Daily Inspiration Quote by Dennis Banks

“Harmony” here isn’t a soft-focus lifestyle brand; it’s a political claim wearing the clothes of a moral principle. Dennis Banks, best known as a founding leader of the American Indian Movement, uses a deceptively calm sentence to do heavy work: assert continuity (“Since the beginning”), establish collective identity (“Native Peoples,” “us”), and indict what came after without naming it.

The specific intent is restorative and strategic. Banks frames Indigenous life not as a relic but as an ongoing relationship ethic: humans as participants in an ecosystem, not owners of it. By choosing “surrounds us,” he widens the circle beyond land to include animals, water, ancestors, and the social fabric itself. It’s a worldview statement, but it’s also a rebuttal to centuries of colonial storytelling that cast Native nations as either “savage” obstacles to progress or romanticized stewards who conveniently vanish from modern life.

The subtext: if harmony was the baseline, then disharmony was introduced. That points to extraction, forced relocation, broken treaties, boarding schools, and the modern pipeline-and-pollution economy without ticking off a list. “Lived a life of being” reads almost intentionally awkward, like spoken rhetoric, emphasizing existence as practice rather than ideology.

Context matters because Banks speaks from activism as much as education: AIM’s battles over sovereignty, land rights, and state violence. In that light, “harmony” becomes a standard against which policy is judged. It’s less nostalgia than a demand: treat Indigenous knowledge as contemporary governance, not decorative wisdom.