25 Quotes by Paula Gunn Allen

Medicine people are truly citizens of two worlds, and those who continue to walk the path of medicine power learn to keep their balance in both the ordinary and the non-ordinary worlds...

For the American Indian, the ability of all creatures to share in the process of ongoing creation makes all things sacred.

True shamans live in a world that is alive with what is to rationalist sight unseen, a world pulsing with intelligence.

As long as we avoid the creative, we are condemned to reaction.

In America, law substitutes for custom.

Breath is life, and the intermingling of breaths is the purpose of good living. This is in essence the great principle on which all productive living must rest, for relationships among all the beings of the universe must be fulfilled; in this way each individual life may also be fulfilled.

The hoop dancer dances within what encircles him, demonstrating how the people live in motion within the circling spirals of time and space. They are no more limited than water and sky. At green corn dance time, water and sky come together, in Indian time, to make rain.

America does not seem to remember that it derived its wealth, its values, its food, much of its medicine, and a large part of its “dream” from Native Americans.

Idealization of a group is a natural consequence of separation from the group; in other words, it is a by-product of alienation.