Top 100 American Native Quotes
#1. I'm tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro - that's the Scotch-Irish part.
Alice Walker
#2. Yes, we become stronger when black and whites, Latino, Asian American, Native American, when all of us stand together.
Bernie Sanders
#6. Look through the prayer books. You'll see lots of dates. You'll see names of Native Americans remembered. This was an open-sourcing project among so many people.
Shane Claiborne
#7. You got what you deserved. Now be a man and confess to what most of us already know.
Stacy Buck
#8. I'm Native American, so it's in my blood to always want brothers and friends. I'm a good brotherhood guy.
Duane Chapman
#10. The more I heard, the more I've learned, and the more I saw, the more resolved I became about helping to address the challenges that plague the Native American community.
Daniel Snyder
#11. It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
Mark Twain
#12. Hiking is like life...
You can spend the whole trip just watching the trail ahead, worrying that you'll twist an ankle or fall.
And then you miss all this.
Susannah Scott
#13. I continue to be surprised by judgmental native stereotypes and apathy, but if I wasn't that would mean I'd become accustomed and tolerant. I don't want to stop being surprised. I just want them to stop.
Red Haircrow
#14. Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans.
Russell Means
#15. We do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us?
Chief Seattle
#17. They say there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in this country. But if you ask a Native American, that number is more like 300 million.
David Letterman
#18. 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
#19. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.
Brad Jensen
#20. One of the things I've been taught by Native American elders is the importance of patience, of waiting to do things when the time is right.
Joseph Bruchac
#21. The only people that deserve to be called Americans are Native Americans, otherwise, I'm a Latino American, you know ... Anybody else ... well where did you come from?
Cristian Machado
#22. When the sun died, I went up to heaven and saw God and all the people who had died a long time ago. God told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and not fight, or steal, or lie. He gave me this dance to give to my people.
Wovoka
#23. Officers have been trying for hundreds of years to outsmart soldiers and have still not learned that it cannot be done. We can always count on the native ingenuity of the American GI to save us from ourselves, and to win wars.
Colin Powell
#25. Like an unfinished symphony, her story played on my mind for most of my life. It would rock to the tune of the passage of time, an adagio of high notes, low notes an illusive movements. Then when I least expected it, I happened upon the missing notes in the life of Charlotte Howe Taylor.
Sally Armstrong
#26. My mother is Greek and my father is Bulgarian. I am a first-generation American and native Los Angeleno. I was born and raised in Hollywood.
Rita Wilson
#27. I have good genes. My father is Danish and my mother is Irish and Native American. They both have good skin.
Virginia Madsen
#28. 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
#30. If you're Native American and you pray to the wolves, you're a savage. If you're African and you pray to your ancestors, you're a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that's just common sense.
Trevor Noah
#31. The wolf turned to Rachel. She was afraid to run, afraid fleeing would make it chase her. Somewhere in the stored files of her mind, she remembered one should not look directly at a menacing dog, but she couldn't take her eyes from it.
G.G. Collins
#32. My forefathers didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.
Will Rogers
#33. Westerners who go native with Chinese ideas are called 'eggs' - outside white, inside yellow -, and are often systematically excluded from their expat community's activities, let alone the financial support system.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
#34. Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.
Rebecca Solnit
#35. I see a time of Seven Generations when all the colors of mankind will gather under the Sacred Tree of Life and the whole earth will become One Circle again.
Crazy Horse
#36. The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a reverence for the life-giving earth, and the Native American shared this elemental ethic: The land was alive to his loving touch, and he, its son, was brother to all creatures.
Stewart Udall
#38. There have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, 'Well, I don't want those folks,' even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.
Barack Obama
#39. My friends call my style 'old man chic.' I wear loafers and stylish sweatpants. I love to stay comfortable, so I definitely funk it up, but I'm always comfortable. I wear lots of hats and feathers, and I kind of have a little obsession with Native American jewelry.
Hayley Kiyoko
#40. My wife was the first romantic partner who understood both American and native parts of me - not so much the positive stuff, but the damage.
Sherman Alexie
#41. I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.
Zora Neale Hurston
#42. One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.
Crazy Horse
#43. Luxury spreads its ample board before their eyes; but they are excluded from the banquet. Plenty revels over the fields; but theyare starving in the midst of its abundance: the whole wilderness has blossomed into a garden; but they feel as reptiles that infest it.
Washington Irving
#44. My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon. So long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have a right to the soil. Nothing can be sold but such things as can be carried away
Black Hawk
#45. The only thing Native Americans ever did better than the rest of us is spirituality. Of course, that's everything, isn't it?
Deacon Jones
#46. Native Americans were driven off their land. Lincoln even took part in the Black Hawk campaign against the Native Americans in Illinois. While they were being exterminated and driven off their land, Whites were collecting assets.
Ishmael Reed
#47. I could see the bay in the distance and where the ship should have been. Instead we found a burnt mast protruding from the waves.
Stacy Buck
#48. The realization of a sustainable economic development strategy for Maine's Native American communities has always been a priority and a critical element of my administration's overall economic development strategy.
John Baldacci
#49. The seal and the constitution, reflects the thinking of the founding fathers that this was to be a nation by white people, and for white people. Native Americans, Blacks, and all other non-white people, were to be the burden bearers for the real citizens of this nation.
Louis Farrakhan
#50. Music is a performing art, as any Native American will tell you. It isn't there in the score.
Michael Tippett
#51. I always see America as really belonging to the Native Americans. Even though I'm American, I still feel like a visitor in my own country.
Nicolas Cage
#52. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Or, as it's known to Native Americans - Sarcastic You're Welcomesgiving.
Stephen Colbert
#53. Most of my younger Native American friends are not in any way looking for sympathy, and they're not looking to lay guilt on anybody. They have their dignity, and they do what they do.
Robbie Robertson
#54. The Lamanites [Native Americans], now a down-trodden people, are a remnant of the house of Israel. The curse of God has followed them as it has done the Jews, though the Jews have not been darkened in their skin as have the Lamanites.
Wilford Woodruff
#55. In more recent years, I've become more and more fascinated with the indigenous folklore of this land, Native American folklore, and also Hispanic folklore now that I live in the Southwest.
Terri Windling
#57. His grandfather had often told him that he tried too hard to move trees when a wiser man would walk around them.
Patricia Briggs
#58. Thanksgiving began in 1621 when Native Americans sat down with a bunch of undocumented pilgrims. They had dinner and the pilgrims never left.
Jay Leno
#60. Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people.
H.P. Lovecraft
#61. 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
#62. Our fathers gave us many laws which they had learned from their
fathers. These laws were good.
Chief Joseph
#63. I have had vegan Thanksgiving of tofurkey and soy gravy. And it's not to say that Thanksgiving will ever justify the genocide of the Native Americans. But vegan Thanksgiving - that's just spitting on the graves, isn't it?
Hari Kondabolu
#65. Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.
Colson Whitehead
#66. Molly grabbed a vase off the mantel and flung it at the wall, knocking it into a painting of a mountain scene. The vase shattered and the picture frame swayed back and forth on the wall, taunting her with an image of what life was supposed to be like. . .
Susan Rose
#68. Don't believe the dark whisperings that invite you to walk backward. At any time in your life, you have the power to turn forward.
Anasazi Foundation
#69. I wanted a trumpet concerto that reflected Native American music because, well, there aren't any. I looked around for one but couldn't find anything. So it's a wide-open field.
Christopher Moore
#70. The movie industry would never purposely offend homosexuals, native Americans, environmentalists, animal rights activists, or women's groups, but they don't think twice about something that might offend Christians.
Tim LaHaye
#71. At the end of our lives, when our bodies are about to be laid in Mother Earth, we will know for ourselves whether we are a Two-Legged being full of light or a Two-Legged being full of darkness.
Anasazi Foundation
#73. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. That nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side.
Sitting Bull
#74. 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
#75. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket,
he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift.
John Fire Lame Deer
#76. In its sacredness, families get together to (unintentionally?) celebrate one genocide (against Native Americans) by committing another (against turkeys).
Daniel Brook
#77. Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
Toni Morrison
#78. 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
#79. Mother Earth has never been more crowded, yet her inhabitants have never been more lonely.
Anasazi Foundation
#80. Grandfather says that when your friends die you must not cry. You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always. It will give you satisfaction in life.
Wovoka
#81. To say nothing is out here is incorrect; to say the desert is stingy with everything except space and light, stone and earth is closer to the truth.
William Least Heat-Moon
#82. Life on
Life on the reservation
Life on the reservation is dirty
Life on the reservation is dirty, filthy
Life on the reservation is dirty, filthy dogs.
(Dena Colhoff, student)
Timothy P. McLaughlin
#83. I didn't know much about my Native American ancestry, but as I got older I became more interested in it.
Alan Robinson
#84. Native Americans say, "It's a good day to die," and samurai live their life to die honorably, so that kind of energy creates a certain mindset of reactiveness with control to a point. And after that, it's gone.
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
#85. As you know, today was Don't Take Your Illegal Immigrant To Work Day here in Los Angeles. No, all across the nation they had a Day Without Immigrants, is what they call it. Or, as Native Americans call it, the good ol' days.
Jay Leno
#86. On the first season of our show, I commissioned a Native American artist to make up, 'cause I'm known for the tomahawk, besides the hair and the leather outfit and the whole thing.
Joe Lando
#87. I've got tonnes of aboriginal and Native American art, but I'd like even more.
Tori Amos
#88. No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country ... we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.
Luis Valdez
#89. Well, as a native, as a colonized people you do live in the in between. The thing is I'm native. But necessarily because I'm a member of the country, I'm also a White American.
Sherman Alexie
#90. In Indian Country," he says, "we have a different sense of time. I'm learning and you're learning - and more will.
Gloria Steinem
#91. The Tonkawa killed him it make my heart hot. I want my people follow after white way. Some white people do that, too.
Quanah Parker
#92. Each morning offers lessons in light. For the morning light teaches the most basic of truths: Light chases away darkness.
Anasazi Foundation
#93. If you look at the statistics regarding Native Americans, you will see that most of the tribes since the 70s have improved their economic situation in some form. And this has been brought about by their aggressive assertion of their sovereign treaty rights.
Leonard Peltier
#94. 'Avatar' imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent.
Annalee Newitz
#96. 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
#97. And my point was one I think that you'd agree with, which is there's no room in America for a black racist, a Latino racist, or a white racist, or an Asian racist, or a Native American racist. Now, we're either color blind or we're not color blind.
Newt Gingrich
#98. I was inspired by Colin Farrell in the fact that he's Irish and has freckles but with black hair. I'm a bunch of different things, Irish, Polish, Native American, and French, but I wanted to tap into that Irish side and be freckle-y with black hair, so that's what I did.
Jojo
#99. I have a hard problem, being some part Native American - being a Christian: do you get burned, do you get cremated, do you get - let the sharks eat you? How do you die?
Duane Chapman
#100. I hope the Great Heavenly Father, who will look down upon us, will give all the tribes his blessing, that we may go forth in peace, and live in peace all our days, and that He will look down upon our children and finally lift us far above this earth.
Red Cloud
