Native American Indians Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Sherman Alexie

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. Because I know that I am not my own master, I offer my heart as a true sacrifice to the Lord.

John Calvin

#7. It's just that very few poets disturb the peace to any degree.

Gerald Stern

#8. 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

#9. Cardinal Dolan, of course, has a very, very hard job: trying to hold up Catholic family values in sexually liberal New York City. I'm not saying New York is the Gay Mecca. But it's at least Gay-rusalem.

Stephen Colbert

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. He who avoids complaint invites happiness.

Abu Bakr

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. Where? Where do you want me to kiss you, Lilah?"
She shivered at the thought of where she wanted his mouth, but he pulled free to look at her, waiting for her answer. "Everywhere," she managed.

Jill Shalvis

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. If you hold anger in your heart, it just turns to evil. You have to be able to see the good in people, even those people in whom you think there isn't even a speck of good left.

Lynn Cahoon

#23. 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