Indigenous Resilience Quotes

if you look at Indigenous and traditional healing practices, they do a remarkable job of creating a total mind-body experience that influences multiple brain systems. Remember, trauma “memories” span multiple brain areas. So these traditional practices will have cognitive, relational-based, and sensory elements. You retell the story; create images of the battle, hunt, death; hold each other; massage; dance; sing.

In short, connection to culture is so much more complex, rich and diverse than anyone who is non-Indigenous can understand. There's this unspoken feeling that comes with identifying as Aboriginal and being around mob that you'll never know if you aren't an Aboriginal person. Identity for us, is built on family lines, connection to country, stories, traditions and something that can't be measured according to levels of melanin.

That one of the most impoverished communities in the Americas would refuse a billion dollars demonstrates the relevance and significance of the land to the Sioux, not as an economic resource but as a relationship between people and place, a profound feature of the resilience of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

if you look at Indigenous and traditional healing practices, they do a remarkable job of creating a total mind-body experience that influences multiple brain systems. Remember, trauma “memories” span multiple brain areas. So these traditional practices will have cognitive, relational-based, and sensory elements. You retell the story; create images of the battle, hunt, death; hold each other; massage; dance; sing. You reconnect to loved ones—to community. You celebrate, eat, and share. Aboriginal healing practices are repetitive, rhythmic, relevant, relational, respectful, and rewarding—experiences known to be effective in altering neural systems involved in the stress response. The practices emerged because they worked. People felt better and functioned better, and the core elements of the healing process were reinforced and passed on. Cultures separated by time and space converged on the same principles for healing.

I love the care and mutual aid we give each other in queer, trans, sick and disabled and working class and queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people of color (QTBIPOC) communities. As a sick and disabled, working-class, brown femme, I wouldn’t be alive without communities of care, and neither would most people I love. Some of my fiercest love is reserved for how femmes and sick and disabled queers show up for each other when every able-bodied person “forgets” about us. Sick and disabled folks will get up from where we’ve been projectile vomiting for the past eight hours to drive a spare Effexor to their friend’s house who just ran out. We do this because we love each other, and because we often have a sacred trust not to forget about each other. Able-bodied people who think we are “weak” have no idea; every day of our disabled lives is like an Ironman triathlon. Disabled, sick, poor, working-class, sex-working and Black and brown femmes are some of the toughest and most resilient folks I know. You have to develop complex strengths to survive this world as us.

By using materials as if they were a gift, and returning that gift through worthy use, we find balance. I think that third row goes by many names: Respect. Reciprocity. All Our Relations. I think of it as the spirit row. Whatever the name, the three rows represent recognition that our lives depend on one another, human needs being only one row in the basket that must hold us all. In relationship, the separate splints become a whole basket, sturdy and resilient enough to carry us into the future.

Even though there are times I do not feel real. I rarely get sick—maybe I have a preternatural immunity acquired as the descendant of the one Indigene in ten who survived all of the Old World diseases that descended upon us. My lucky-gened ancestor may have bequeathed to me this resilience. At the same time, losing everyone else you love is obliterating. And some believe that trauma changes a person genetically. I don’t know if that’s possible, but if it is, along with the rude good health I have an inherited sense of oblivion. Once in a while I encounter that oblivion in the form of an unreal me. This unreal me is paralyzed by one bottomless thought: I didn’t choose this format. I didn’t choose to be organized into a Tookie. What, or who, made that happen? Why? What will happen if I do not accept this outrage? It isn’t easy to stay organized in this shape. I can feel what it would be like to stop making that effort. Without constant work the format called me would decay. I close ‘my’ eyes and meet Budgie’s puzzled gaze. There was no struggle on his face. Just a question. What is this? What was this? They are the questions I ask the gauze curtains.

Given the opportunity, a culture attempts to mold its members into ideal personalities. The ideal personality in Native American cultures is a person shows kindness to all, who puts the group ahead of individual wants and desires, who is a generalist, who is steeped in spiritual and ritual knowledge—a person who goes about daily life and approaches “all his or her relations” in a sea of friendship, easy-going-ness, humour, and good feelings. She or he is a person who attempts to suppress inner feelings, anger, and disagreement with the group. She or he is a person who is expected to display bravery, hardiness, and strength against enemies and outsiders. She or he is a person who is adaptable and takes the world as it comes without complaint. That is the way it used to be! That is the way it should be!