“I wonder what it must have been like, what dignity it must have conferred on children of the Iroquois confederacy that any child over three was welcome to speak about matters of group importance in the tribal council.”

“When we rely on written records we need to continually ask ourselves what might be missing, what might have been recorded in order to manipulate events and in what direction, and in what ways we are allowing ourselves to assume that objectivity is in any way connected with literacy.”

“To do exciting, empowering research and leave it in academic journals and university libraries is like manufacturing unaffordable medicines for deadly diseases. We need to share our work in ways that people can assimilate, not in the private languages and forms of scholars...Those who are hungriest for what we dig up don't read scholarly journals and shouldn't have to. As historians we need to either be artists and community educations or find people who are and figure out how to collaborate with them. We can work with community groups to create original public history projects that really involved people. We can see to it that our work gets into at least the local popular culture through theater, murals, historical novels, posters, films, children's books, or a hundred other art forms. We can work with elementary and high school teachers to create curricula. Medicinal history is a form of healing and its purposes are conscious and overt.”

“Ownership shatters ecology. For the land to survive, for us to survive, it must cease to be property. It cannot continue to sustain us for much longer under the weight of such merciless use. We know this. We know the insatiable hunger for profit that drives that use and the dismpowerment that accommodates us. We don't yet know how to make it stop.But where ecology meets culture there is another question. How do we hold in common not only the land, but all the fragile, tenacious rootedness of human beings to the ground of our histories, teh cultural residues of our daily work, the invidual and tribal longings for place? How do we abolish ownership of land and respect people's ties to it? How do we shift the weight of our times from the single-minded nationalist drive for a piece of territory and the increasingly barricaded self-interest of even the marginally privileged towards a rich and multilayered sense of collective heritage? I don't have the answer. But I know that only when we can hold each people's particular memories and connections with land as a common treasure can the knowledge of our place on it be restored.”

“I am not african. Africa is in me, but I cannot return. I am not taina. Taino is in me, but there is no way back. I am european.Europe lives in me, but I have no home there. I am new. History made me. My first language is Spanglish. I was born at the crossroadsand I am whole.”

“Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable. (Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity)”

“...oppression is really quite simple. It's about looting.”