

Some things are really sacred and important to other cultures, so you have to be aware, politically, about those things before you just adopt them.

It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity - or it might not.

CBC has a very important mandate to bind Canada together in both official languages, tell local stories, and make sure we have a sense of our strength, our culture, our stories.

I began to write, believing that all I had to do to change things would be to write the other side, to tell the stories that I heard from my grandmother.

My grandfather died before I was born, so I never had the chance to speak with him about his father. But I learned about him from books.

I'm Native American, so the racial thing kind of hits home with me.

I don't like family stories forcefully mixed with commercial elements.

I've always been fascinated with the history of the Plains Indians and the history of the American Indian Movement in the '70s.

There are about 100 Aboriginal communities in Australia, and I'm trying to visit as many as possible to learn as much as I can.

You can't escape culture. You can learn about it. You can criticize it. You can try to move it slowly. But at the end of the day, you can't actually opt out of the culture that you're in.