Lee Maracle Quotes

To be raped is to be sexually violated. For society to force someone, through shame and ostracism, to comply with love and sex that it defines, is nothing but organized rape. That is what homophobia is all about. Organized rape.

Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one? —Lee Maracle, Ravensong

Find freedom in the context you inherit

The result of being colonized is the internalization of the need to remain invisible.

I succeeded on my own, why can't you?" is a dispassionate call to the majority of Native people to forsake one another. The end results is each of us digging our own way out of the hole, filling up the path with dirt as we go. Such things as justice and principles prevent the whole people from becoming dispassionate. Until all of us are free, the few who think they are remain tainted with enslavement.

In a perverse and fearful way, I like the looking; but I am not so crazy about this business of shaking with fear that the unfolding story inspires in me. I have some doubt about the intelligence and safety of staying behind to witness, but some piece of me believes that doubt is somehow the best part of being alive; I love the suspiciousness of doubt and all the angles for retelling stories that this doubt spawns. This story deserves to be told; all stories do. Even the waves of the sea tell a story that deserves to be read. The stories that really need to be told are those that shake the very soul of you. I prepare to be shaken.

If I had to choose one author to critique By The Next Pause it would be author Lee Maracle. She is a fascinating and incredible storyteller. After listening to her speak at this year's Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), I think she would be that one person who could tear my work apart, down to the studs, but then help me dig even deeper with one of her lovely anecdotes that would set everything straight again.

I sometimes feel like a foolish young grandmother armed with a teaspoon, determined to remove three mountains from the path to liberation: the mountain of racism, the mountain of sexism and the mountain of nationalist oppression. I tire easily these days ... Sometimes I feel the tiredness is old, as old as the colonial process itself. On those days I am energized by the fact that it is not my fatigue but the fatigue of the oppressor's system which haunts me. On other days the tiredness is deeply personal.

What's Fascism?" Momma let it go with too much caution. Stacey told them it is when you don't have any rights anymore. They all looked at Stacey in disbelief. "You mean our boys went to kill people they never met for that? Hell, we got that here. No one kills for that here!" Kate pronounced the sentiments of everyone in the room. Stacey hadn't thought about this when studying World War I and World War II, but it was true. The essence of Fascism applied to them all right, except the forced labour part, but the exclusion of Indians from working in the outside world started to look to Stacey like the flip side of the same coin.