Rudolfo Anaya Quotes

It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain.

I'm Cherokee, and there were times when social expansion was something that is needed by a cultural group or a national group.

We are under attack. Our culture, society, traditions, and way of life are at risk.

Niaqornat particularly seemed to offer a heightened version of a story being played out across the world about traditional communities' struggle for survival and their attempts to renegotiate their identity in the face of modern life.

Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous even when they deserve to be left in the past.

What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact.

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

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'

People tend to believe that to be modern you have to disengage from your heritage, but it's not true.

For members of a traditional society where many traditions have been discredited, an interest in modernity can result in a restless sophistication. Mehmet Ertegun seems not to have been a restless man.

My mother was a Mohawk, born and raised on a reservation, and when I was a kid, she would take me there to visit her relatives.

The Sami, as an indigenous people, as well as the Roma and other groups, have the right to maintain and develop their own language and culture.

There must be in their [the Indian's] social bond, something singularly captivating, and far superior to anything to be boasted among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans.

National cultures and heritages must compete for man's attention with the mind-absorbing advances of universal science.

My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door.

I think that a lot of the stories I would see was kids who are first-generation immigrants, watching them try to rip themselves from their family and their faith and kind of erase. I hadn't really seen anything where someone's trying to reconcile the two.

Civilisations which get cut off from their traditions and values do not survive for long.

I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.

I'm half Native American and half Mexican and I support all native peoples around the world.

There's a reason why the cultures of so many Chinatowns around the world in some ways are more Chinese. They've held onto older Chinese rituals, traditions, and symbols in ways that, if you go back to China today, they're not holding on to. They're getting married in white dresses and in churches.

I think our societies - to certain extent, of course, and to different degrees, but almost with no exception - have always been struggling to come to terms with archaic traditions.

We want to uplift the culture of Filipino - our respect to our elders, how we pray before we eat and sleep. These are things the younger generations tend to forget because of our exposure to other cultures.

How to Be an American Housewife is filled with dreams and love-the kinds that come true and those that don't. Margaret Dilloway is wise and ironic. She has created wonderful characters who never, in spite of hardships, stop finding ways to love each other.

It would be a sad day for India if it has to inherit the English scale and the English tastes so utterly unsuitable to the Indian environment.

When I first decided to be a writer, that meant dealing with preoccupations and concerns that took little account of Indian traditions. I saw India's past as part of an antiquity rendered irrelevant by modernity, which with its science, nation states, free enterprises, and consumer societies was supposed to have solved all problems.