Indigenous Beliefs Quotes

If Oak Flat were a Christian holy site or, for that matter, Jewish or Muslim, no senator who wished to remain in office would dare to sneak a backdoor deal for its destruction into a spending bill - no matter what mining-company profits or jobs might result. But this is Indian religion.

Since the beginning, Native Peoples lived a life of being in harmony with all that surrounds us. It is a belief that all humankind are related to each other. Each has a purpose, spirit and sacredness. It is an understanding with the Great Spirit or Creator that we will follow these ways. And in this understanding we believe we are related to all other living species.

The Indian is a human being.

We Indians do not teach that there is only one god. We know that everything has power, including the most inanimate, inconsequential things. Stones have power. A blade of grass has power. Trees and clouds and all our relatives in the insect and animal world have power. We believe we must respect that power by acknowledging it's presence. By honoring the power of the spirits in that way, it becomes our power as well. It protects us.

The Great Spirit made all things. He gave the white people a home beyond the great waters. He supplied these grounds with game, and gave them to his red children; and he gave them strength and courage to defend them.

In many respects, I think 'Bless Me, Ultima' is a novel about the indigenous.

I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.

Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.

What we teach our children is that earth is your mother that provides; she's a giver. So, please first ask forgiveness from the mother earth before you step on to it and cause it pain.

On the night of the 1st of September we observed for the first time signs of the natives being in the neighbourhood. Fires were seen on the low land near Cape Frederick Henry, and at daylight we saw the natives with our glasses.

The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.

The thing that is being lost is heritage. In Africa, religion and advertisement and television and media hype have gotten Africans to where they are convinced psychologically that their own heritage is heathen, pagan, barbaric, savage, primitive.

We found a large number of these books in these [Mayan] characters and as there contained nothing at all which was not to be superstition and lies of the Devil, we burned them all.

It is important to understand that there are many different ways of seeing the world and expressing the wisdom of Native belief...No one voice speaks for all voices.

I have a hard problem, being some part Native American - being a Christian: do you get burned, do you get cremated, do you get - let the sharks eat you? How do you die?

Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you're 52.

The Congress finds and declares that for many Indian people, the traditional ceremonial use of the peyote cactus as a religious sacrament has for centuries been integral to a way of life, and significant in perpetuating Indian tribes and cultures.

From the age of about 8 to the age of about 15, I was obsessed with Native Americans.

On first acquaintance, the mystery of the Mayans of Guatemala can seem simply bizarre, as it was when I first encountered Maximon the god.

The Indians believe all things have spirit - even the hail that comes from the sky is spirit. If you believe that, which I implicitly do, everything is alive.

And what they believe in real life is complicated. Theodor Koch-Grunberg wrote in his diary that indigenous peoples in the Amazon see these outsiders following in each other's footsteps as the same person, a single soul traversing across several lives. They also see time as something that doesn't proceed inexorably into the future.

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

The spiritual reality of the Indian world is very evident, very highly developed. I think it affects the life of every Indian person in one way or another.

In place of science, the Eskimo has only magic to bridge the gap between what he can understand and what is not known. Without magic, his life would be one long panic.

The more I learned about religion in Africa, the more intrigued I became. It was as if the continent was gripped with religious fervor. And the center of it was Uganda.