Top 63 Native Indian Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Next time! In what calendar are kept the records of those next times which never come?
Helen Hunt Jackson
#4. 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
#5. Out of the Indian approach to life there came a great freedom, an intense and absorbing respect for life, enriching faith in a Supreme Power, and principles of truth, honesty, generosity, equity, and brotherhood as a guide to mundane relations.
Black Elk
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the world always works in circles.
Black Elk
#13. 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
#14. I have Indian Blood in me. I have just enough white blood for you to question my honesty!
Will Rogers
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. There is not one Indian in the whole of this country who does not cringe in anguish and frustration because of these textbooks. There is not one Indian child who has not come home in shame and tears.
Rupert Costo
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Yes, I am Irish and Indian, which would be the coolest blend in the world if my parents were around to teach me how to be Irish and Indian. But they're not here and haven't been for years, so I'm not really Irish or Indian. I am a blank sky, a human solar eclipse.
Sherman Alexie
#22. The Indian's intercourse with Nature is at least such as admits of the greatest independence of each.
Henry David Thoreau
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Each and every Indian, man or woman, child or Elder, is a spirit-warrior.
Leonard Peltier
#27. Fascinating, often hilarious, always devastatingly truthful, The Inconvenient Indian is destined to become a classic of historical narrative. For those who wish to better understand Native peoples, it is a must read. For those who don't wish to understand, it is even more so.
Joseph Boyden
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#36. 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
#37. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.
Brad Jensen
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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. Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands.
Jared Diamond
#43. 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
#44. In Indian Country," he says, "we have a different sense of time. I'm learning and you're learning - and more will.
Gloria Steinem
#45. 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
#46. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Spirituality is indeed the master key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinitive is native to it.
Sri Aurobindo
#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. Who can declare that money is not a power which rulers of the world cannot withstand?
S. Alice Callahan
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. No telling what those men wanted ... but in these times there were white men with bloodier hands than any Indian ...
Louis L'Amour
#58. 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
#59. This is going to sound weird, but when I was a kid my old man used to tell us that he was a Sioux Indian warrior in his former life. Native American culture was always big in my house - I don't know why.
Marc Forgione
#60. The White Man goes into his church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his tipi and talks with Jesus.
Quanah Parker
#61. Thanks Giving.
The Indian and the White Man together.
The pageantry spoke to me of civilization.
Stephen Graham Jones
#62. 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
#63. 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
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