Top 100 Native People Quotes
#1. And Americans realized that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing.
Dennis Banks
#2. Unfortunately, half the boats were lost in a great storm at sea, and many members of the six boats that did make it to their destinations safely, were later killed by the very native people to whom they sought to transmit their knowledge of the Atlantean sciences, arts and metaphysics.
Frederick Lenz
#3. The United States - you know, native people are large landowners, but the military has a huge chunk of our territories. And in those, there are a number of places that are our sacred sites.
Winona LaDuke
#4. I don't ask employers, for example, to like blacks or Jews or native people; I ask employers to hire the qualified members of thesegroups whether they likethem or not.
Alan Borovoy
#5. The beliefs of Native people are no less powerful or important just because they focus on a different "form of magic."
Joseph Boyden
#6. I have a real interest in working with younger Native artists. I think it's a very important way for Native people to communicate the realities of our culture and remember our ancestors.
John Trudell
#7. On any state elections map, the reservations are blue places. Native people are most often progressives, Democrats, and by no means gun-toting vigilantes.
Louise Erdrich
#8. America is so accustomed to some depiction of native people that is entirely racist, and there's a perception that that is okay.
Winona LaDuke
#9. Some Native people suggest that one should test how cold the hands are by touching the thumb to the little finger of the same hand. As soon as you cannot carry out this exercise you are reaching a dangerous state of incapacity and you should immediately take steps to warm up.
Mors Kochanski
#10. Native people - about two-thirds of the uranium in the United States is on indigenous lands. On a worldwide scale, about 70 percent of the uranium is either in Aboriginal lands in Australia or up in the Subarctic of Canada, where native people are still fighting uranium mining.
Winona LaDuke
#11. Many young Japanese were hearing for the first time the words of Native people from the West.
Dennis Banks
#12. 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
#13. At a time when Europeans already had a long history of violent contact with Native people, Lewis and Clark made most of their journey in peace.
Joseph Bruchac
#14. The word "buccaneer" originated in a native people's term for smokehouse, which the French pronounced boucan. The original boucaniers didn't board ships and steal treasure; they were the jerky kings of the Western Hemisphere.
Tom Reiss
#15. The United States, you know, people - one of the reasons that it is said that native people received citizenship in 1924 was so that they could be drafted. And they have been extensively drafted.
Winona LaDuke
#16. There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.
Mark Twain
#17. 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
#18. You all know from past experiences that the white man only sees the bad that our people do to them. They are blind to their own indiscretions.
Violetta Botzet Luetgers
#19. Architecture has its political Use; publick Buildings being the Ornament of a Country; it establishes a Nation, draws People and Commerce; makes the People love their native Country, which Passion is the Original of all great Actions in a Common-wealth ... Architecture aims at Eternity.
Christopher Wren
#20. 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
#21. The people setting out on these walks weren't seeking to conquer peaks or test themselves against maps and miles. They were looking for a mystical communion with the land; they walked backwards in time to an imagined past suffused with magical, native glamour:
Helen Macdonald
#22. I feel strongly that we need the young people of today to become the scientists and the engineers of tomorrow so that my native United States continues to be a world leader in discovery and innovation. If we suppress science in this country, we are headed for trouble.
Bill Nye
#23. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.
Brad Jensen
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. But as he no longer stands on his native soil, his art can't possibly have roots. An artist creates true art for his people only as long as he lives, and suffers, among them.
Olga Grushin
#28. It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
Louise Erdrich
#29. Here, we tell the story: why the people came here, what they did when they got here, going back to the Native Americans and coming all the way forward.
Robert Patterson
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.
Crazy Horse
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.
Wade Davis
#36. She has always been somehow weightless, free of the heavy burden of mother tongues, national histories, native soils, homelands, fatherlands, myths, that many of the people around her tote on their backs like a sack of red-hot stones.
Dasa Drndic
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. According to Okonkwo, the British via its indirect rule system ensured that Africans saw their native leaders as the demons who betrayed their people. He called it a demonocracy and that was the first time I had seen him become so passionate about issues that affect Africa as a people and continent.
S.A. David
#40. 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
#41. Not that people did much sailing on Ylla's extensive oceans, nor swimming either - Yllan seawater tended to give humans strange rashes, and while humans were highly toxic morsels in the diet of the native sea monsters, the monsters were extremely stupid and kept not figuring this out.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#42. People know two languages: their native language and gibberish.
Maribel C. Pagan
#43. When people fall in deep distress, their native sense departs.
Sophocles
#44. A Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets has no charm for me. If the Union is dissolved and government disrupted, I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people, and save in defense will draw my sword on none.
Robert E.Lee
#45. Think about the number of people who do film music, make records and have a Native American heritage - and I may be the only one on the list.
Robbie Robertson
#46. What we are doing in the United States is we have launched a television station for mainstream audiences, which means whether they are native Americans or people living from any part of the world.
Subhash Chandra
#47. 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
#48. We [Native Americans] respect being human beings, but also the natural and spiritual world and I thought that came across wonderfully and I hope a lot of people get a sense of that; not to take away that we also have that warrior spirit.
Adam Beach
#49. If I want my people to be free, Americans have to be free.
Russell Means
#50. United States Government needs to acknowledge and respect our sovereignty, treaties, traditional Native American values, and our human rights as a people, which under the law as written we deserve, and which should be protected.
Leonard Peltier
#51. The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect themselves from slave revolts, and from uprisings by Native Americans. A revolt from people who were stolen from their land or revolt from people whose land was stolen from, that's what the genesis of the Second Amendment is.
Danny Glover
#52. As long as there are people in exile, there will be people who want to get back to their native soil.
Warren Eyster
#53. There's nothing native about young people's engagement with technology,
Danah Boyd
#55. It's therapy. [people] say true healing requires honest confrontation, and that can be seen on a macro scale with America and the things that have been swept under the rug, whether it be with the native Americans or slavery, or whatever holocaust that's happened on this soil.
Nate Parker
#56. As we maintain the vigil of peace, we must remember that justice is a vigil, too-a vigil we must keep in our own streets and schools and among the lives of all our people-so that those
who died here on their native soil shall not have died in vain.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#57. It bring a tear to my eye to see native New York people give me my props because New York is stubborn and arrogant.
ASAP Rocky
#58. The white man's God was a lot like him. He never for a second figured there was anyone else already here. He figured it was all just here waiting for Him to do whatever He wanted to with it. And boy, do white people love to do stuff, jut to do it.
R.S. Belcher
#59. In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid.
Trevor Noah
#60. My sense is that file sharing started in predominantly white, middle- and upper-middle-cl ass young people who were native-born, who felt they were entitled to have something for free, because that's what they were used to.
Gene Simmons
#61. We know our lands have now become more valuable. The white people think we do not know their value; but we know that the land is everlasting, and the few goods we receive for it are soon worn out and gone.
Canasatego
#62. "Native" always means people who belong someplace else, because they had once belonged somewhere. That shows that the white race does not really think they belong anywhere, because they think of everybody else as native.
Gertrude Stein
#63. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people as one of many hoops that made one circle.
Black Elk
#64. People tend to forget that in our country, we'd pretty much all be immigrants, except for the Native Americans.
Amy Bloom
#65. It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians (and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people) are carrying around is random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#66. It is more than their land that you take away from the people whose native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see, and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take out their eyes.
Karen Blixen
#67. Whether we walk among our people or alone among the hills, happiness in life's walking depends on how we feel about others in our hearts.
Anasazi Foundation
#68. I'm very interested in heritage restoration, and I'm working with a group of people to create a number of academies and performance spaces to encourage native arts and crafts and to explore African history.
Hugh Masekela
#69. I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence
providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.
Studs Terkel
#70. My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain ... There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.
Chief Seattle
#71. Of course, fairies are all imported in North America. We have no native fairies. The Little People do not long survive importation unless they go to California and grow large and beautiful, but haven't much flavour, like the fruit and the film stars.
Robertson Davies
#72. I looked around at us all: me in my nightgown, Kiyo bare-chested, Dorian in his extravagant robes, and Tim in his Native getup. God, I muttered, standing up, we all look like the village people.
Richelle Mead
#73. There is no substitute to living in one's native land, struggling and winning with one's own people.
Mario I. Miclat
#74. Now and always, we expect to insist upon it that we are Americans, that America is our native land; that this is our home; that we are American citizens . . . and that it is the duty of the American people so to recognize us. - FREDERICK DOUGLASS A
Elizabeth Dowling Taylor
#75. When I started school in 1958 there were no books written by Aboriginals in the school system and everything about Native life was written by white people through their eyes.
Now, Aboriginal writers can tell their stories. They have always been our narratives to tell, not others.
Rick Revelle
#76. Our job is to be an awake people...utterly conscious, to attend to our world.
Louis Owens
#77. Thanks Giving.
The Indian and the White Man together.
The pageantry spoke to me of civilization.
Stephen Graham Jones
#78. 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
#79. As Native Americans, we believe the Rainbow is a sign from the Spirit in all things. It is a sign of the union of all people, like one big family. The unity of all humanity, many tribes and peoples, is essential.
Thomas Banyacya
#80. No individual has sufficient experience, education, native ability and knowledge to ensure the accumulation of a great fortune, without the cooperation of other people.
Napoleon Hill
#82. Today, getting people to hear your story on social media, and then act on it, requires using a platform's native language, paying attention to context, understanding the nuances and subtle differences that make each platform unique, and adapting your content to match.
Gary Vaynerchuk
#83. America is made up of people who came from someplace else. Even the Native Americans came over the Bering strait ... America is what it is because people came from someplace else.
Isabel Wilkerson
#84. This idea of the digital native in the bedroom taking down a fascist regime and building a billion-dollar company is a very attractive image, but actually, if you look at the research, young people are on the lowest rung of digital opportunity.
Beeban Kidron
#85. When you look at the Pueblo communities along the Rio Grande, when you talk to the Navajo people, the Ute people, and certainly the native peoples of California who still have their communities intact, it is what they have always known: that we are not apart from nature but a part of it.
Terry Tempest Williams
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. The success of my journey depended on whether my heart walked forward - toward my people - instead of backward, away from them.
Anasazi Foundation
#89. To be successful in my native France, where people speak the same language and understand me, is nothing.
Edith Piaf
#90. I think people should look at learning about Native American history the same as visiting Washington, D.C., and seeing the monuments there. It's all part of the package.
Chaske Spencer
#91. I believe it is my responsibility to do what I can for children and people with Down syndrome as well as in my native Dominican Republic.
Albert Pujols
#92. It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.
Grover Norquist
#93. People like head trauma. They love knockouts. The crowd is silent, silent, silent ... and then a knockout happens, and everyone goes native. There would be far fewer knockouts without the gloves.
Jonathan Gottschall
#94. Growing up on the border there, we were always frustrated with people's pronunciations of towns in Michigan, and people mispronouncing Illinois. There are all these Native American words that no one really knows how to pronounce.
Sufjan Stevens
#95. I feel sorry for people of good heart who have never had a chance to learn the realities of Native American everything - not just our history but the sweetness and the beauty and the reasons why were so close to Mother Earth.
Buffy Sainte-Marie
#96. The river moves from land to water to land, in and out of organisms, reminding us what native peoples have never forgotten: that you cannot separate the land from the water, or the people from the land.
Lynn Culbreath Noel
#97. We weep,
tears of blood,
we weep,
In despair, crying,
we weep;
the sun forever has stolen
the light from his eyes.
No more his face do we see,
no more his voice do we hear,
nor will his affectionate gaze
watch over his people.
Jane Bierhorst
#98. I want the seals of power and place, the ensigns of command, charged by the people's unbought grace, to rule my native land. Nor crown, nor scepter would I ask but from my country's will, by day, by night, to ply the task her cup of bliss to fill.
John Quincy Adams
#99. Many people love grey squirrels, but the reality is that they are a real problem for some of our most threatened native species, like the red squirrel and dormouse. It is not realistic, practical or even desirable to completely eradicate grey squirrels, but we must control them effectively.
Jim Knight
#100. A cold wind blew on the prairie on the day the last buffalo fell. A death wind for my people.
Sitting Bull
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