Alice Walker Quotes
We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. If they do, it is our duty as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children. If necessary, bone by bone.
Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983, p. 92.
Note that this is a tribal right and not an individual one. When whites first came to America, the Iroquois, were the most sophisticated Native Americans. They were actually a confederation of 5 different tribes each of which was composed if many clans. Although fierce warriors, they had agreed not to fight each other and to assist if any were attacked. They developed a strong agricultural base, to go with the fishing and hunting, and their confederation were very aggressive and sophisticated traders taking them far from their upstate New York “capitol.” Their governmental structure was quite sophisticated with an elaborate, formal, system of checks and balances, multi-cameral legislatures that recognized numbers of citizens, power and wealth, and even cultural traditions. They were literate, capitalistic and globalistic in that they wanted to trade with all. They had written laws, and women had a role that was unique in world history in that only women owned property in a matrilineal society. Further, it was only the Clan Mothers who voted for the 50 Sachems (~Senators)—but their selections had to be accepted by the people they represented. Ironically the descendants of the Iroquois who remained in New York became a very successful Native American group. In the 2000 census, the average Indian in New York State earned the same income as the average White with no Indian gambling money.
Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she published the novel The Color Purple, for which she won the National Book Award for hardcover fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She also wrote the novels Meridian (1976) and The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970). An avowed feminist, Walker coined the term womanist to mean "A black feminist or feminist of color" in 1983.
