Native American Environmental Quotes & Sayings

There is probably a high percentage of Native Americans as well as non-Indians who feel that participating in this greater American economy that you mentioned is and has become a recipe for disaster in the long term, because the response to social and environmental problems has been responded to with a drug mentality, which is to say, anything for the quick fix. And it has trained the public to always believe they are one purchase away from happiness. — Leonard Peltier

Environmental policies are driven by a kind of emotional spiritualism that threatens the very foundation of our society. There is increasing evidence of a government-sponsored religion in America. This religion, a cloudy mixture of new-age mysticism, Native American folklore, and primitive Earth worship, is being promoted and enforced by the Clinton administration in violation of our rights and freedoms. — Helen Chenoweth-Hage

Many a night I woke to the murmer of paper and knew (Dad) was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James - oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder. — Leif Enger

Cuba may be the only place in the world where you can be yourself and more than yourself at the same time — Pedro Juan Gutierrez

We gathered up the kids and sat up on the hill. We had no time to get our chickens and no time to get our horses out of the corral. The water came in and smacked against the corral and broke the horses' legs. The drowned, and the chickens drowned. We sat on the hill and we cried. These are the stories we tell about the river," said [Ladona] Brave Bull Allard. The granddaughter of Chief Brave Bull, she told her story at a Missouri River symposium in Bismark, North Dakota, in the fall of 2003.

Before The Flood, her Standing Rock Sioux Tribe lived in a Garden of Eden, where nature provided all their needs. "In the summer, we would plant huge gardens because the land was fertile," she recalled. We had all our potatoes and squash. We canned all the berries that grew along the river. Now we don't have the plants and the medicine they used to make. — Bill Lambrecht

I can hang with the dudes because I love beef and baseball and driving fast and flirting. I understand where men are coming from, and I'm interested in typically male endeavors. But I can also wear the short skirt and cheerlead. — Elizabeth Banks

Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other. — Esa-Pekka Salonen

An environmental revolution is taking shape in the United States. This revolution has touched communities of color from New York to California and from Florida to Alaska - anywhere where African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans live and comprise a majority of the population. Collectively, these Americans represent the fastest growing segment of the population in the United States. They are also the groups most at risk from environmental problems. — Robert D Bullard

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory. — Philip Levine

To dismiss the current extinction wave on the grounds that extinctions are normal events is like ignoring a genocidal massacre on the grounds that every human is bound to die at some time anyway. — Jared Diamond

God guided me to America and gave me a good job. But he also gave me a heart so I would look back. — Manute Bol

But that (My brother's first science fair) project changed my life. — Eileen Pollack

I'm not aiming to be someone like Christina Aguilera. — Gin Wigmore