James Cameron Quotes

Some Indians will come up and say that a story reminded them of something very specific to their experience. Which may or may not be the case for non-Indians.

I once walked through an exhibit in a large American museum that displayed First Nations artifacts in old dioramas, with mannequins that hadn't been changed since the 19th century.

I often find myself unsatisfied with books 'about' Indians because they are written from the viewpoint of non-Indians.

I feel as if I can take Indian stories, make them mine and take them to the world.

I always have one or two, sometimes more, Navajo or other tribes' cultural elements in mind when I start a plot. In Thief of Time, I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead, respect for burial sites.

Anytime you're writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there's a lot of guesswork.

The Americans are not created by the master of life. … I will ask the master of life to cover over the Americans with earth and the Indians shall return to the Earth.

These fears, held by indigenous Fijians, must not be ridiculed but understood and addressed. In the final analysis it will be counterproductive to impose democracy on people who have yet to fully understand how it will sit against everything they believe in.

Some things are really sacred and important to other cultures, so you have to be aware, politically, about those things before you just adopt them.

It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity - or it might not.

Culture - art, music, literature - is the long game, because it's the way to change people's ideas in a more personal way.

At about the age of seven … I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather: how lovely it was that the sun had come out. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria; we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

I don't think anyone could write about another culture and get it 100 percent accurate.

We have to allow ourselves the freedom to make mistakes, including cultural mistakes, in our first drafts. I believe it's okay to get cultural details wrong in your first draft. It's okay if stereotypes emerge. It just means that your experience is limited, that you're human.

The negative cost of Lewis and Clark entering the Garden of Eden is that later expeditions regardless of what they were intended to do, later expeditions did not deal with the native peoples with the intelligence with the almost kindly resolve that Lewis and Clark did.

We have learned the lines of good taste through history and our sense of guilt, be it post-colonial or post-Holocaust.

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

In the design process, there's a need to be culturally comprehensive.

Every book in the 'Dreams' cycle dramatizes a particular epoch in the ongoing cultural collision between North America's native peoples and its European colonizers.

My mother was a children's librarian. I remember when traditional stories were revised for modern audiences until they bore only a nodding acquaintance with the originals, but were released as 'authentic Indian stories' when they were, in fact, nothing of the kind.

You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you're making a fiction film, it's entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.

Well, I think indigenous peoples have ways of living on the Earth that they've had forever. And they've been overrun by organized religion, which has had a lot of money and power.

It is important that alongside the blockbusters there are stories that can inspire and audiences can experience together in the cinema.

There are very few people who are Asian who have the kind of global reach that I have, not just with Asians but with non-Asians. I've worked hard for what my name represents, my brand, not just in Britain but around the world.

I can get along great with the Hispanics. In fact, I sure would like to meet them, even the politicians, maybe in the back room or whatever, have a couple of beers and try to explain. But they need to understand that I enforce the laws. I want to listen to them and hear their problems. I want them to tell me what their problems are.