American Indians Quotes

#1. Ask most kids about details about Auschwitz or about how the American Indians were assassinated as a people and they don't know anything about it. They don't want to know anything. Most people just want their beer or their soap opera or their lullaby.

Marlon Brando

#2. With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt on to someone else.

Andrew Roberts

#3. Because Native American Indians are so marginalized in the historical world, we are compelled to search for tiny openings in the armor of recorded history to work resistant magic.

Autumn Morning Star

#4. I want to make them [American Indians] live forever. It's such a big dream I can't see it all.

Edward S. Curtis

#5. Librarians are not just gatekeepers to knowledge, they are what the American Indians used to call their special sages who preserved the oral legends of a tribe: dream keepers.

James H. Billington

#6. In 'Shadow Tag,' Erdrich creates scenes from a fictional marriage, that of two American Indians, Irene and her painter husband Gil, that suggest some of the worst psychological torments and stresses of real life.

Alan Cheuse

#7. There are more American Indians alive today than there were when Columbus arrived or at any other time in history. Does this sound like a record of genocide?

Rush Limbaugh

#8. Mon ami,' said Poirot with dignity, 'when I commit a murder it will not be with the arrow poison of the South American Indians.

Agatha Christie

#9. We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians, those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ.

Jean Baudrillard

#10. Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain.

Russell Means

#11. What the American Indian Movement says is that the American Indians are the Palestinians of the United States, and the Palestinians are the American Indians of Europe.

Russell Means

#12. Then, I realized that there is an indigenous presence in the Solar System. It's us. So, then, I got to wondering what would happen if a more technologically advanced society moved next door to us, the way we moved next door to the American Indians.

Sarah Zettel

#13. The fey in this country keep to themselves, and are a separate nation, much like the American Indians, but with even more autonomy.

Laurell K. Hamilton

#14. 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

#15. Among the language of the American Indians, there is no word for 'art' ... For Indians, everything is art ... therefore needs no name.

Jamake Highwater

#16. So, one of the things I was doing with the aliens in The Quiet Invasion was creating that advanced society which had ideas about morality and proper use of natural resources that were radically different from ours, as the Europeans were from the American Indians.

Sarah Zettel

#17. I'd love to work more with the American Indians, my people.

Loretta Lynn

#18. A few scattered accounts, collected and combined together, may lead us to two certain conclusions: 1. That all the American Indians are one kind of people; 2. That they are the same as the people in the northeast of Asia.

Ezra Stiles

#19. We owe an historic debt to American Indians. They have a unique set of concerns that haven't been addressed, and I'd like to stand with them. Also, I'd like to get their views on immigration.

Al Franken

#20. I think when you see 'Ridiculous Six,' the show speaks for itself in terms of its treatment of American Indians.

Ted Sarandos

#21. For a subject worked and reworked so often in novels, motion pictures, and television, American Indians remain probably the least understood and most misunderstood Americans of us all.

John F. Kennedy

#22. I was so tired of the parts I had to play. There seems little for me in Hollywood, because, rather than real Chinese, producers prefer Hungarians, Mexicans, American Indians for Chinese roles.

Anna May Wong

#23. The American Indians, the ancient Indians would say, the metaphysical ones would say: "Power binds us together." Power, for a while, makes us what we are, perceivers, luminous perceivers of reality.

Frederick Lenz

#24. Throughout history, every great warrior-the Greeks, the Samurais, the American Indians, the Mongolians, you name it-had long hair and would dress it before battle.

Troy Polamalu

#25. The white people should go back to Europe, and the country should be returned to the American Indians. This is the future I would like to see for the so-called United States.

Bobby Fischer

#26. Obviously I'm in favor of protecting the rights of everybody: gay, black, women, what have you, American Indians.

Gore Vidal

#27. The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

P. J. O'Rourke

#28. Among the languages of American Indians there is no word for 'art,' because for Indians everything is art.

Huston Smith

#29. Yes, I know, if the American Indians had enforced such a policy none of us pale-faced honkies would be here. But the Indians were foolish, and divided, and failed to keep our WASP ancestors out. They've regretted it ever since.

Edward Abbey

#30. (Present-day anthropologists defend the thesis that the American Indians were in fact originally Mongolians who crossed over by the Bering Strait.)

Barbara W. Tuchman

#31. The American Indians were Communists. They were. Every anthropologist will tell you they were Communists. No rich, no poor. If somebody needed something the community chipped in.

Pete Seeger

#32. That Native American cultures are imperiled is important and not just to Indians. It is important to everyone, or should be. When we lose cultures, we lose American plurality -- the productive and lovely discomfort that true difference brings.

David Treuer

#33. I've always been fascinated with the history of the Plains Indians and the history of the American Indian Movement in the '70s.

Jason Aaron

#34. Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. Its five hundred years later and they still cant see us. We are still invisible.

John Trudell

#35. We're not Indians and we're not Native Americans. We're older than both concepts. We're the people, we're the human beings.

John Trudell

#36. Ten Little Indians once again shows [Alexie] to be not just one of the West's best, but one of the most brilliantly literate American writers, even funnier than Louise Erdrich, even more primal than Jim Harrison, and even more eloquent than Annie Proulx.

Ron Franscell

#37. 'Indian policy' has now been brought down upon the American people, and the American people are the new Indians of the 21st Century.

Russell Means

#38. I don't want to collect Indian art, though pots and beadwork and blankets made by Indians remain the most beautiful art objects in the American West, in my opinion.

Ian Frazier

#39. Do you think we care about the feelings of Native Americans when we celebrate Columbus Day? That's the day that the white man discovered a land where Indians had been living for a few thousand years.

Carlos Mencia

#40. From nowhere we came; into nowhere we go. What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Crowfoot Blackfoot Warrior Chief 1890

#41. The American public has difficulty believing ... [that] injustice continues to be inflicted upon Indian people because Americans assume that the sympathy and tolerance they feel toward Indians is somehow 'felt' or transferred to the government policy that deals with Indians. This is not the case.

Leslie Marmon Silko

#42. It's not about Indians, it's about people... the overall philosophy is to reconnect all people to nature and inevitably themselves. - Larry Stillday

Michael Meuers

#43. You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

Sherman Alexie

#44. There was such a relationship between the buffalo and the American Indian - the Indians would eat them, live inside their pelts, use every part of the body. There was almost no separation between the people and the animals.

Val Kilmer

#45. Now, of course, the great thing about the solar system as a frontier is that there are no Indians, so you can have all the glory of the myth of the American westward expansion without any of the guilt.

Sarah Zettel

#46. Religion serves all of us; men, women, gays, straights, blacks, whites, Americans and Indians. If it does not comply with our needs, wishes and happiness, then religion without a doubt is a plague that must be stopped.

M.F. Moonzajer

#47. Indians and wolves are both beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape.

George Washington

#48. Rogue factories on the other side of the border, most of them also on Native American reservations, pumped out millions of cheap, untaxed, generic cigarettes a year. You couldn't blame the Indians. We took their land; they were giving us cancer.

Daryl Gregory

#49. If you look at national economies today, for example, the American economy, the European economy, the Indians, the Chinese, we're all tied together. If one of them sinks, the rest are going to sink with them and if one floats, the rest are lifted up. I find that very interesting.

Frans De Waal

#50. There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.

Bharati Mukherjee

#51. 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

#52. Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skinsand furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.

Thomas Jefferson

#53. To say that certainly America was very lucky to get a large amount of land, and the native Indians were extremely unlucky to have white men coming over here, is one thing. But to say that the whole of the American prosperity was based on exploiting the indigenous population would be a great mistake.

Amartya Sen

#54. Another Chief remembered that since the Great Father promised them that they would never be moved they had been moved five times. "I think you had better put the Indians on wheels," he said sardonically, "and you can run them about whenever you wish.

Dee Brown

#55. The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.

Immanuel Kant

#56. It may be regarded as certain that not a foot of land will ever be taken from the Indians without their own consent.

Thomas Jefferson

#57. I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans. Generally speaking Indians don't read books. It's not a book culture. That's why I'm trying to make movies. Indians go to movies; Indians own video recorders.

Sherman Alexie

#58. Let there be freedom for the Indians, wherever they may be in the American Continent or elsewhere in the world, because while they are alive, a glow of hope will be alive as well as a true concept of life.

Rigoberta Menchu

#59. Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.

Sherman Alexie

#60. Popcorn is American. Nobody but the Indians ever had popcorn, till after the Pilgrim Fathers came to America. On

Laura Ingalls Wilder

#61. When I was a kid growing up in Cleveland, I believed - completely, wholeheartedly, without reservation or pause - that the Cleveland Indians were named to honor a Native American ballplayer named Louis Sockalexis, who played for Cleveland in the late 19th Century.

Joe Posnanski

#62. This country was a lot better off when the Indians were running it.

Vine Deloria Jr.

#63. I think a lot of African-American kids don't have fathers to teach them how to dress, so you end up being taught by pictures in magazine and movies. You see cowboys, Indians, old Hollywood films, Cary Grant. It has an effect on you.

Andre Benjamin