The Founders on Religion: A Book of Quotations Book

"Is there anything in the primal religions that is uniquely important? I would say yes. They correct our modern assumption that later is better. That illusion is contained in this word progress, and progress has been, pardon the language, the bitch goddess of the twentieth-century West."

I decided to read this because 1) I live in America; 2) I only ever learned the "big five" in school; and 3) my job has to do with public lands, currently the subject of some fraught and fractious conversations with native religion at the fore.

I found a lot of ideas that resonated:

* "Though no one voice speaks for all, sometimes many speak as one."'Joseph Bruchac
* The "double bind of romanticism and racism"
* In most (all?) native languages, there is "no word for 'religion' as institutionalized spirituality'rather, religiousness, a way of life, a 'wisdomed tradition.'" There is "no one word for God, but many for the Great Mystery'sacred names for the great force in the universe that connects all living beings in the circle of life. And for the Hopis, ultimate reality is simply, numinously, a'nehimu, 'A mighty something.'"
* Why do you write?" 'Because Indians always tell a story. The only way to continue is to tell a story and that's what Coyote says.'"'Simon Ortiz
* "One does not sell the land people walk on."'Crazy Horse

… and some I still can't stretch to span my three continents.

* The idea of a birthright or a homeland; the idea that a particular place'and in particular, an unchanging place'is owed to anyone instead of anyone else.
* Related, the idea of inherent obligations due or inherited from the dead.

I'll keep reading and thinking and listening and see what happens.