Native Indian Quotes & Sayings

Each and every Indian, man or woman, child or Elder, is a spirit-warrior. — Leonard Peltier

Last summer we had eight people in the [Christian] congregation who danced four different sun dances. Of course the missionaries have said all along that those ceremonies are pagan and we can't do that. Our people insist that they are free in the gospel, free in Christ Jesus, to participate in Indian religious forms and ceremonies. - George Tinker — Jim Wallis

One of our people in the Native community said the difference between white people and Indians is that Indian people know they are oppressed but don't feel powerless. White people don't feel oppressed, but feel powerless. Deconstruct that disempowerment. Part of the mythology that they've been teaching you is that you have no power. Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth. — Winona LaDuke

When Indian women begin the search for an Indian man, they carry a huge list of qualifications. He has to have a job. He has to be kind, intelligent, and funny. He has to dance and sing. He should know how to iron his own clothes. Braids would be nice. But as the screwed-up Indian men stagger through their lives, Indian women are forced to amend their list of qualifications. Eventually, Indian men need only to have their own teeth to get snagged. — Sherman Alexie

I once said, "You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent." When Bobby Jindal entered the Republican campaign, my comment should have been covered again, more prominently. I mean, Jindal is not Native American, he's a real Indian. — Joe Biden

The Indian navigator naturally distinguishes by a name those parts of a stream where he has encountered quick water and forks, andagain, the lakes and smooth water where he can rest his weary arms, since those are the most interesting and more arable parts to him. — Henry David Thoreau

They called me an Indian pig. Oh, and they called me a prairie n*****. Pretty colorful, enit?"

"I suppose."

"That one pissed me off, though. I ain't no prairie Indian. I'm from a salmon tribe, man. If they were going to insult me, they should've called me salmon n*****."

"I'm surprised you can laugh about this."

"It's what Indians do."

"Weren't you afraid?"

"Yeah, I was afraid, but I'm afraid most of the time, you know? How would you feel if a white guy like you got dropped into the middle of a black neighborhood, like Compton, California, on a Saturday night?"

"I'd be very afraid."

"And that's exactly how I feel living in Seattle. Hell, I feel that way living in the United States. Indians are outnumbered, Officer. Those three guys scared me bad, but I've been scared for a long time. — Sherman Alexie

In Indian Country," he says, "we have a different sense of time. I'm learning and you're learning - and more will. — Gloria Steinem

Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the government
take care of him better take a closer look at the American Indian. — Henry Ford

In 1492, the natives discovered they were indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that the Sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and the dress, and had sent to be burnt alive who worships the Sun the Moon the Earth and the Rain that wets it. — Eduardo Galeano

I have a cousin who is a spiritual advisor for Native veterans in Canada, so I'm very familiar with the history of Natives in the military. And growing up as an American Indian myself, the story of Ira Hayes is one that is often told. — Adam Beach

The Indian must not lose pride in what he does, in his handicraft, for if he loses pride he will no longer build, his art will fail him, and he will completely be dependent upon others. — Louis L'Amour

But undying memories stood like sentinels in her breast. When the notes of doves, calling to each other, fell on her ear, her eyes sought the sky, and she heard a voice saying, Majella! — Helen Hunt Jackson

Through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most Oriental city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which Scythians and Ethiopians and Indians dwell. What is echo, what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, there? The works of man are everywhere swallowed up in the immensity of nature. The AEgean Sea is but Lake Huron still to the Indian. — Henry David Thoreau

I have made a short excursion into the new world which the Indian dwells in, or is. He begins where we leave off. — Henry David Thoreau

To understand American Indians is to understand America. This is the story of the paradoxically least and most American place in the twenty-first century. Welcome to the Rez. — David Treuer

The expansion of this country was accomplished at the cost of decimation to the Native American population. The American Indian death toll due to the United States' march to the Pacific was massive. Much of the land we stole from the Native Americans is uninhabited to this day; basically, the Indians could have stayed where they were. Had America expanded its boundaries yet been true to its conscience, the American Indian nations could have remained intact. And were there a greater prevalence of Native American philosophy and culture in the United States today, the life of our nation would be immeasurably enriched. — Marianne Williamson

The [Apache] tribe was under siege by government agents, who had jailed some of the medicine men for practicing their rituals. Freedom of religion was cherished as a sacrosanct American right -- everywhere, that is, but on the archipelago of Indian life. — Timothy Egan

That is the way a white man remembers a battle. So many soldiers here, so many there. Such a captain here. Such a lieutenant there. This colonel in one place. That major in another. The horses precisely here, the cannon exactly there. But not an Indian. An Indian remembers where his mother fell bayoneted, or his little brother had his skull smashed, or his big sister cried for mercy and was shot in the mouth. — Will Henry

If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys. — Chief Dan George

The Statue of Liberty, that frequently malevolent bitch, has an enormous tumor in her gut that has spread to her brain and eyes. With regard to the Native Americans she has Alzheimer's or mad cow disease and can't remember her past, and her blind eyes can't see the terrifying plight of most of the Indian tribes. Meanwhile she blows China and stomps Cuba to death, choosing to forget the Native cultures she has already destroyed. — Jim Harrison

The White Man goes into his church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his tipi and talks with Jesus. — Quanah Parker

Above all, I wanted to be appreciated as a prima ballerina who happened to be a Native American, never as someone who was an American Indian ballerina, — Maria Tallchief

The reality is, is that the military is full of native nomenclature. That's what we would call it. You've got Black Hawk helicopters, Apache Longbow helicopters. You've got Tomahawk missiles. The term used when you leave a military base in a foreign country is to go 'off the reservation, into Indian Country.' — Winona LaDuke

In an even wilder part of the river's jungle of cane and gum and pin oak, there is an Indian mound. Aboriginal, it rises profoundly and darkly enigmatic, the only elevation of any kind in the wild, flat jungle of river bottom. Even to some of us - children though we were, yet we were descended to literate, town-bred people - it possessed inferences of secret and violent blood, of savage and sudden destruction, as though the yells and hatchets we associated with Indians through the hidden and seceret dime novels which we passed among ourselves were but trivial and momentary manifestations of what dark power still dwelled or lurked there, sinister, a little sardonic, like a dark and nameless beast lightly and lazily slumbering with bloody jaws ... — William Faulkner

To the untutored sage, the concentration of population was the prolific mother of all evils, moral no less than physical. He argued that food is good, while surfeit kills; that love is good, but lust destroys; and not less dreaded than the pestilence following upon crowded and unsanitary dwellings was the loss of spiritual power inseparable from too close contact with one's fellow-men. — Charles Alexander Eastman

Thomas slammed his fist on the table, sending eating utensils flying. "Shameful! It is downright shameful that so-called men of God would use religion to manipulate people."
--from Prairie Grace when Thomas learns how the Indian agents and others are stealing from Native Americans — Marilyn Bay Wentz

The idea of full dress for preparation for a battle comes not from a belief that it will add to the fighting ability. The preparation is for death, in case that should be the result of conflict. Every Indian wants to look his best when he goes to meet the great Spirit, so the dressing up is done whether in imminent danger is an oncoming battle or a sickness or injury at times of peace. — Wooden Leg

In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be troublesome, and who must be cajoled or forced into leaving his hunting-grounds for the occupation of very orderly and virtuous white people, who sell him gunpowder and whiskey, but send him now and then a missionary to teach him that it is wrong to get drunk and murder his neighbor. — Mary H. Eastman

There have been players with Indian heritage, but there hasn't been a Native-American professional basketball player who became a regular for all sorts of social and political reasons. — Sherman Alexie

The values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to immerse himself in swamps for the positive vibrations; at the other end is Benjamin Franklin, who didn't like Nature. [p.91] — Margaret Atwood

I got in a fight with my girlfriend," I said. "I was just driving around, blowing off steam, you know?"
Well, you should be more careful where you drive," the officer said. "You're making people nervous. You don't fit the profile of the neighborhood."
I wanted to tell him that I didn't fit the profile of the country but I knew it would just get me into trouble. — Sherman Alexie

The Indian's intercourse with Nature is at least such as admits of the greatest independence of each. — Henry David Thoreau

There had been no crises of incident, or marked movements of experience such as in Felipe's imaginations of love were essential to the fulness of its growth. This is a common mistake on the part of those who have never felt love's true bonds. Once in those chains, one perceives that they are not of the sort full forged in a day. They are made as the great iron cables are made, on which bridges are swung across the widest water-channels,
not of single huge rods, or bars, which would be stronger, perhaps, to look at; but myriads of the finest wires, each one by itself so fine, so frail, it would barely hold a child's kite in the wind: by hundreds, hundreds of thousands of such, twisted, re-twisted together, are made the mighty cables, which do not any more swerve from their place in the air, under the weight and jar of the ceaseless traffic and tread of two cities, than the solid earth swerves under the same ceaseless weight and jar. Such cables do not break. — Helen Hunt Jackson

Native Americans' families experience living surrounded, living in increasingly small reservations surrounded by the society that destroyed their civilization, and are still stigmatized. For decades and decades, for hundreds of years except in Indian schools, they weren't allowed to speak their language. That stigma takes a terrible toll. — Joshua Oppenheimer

It's not that the Davenports had never had black people around their house before, or even a Chinese guy once, but never a Malaysian who looked Chinese to some and Indian to others, fancied himself black at times, and wanted to be the next Lenny Bruce Lee; a preppy black football player who sounded like the president and read Plato in Latin; and a white woman who occasionally claimed to be Native American. They were like an overconstructed novel, each representative of some cul-de-sac of idiolect and stereotype, missing only a handicapped person - No! At Berkeley we say handi-capable person - and a Jew and a Hispanic, and an Asian not of the subcontinent, Louis always said. — T. Geronimo Johnson

Hanging a banner from the front of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building that proclaimed it to be the "Native American Embassy," hundreds of protesters hailing from seventy-five Indigenous nations entered the building to sit in. BIA personnel, at the time largely non-Indigenous, fled, and the capitol police chain-locked the doors announcing that the Indigenous protesters were illegally occupying the building. The protesters stayed for six days, enough time for them to read damning federal documents that revealed gross mismanagement of the federal trust responsibility, which they boxed up and took with them. The Trail of Broken Treaties solidified Indigenous alliances, and the "20-Point Position Paper,"14 the work mainly of Hank Adams, provided a template for the affinity of hundreds of Native organizations. Five years later, in 1977, the document would be presented to the United Nations, forming the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Public service announcements were first created by the Ad Council during World War II to get Rosie to work and to tighten loose lips. In 1971, on the second Earth Day, the world met "the crying Indian," played by Iron Eyes Cody. The famous anti-pollution ad, which showed Cody paddling a canoe and watching motorists litter, effectively gave the new ecology movement a huge boost. As it turns out, Cody was of Italian descent (real name Espera DeCorti), but he appeared in hundreds of movies and TV shows as a Native American and denied his European ancestry until his death in 1999. — Mark Jacob

The Indian is one of Nature's gentlemen
he never says or does a rude or vulgar thing. The vicious, uneducated barbarians, who form the surplus of overpopulous European countries, are far behind the wild man in delicacy of feeling or natural courtesy. — Susanna Moodie

In this instance of the fire-arms, the Asiatic has been most improperly bracketed with the natives. The British Indian does not need any such restrictions as are imposed by the Bill on the natives regarding the carrying of fire-arms. The prominent race can remain so by preventing the native from arming himself. Is there a slightest vestige of justification for so preventing the British Indian? — Mahatma Gandhi

Europeans were always trying to stop the outflow. Hernando de Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies. The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it a crime for men to wear long hair. "People who did run away to the Indians might expect very extreme punishments, even up to the death penalty," Karen Kupperman tells us, if caught by whites.49 Nonetheless, right up to the end of independent Native nationhood in 1890, whites continued to defect, and whites who lived an Indian lifestyle, such as Daniel Boone, became cultural heroes in white society. — James W. Loewen

Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will. — D.H. Lawrence

From my teenage years on, I sought out Native elders from many tribal nations and listened to their words. I also started a small press, The Greenfield Review Press, and became very involved with publishing the work of other American Indian authors, especially books of poetry. — Joseph Bruchac

The conflict between the creatures of Native Lore and the immigration of the European preternatural hosts is hinted at in 'Blood Bound' and reflects the conflicts between the human immigrants and the Indian people who were already here. — Patricia Briggs

What we did in the 1960s and early 1970s was raise the consciousness of white America that this government has a responsibility to Indian people. That there are treaties; that textbooks in every school in America have a responsibility to tell the truth. An awareness reached across America that if Native American people had to resort to arms at Wounded Knee, there must really be something wrong. And Americans realized that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing. From that, our own people began to sense the pride. — Dennis Banks

Last night I missed two free throws which would have won the game against the best team in the state. The farm town high school I play for is nicknamed the "Indians," and I'm probably the only actual Indian ever to play for a team with such a mascot.
This morning I pick up the sports page and read the headline: INDIANS LOSE AGAIN.
Go ahead and tell me none of this is supposed to hurt me very much. — Sherman Alexie

If today I had a young mind to direct, to start on the journey of life, and I was faced with the duty of choosing between the natural way of my forefathers and that of the ... present way of civilization, I would, for its welfare, unhesitatingly set that child's feet in the path of my forefathers. I would raise him to be an Indian! — Tom Brown Jr.

The Lord has never indicated that black skin came because of being less faithful. Now, the Indian; we know why he has changed, don't we? The Book of Mormon tells us that; and he has a dark skin, but he has promise there that through faithfulness, that they all again become a white and delightsome people. — LeGrand Richards

Tom Stoppard's other work includes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, After Magritte, The Real Thing, Enter A Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink (a stage adaptation of his own play, In the Native State) and The Invention of Love. Arcadia — Tom Stoppard

He who would do great things should not attempt them all alone. — Seneca The Younger

There is no man who is enterprising and keeps well up with the times but confesses that the women of to-day are in every respect, except political liberty, equal to the men. — S. Alice Callahan

The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of the pond, the smell of the wind itself cleansed by a midday rain, or scented with pinon pine. The air is precious to the red man, for all things are the same breath - the animals, the trees, the man. — Chief Seattle

The most Indian thing about the Indian is surely not his moccasins or his calumet, his wampum or his stone hatched, but traits of character and sagacity, skill, or passion. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Juet's journal frequently records how only a tiny quantity of alcohol was needed to get the Indians drunk, 'for they could not take it'; and tales of the drunkenness that greeted Hudsons' arrival persisted among the native Indians until the last century. Indeed Heckewelder claims that the name Manhattan is derived from the drunkenness that took place there, since the Indian word 'manahactanienk' means 'the island of general intoxication'. — Giles Milton

Next time! In what calendar are kept the records of those next times which never come? — Helen Hunt Jackson

According to court records, during the siege at Wounded Knee, more than two hundred and fifty thousand rounds were fired at our people by U.S. marshalls, FBI agents, the tribal police, the GOONs, and white vigilantes. These boys weren't kidding. And neither were we. — Leonard Peltier

Never has America lost a war ... But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict. Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies. — Vine Deloria Jr.

This is not your land," William Lobb said.
"Oh, it is, it is. I got the papers. I can show you, back at the camp."
"This is Indian land, if it's anyone's." William Lobb spoke as if he hadn't heard Billie Lapham. "Those Miwoks encamped just south of here - they've been here longer than you. It's theirs, or it's God's land - take your pick. — Tracy Chevalier

Spirituality is indeed the master key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinitive is native to it. — Sri Aurobindo

Outside, milling under the ubiquitous gaze of security cameras, are bright splashes of colorful souls wearing crystals, beads, and Native American Indian paraphernalia; middle-aged academics with "Erowid" drug website t-shirts; and passengers that give you that odd conspiratorial smile that says, "yes, we are here for the conference." And here we are chowing down on McDonalds and donut King, getting our last hits of civilization before hitting the jungle city of Iquitos and shamanic boot camp. It feels like some whacked-out reality TV show, a generational snapshot of a new psychedelic wave just before it breaks. Bright-eyed Westerners about to die and be reborn in the humid jungles of Peru, drinking the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca ... — Rak Razam

The true Indian sets no price upon either his property or his labor. His generosity is limited only by his strength and ability. He regards it as an honor to be selected for difficult or dangerous service and would think it shameful to ask for any reward, saying rather: Let the person I serve express his thanks according to his own bringing up and his sense of honor. Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new sweet earth, and the Great Silence alone!. What is Silence? It is the Great Mystery! The Holy Silence is His voice! — Charles Alexander Eastman

In my opinion, it was chiefly owing to their deep contemplation in their silent retreats in the days of youth that the old Indian orators acquired the habit of carefully arranging their thoughts.
They listened to the warbling of birds and noted the grandeur and the beauties of the forest. The majestic clouds - which appear like mountains of granite floating in the air - the golden tints of a summer evening sky, and the changes of nature, possessed a mysterious significance.
All of this combined to furnish ample matter for reflection to the contemplating youth. — Francis Assikinack

In the 1830s, the forced removal of Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles from the fertile lands of the southeastern United States, under the direction of President Andrew Jackson, amassed even more land for cotton cultivation and expansion of the wealth of white people. As Native Americans made the involuntary treks to what would become Indian Country or Oklahoma, white Americans dislocated approximately one million African Americans through the domestic slave trade, moving them from the Upper South to the Lower South and westward, destroying families, and severing community ties in order to create plantations and cultivate cotton. — Heather Andrea Williams

No telling what those men wanted ... but in these times there were white men with bloodier hands than any Indian ... — Louis L'Amour

By the eve of the American Revolution, a third of the native people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Indian bondage was more common still in the southern — Charles C. Mann

Ironworkers also settled in Detroit and Buffalo. They were, for the first time in the history of Native Americans, creating a new class--the urban Indian. — David Weitzman

I'm not an Indian warrior chief. I'm not some demure little Indian woman healer talking spider this, spider that, am I? I'm not babbling about the four directions. Or the two-legged, four-legged, and winged. I'm talking like a twentieth-century Indian woman. Hell, a twenty-first century Indian, and you can't handle it, you wimp. — Sherman Alexie

Like a good Indian, he knew when to talk and when to remain silent. Like a good Indian, he knew there was never a good time to talk. — Sherman Alexie

It's just me and James walking and walking except he's on my back and his eyes are looking past the people who are looking past us for the coyote of our soul and the wolverine of our heart and the crazy crazy man that touches every Indian who spends too much time alone. — Sherman Alexie

Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine. — Brad Jensen

You see the one thing I've always maintained is that I'm an American Indian. I'm not a Native American. I'm not politically correct. Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans. And if you notice, I put American before my ethnicity. I'm not a hyphenated African-American or Irish-American or Jewish-American or Mexican-American. — Russell Means

Virtually the entire inflow was therefore Asiatic, and all but three or four thousand of that inflow originated from the Indian subcontinent ... It is by 'black Power' that the headlines are caught, and under the shape of the negro that the consequences for Britain of immigration and what is miscalled 'race' are popularly depicted. Yet it is more truly when he looks into the eyes of Asia that the Englishman comes face to face with those who will dispute with him the possession of his native land. — Enoch Powell

I think the worst one [indian mascot] is the Cleveland Indians' Big Chief Wahoo. It's just a red face on a baseball with a big, toothy grin. It's the Sambo of all other offensive mascots. I have never seen a Native American smile that hard before, not even at a casino opening. — Wanda Sykes

I have Indian Blood in me. I have just enough white blood for you to question my honesty! — Will Rogers

When the death toll among British troops was added to that of the carriers the official 'butcher's bill' in the East Africa campaign exceeded 100,000 souls. The true figure was undoubtedly much higher: as many a British official admitted, 'the full tale of the mortality among [the] native carriers will never be told'.2 Even 100,000 deaths is a sobering enough figure. It is almost double the number of Australian or Canadian or Indian troops who gave their lives in the Great War; indeed it is equivalent to the combined casualties - the dead and wounded - sustained by Indian troops. It is as if the entire African workforce employed at the time in the mines of South Africa had been wiped out. Yet the East Africa campaign remains, by and large, a forgotten theatre of war. — Edward Paice

For a day or two Fleury became quite active. He had his book about the advance of civilization in India to consider and this was one reason why he had taken an interest in the behaviour of the Collector. He asked a great number of questions and even bought a notebook to record pertinent information.
"Why, if the Indian people are happier under our rule," he asked a Treasury official, "do they not emigrate from those native states like Hyderabad which are so dreadfully misgoverned and come and live in
British India?"
"The apathy of the native is well known," replied the official stiffly. "He is not enterprising."
Fleury wrote down "apathy" in a flowery hand and then, after a moment's hesitation, added "not enterprising". — J.G. Farrell

Thanks Giving.
The Indian and the White Man together.
The pageantry spoke to me of civilization. — Stephen Graham Jones

I want to say that further you are not a great chief of this country. That you have no following, no power, no control." Logan continued, "You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government, your children are educated by the government, and all you have and are today is because of the government. If it were not for the government you would be freezing and starving today in the mountains. I merely say these things to notify you that you cannot insult the people of the United States of America or its committees ... the government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men.
-Senator John Logan, 1883 — Dee Brown

Our beliefs are rooted deep in our earth, no matter what you have done to it and how much of it you have paved over. And if you leave all that concrete unwatched for a year or two, our plants, the native Indian plants, will pierce that concrete and push up through it. — John Fire Lame Deer

The land is sacred. These words are at the core of your being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take our land away and we die. That is, the Indian in us dies. — Mary Brave Bird

Why had Ovid lived in Ancient Rome in 20 BCE and not Chicago in 2006 CE? Would Ovid still have been Ovid if he had lived in America? No, he wouldn't have been, because he would have been a Native American or possibly and American Indian or a First Person or an Indigenous Person, and they did not have Latin or any other kind of written language then. So did Ovid matter because he was Ovid or because he lived in ancient Rome? — John Green

I've even come to a conclusion that would get me blackballed from ever setting foot in liberal education circles again. That is this: colonialism wasn't 100 percent evil. More like 96 percent evil. Sometimes the colonizing culture actually made moral improvements in the native culture. I came to this conclusion while reading about the abolition of the Indian custom of widow burning. In pre-British India, a man's widow was burned alongside his corpse. The British colonialists put a stop to that. So yes, they criminally oppressed an entire people. But like a robber who fills up the ice trays while he steals the TV, they did a smidgeon of good. — A. J. Jacobs

Indian misery is when somebody takes your land.
Indian misery is when somebody kills your friends.
Indian misery is when your people turn against you.
Indian misery is being slaves to people.
Indian misery is being locked up in jail.
Indian misery is people killing your food for money.
Indian misery is fighting. Indian misery is no peace.
Indian misery is when you get killed. Indian misery is if you lose the fight.

(Andrew Herman, student) — Timothy P. McLaughlin

When a woman grabs my braids and says "How cute!" I crab her breast and say "How cute!" She never touches me again! — Russell Means

How can scholars continue to honor the unique and important histories of individual tribal nations and Indian communities while simultaneously drawing attention to ways that the nineteenth-century Native experiences shaped the United States in profound ways? — C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa

No, no, my friend. You are kind, and you mean well, but you can never understand these things as I do. You've never been oppressed. — S. Alice Callahan

Where no one intrudes, many can live in harmony. — Chief Dan George

[The is] a mistaken belief that [the word Indian] refers somehow to the country, India. When Columbus washed up on the beach in the Caribbean, he was not looking for a country called India. Europeans were calling that country Hindustan in 1492 ... Columbus called the tribal people he met "Indio," from the Italian in dio, meaning "in God." — Russell Means

Who can declare that money is not a power which rulers of the world cannot withstand? — S. Alice Callahan

The acknowledgement of White cowardice has driven literally tens of millions of White Americans to try to escape it by undergoing a voluntary human metamorphosis and becoming "part-Indian." 95% would become proven liars by a simple DNA test, but their children grow up believing the lie. Abandoning the White race means not having to fight for it or defend it in any way. — Frazier Glenn Miller

Traditional people of Indian nations have interpreted the two roads that face the light-skinned race as the road to technology and the road to spirituality. We feel that the road to technology ... has led modern society to a damaged and seared earth. Could it be that the road to technology represents a rush to destruction, and that the road to spirituality represents the slower path that the traditional native people have traveled and are now seeking again? The earth is not scorched on this trail. The grass is still growing there. — William Commanda

New York has her wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of Europe are familiar with the soundings of her Hudson, and Fulton long since invented the steamboat on its waters, an Indian is still necessary to guide her scientific men to its headwaters in the Adirondack country. — Henry David Thoreau

One researcher just determined that African and Indian elephants make each other sick. When a new animal or plant is introduced to a habitat bad things happen. The biggest danger to native wildlife is foreign wildlife. — Robert T. Bakker

Everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease and herb to cure it, and every person a mission. This is the Indian theory of existence. — Mourning Dove

I have much to learn of the Indian, nothing of the missionary. — Henry David Thoreau

I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural. — Henry David Thoreau

The only good Indian is a dead Indian — William Tecumseh Sherman

The American Indian is of the soil, whether it be the region of forests, plains, pueblos, or mesas. He fits into the landscape, for the hand that fashioned the continent also fashioned the man for his surroundings. He once grew as naturally as the wild sunflowers, he belongs just as the buffalo belonged ... — Luther Standing Bear

The Great Spirit Chief who rules above all will smile upon this land ... and this time the Indian race is waiting and praying. — Chief Joseph

It is important that Congress works to promote home ownership in Indian Country. These federal housing funds and programs will help young Native American families to stay on tribal lands in order to live, work and raise a family. — Rick Renzi