Quotes About Native Americans

#1. 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

#2. What's it mean; are you determined
To make modern all mankind?
If so, you should be be-sermoned
And brought back to healthy mind.

Charles C. Abbott

#3. 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

#4. One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.

Sebastian Junger

#5. When I was a kid, I really loved Indians. Native Americans. Pardon. Me.

Dave Attell

#6. Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. "What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America" is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, "our Original Sin.

James W. Loewen

#7. I love Caribbean food. It's a great melting pot of so many cultures including the Native Americans.

Bob Greene

#8. Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans.

Russell Means

#9. I've always been interested in the history of the West, our country and particularly as it relates to the Native Americans - the original Americans.

Beau Bridges

#10. And Americans realized that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing.

Dennis Banks

#11. The Talmud states, "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

Bridges McCall

#12. 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

#13. We also recommit to supporting tribal self-determination, security, and prosperity for all Native Americans. While we cannot erase the scourges or broken promises of our past, we will move ahead together in writing a new, brighter chapter in our joint history.

Barack Obama

#14. We do not admire their president.
We know why the White House is white.
We do not find their children irresistible;
We do not agree they should inherit the earth.

Alice Walker

#15. At the time, Alcatraz had been taken over by Native Americans who were protesting against a long series of broken treaties, genocidal policies, and racist exploitation.

Assata Shakur

#16. The romantic myth of the artist says that you are the Source. I have no illusion about that. Native Americans don't believe they are the Source. They have access to the Source. Endless access. But don't get confused.

Tori Amos

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. We must always embrace individual liberty and enforce the constitutional rights of all Americans-rich and poor, immigrant and native, black and white.

Rand Paul

#24. 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

#25. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Or, as it's known to Native Americans - Sarcastic You're Welcomesgiving.

Stephen Colbert

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. The myth of Native Americans' talent for conservationism before the arrival of the white man is belied by the evidence of the scale of their slaughters.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. In its sacredness, families get together to (unintentionally?) celebrate one genocide (against Native Americans) by committing another (against turkeys).

Daniel Brook

#34. 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

#35. I represent more Native Americans than anyone else in Congress.

Rick Renzi

#36. 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

#37. Edward Curtis was a photographer in the late 19th century who tried to document the rapidly disappearing Native Americans. He assembled a canon of work which, today, is exemplary and invaluable.

Rhys Ifans

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State; -neither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#41. 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

#42. Nobody else in the world has a form like the Native American musical, and Americans should be very proud.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

#43. I can't get upset about 'offensive to women' or 'offensive to blacks' or 'offensive to Native Americans' or 'offensive to Jews' ... Offend! I can't get worked up about it. Offend!

Jamaica Kincaid

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. Fate. Now that's a loaded word. Like "yoga" or "karma", it's one of those words that slipped out of its native culture and ended up a celebrity with an extreme makeover.

Debra Ollivier

#47. If I want my people to be free, Americans have to be free.

Russell Means

#48. [T]he gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, though they differ in shape.

George Washington

#49. Would Crazy Horse have spent this much to remodel a kitchen?

Ian Frazier

#50. In indigenous cultures including those of Native Americans, menstruation is viewed a time of positive power, rather than evidence of sin and negative power, or as a feminine inconvenience.

Joan Borysenko

#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. If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans. - Stephen Hawking

Rick Yancey

#53. For their part, the savage men appear to spend an inordinate amount of time lounging around their lodges, smoking and gossiping among themselves ... so that it occurs to me that perhaps our cultures are not so different after all: the women do all the work while the men do all the talking.

Jim Fergus

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. The Native Americans know that wolves are mirrors for humans. What they show us are our strengths and weaknesses ... When I lived with the wolves, I was proud of the reflection of myself. But when I came back, I always paled in comparison.

Jodi Picoult

#57. We are not native. We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside. To me, that seems to be perfectly natural.

Don DeLillo

#58. Despite the legacy of slavery, the near extermination of native Americans, and persistent racial, sexual, and social discrimination, the citizens of the United States could plausibly claim, in 1945, to live in the freest society on the face of the earth.

John Lewis Gaddis

#59. 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

#60. For many Native Americans across the land, the name of the Washington football team is a deeply personal reminder of a legacy of racism and generations of pain.

Dan Maffei

#61. In the end, there is no absence of irony: the integrity of what is sacred to Native Americans will be determined by the government that has been responsible for doing everything in its power to destroy Native American cultures.

Winona LaDuke

#62. No telling what those men wanted ... but in these times there were white men with bloodier hands than any Indian ...

Louis L'Amour

#63. I advise you to be suspicious of any black American whose family does not claim a blood connection to Native Americans. That's a clear sign of a racial infiltrator who has not done enough research.

Baratunde R. Thurston

#64. The Indians' insistence on clinging to their customs had to be the work of Satan there was no other explanation which is why the friars went out to hunt down and lasso the deserters and then whipped their doctrine of
love and forgiveness into them.

Isabel Allende

#65. People tend to forget that in our country, we'd pretty much all be immigrants, except for the Native Americans.

Amy Bloom

#66. 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

#67. I remember hearing stories from my mother and father about their parents and grandparents when they were taken off the reservation, taken to the boarding schools, and pretty much taught to be ashamed of who they were as Native Americans. You can feel that impact today.

Chaske Spencer

#68. 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

#69. It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?

Jared Diamond

#70. It's a widely accepted principle,' he says, 'that you can claim a piece of land which has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, if only you repeat this mantra endlessly: 'We discovered it, we discovered it, we discovered it ...

Kurt Vonnegut

#71. The two women switched to their native tongue. Kate tuned them out. She understood only half of what they were saying. As with most Americans, Dutch sounded to her more like a disease of the throat than an actual language

Karin Slaughter

#72. 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

#73. America does not seem to remember that it derived its wealth, its values, its food, much of its medicine, and a large part of its "dream" from Native Americans.

Paula Gunn Allen

#74. If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans.

Stephen Hawking

#75. You've got to invite Native Americans to the table, and Asians, and Chicanos. You cannot keep us in the back room anymore and give us notations on paper saying this is what you deserve. You have to invite us to the table because America is ours, too.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#76. 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

#77. Isn't it amazing that, historically, the "Prince of Peace" has most often been introduced to new cultures through extreme violence? European and American colonialists bring this disparity to light in a way that makes me wish that forced conversion didn't work so extraordinarily well.

David G. McAfee

#78. The Klamath tribe of Native Americans who witnessed the eruption believed it was a fierce battle between Llao, the spirit of the underworld, and Skell, the spirit of the sky.

Cheryl Strayed

#79. For every person who died in the westward migration prior to the Civil War from Native Americans attacking, the stuff of American legends, thousands, maybe tens of thousands died from water holes polluted by cholera and typhoid . . . but that doesn't make for a good movie.

William R. Forstchen

#80. The typical Western is kind of a good-guy/bad-guy thing, and that's great, but initially when I heard about 'Into the West,' and what I love about it is it delves into both sides of our cultural past, and it puts more of a human face on the Native Americans.

Matthew Settle

#81. BARBARA: They're called Native Americans now, Mom.
VIOLET: Who calls them that? Who makes that decision?

Tracy Letts

#82. Thanks Giving.
The Indian and the White Man together.
The pageantry spoke to me of civilization.

Stephen Graham Jones

#83. 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

#84. While they trace their history back to wars that helped to ethnically cleanse Native Americans and to their exploits in the Civil War fighting for the South, the modern-day Rangers were created to help rejuvenate a defeated and demoralized U.S. imperialism after the war in Vietnam.

Brendan Sexton III

#85. 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

#86. Negroes and Southern Europeans are mentally inferior to native born Americans.

Margaret Sanger

#87. The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are referred to in the newspapers as blacks and African Americans must include Europe and Native America.

Ishmael Reed

#88. Second, this epic tale allows the audience to actually listen to the Native Americans and receive their wisdom. Spielberg conveys the respect for Native Americans that is normally lacking in Western films.

Beau Bridges

#89. The home ownership process for Native Americans has been hobbled by bureaucratic delays and regulations.

Rick Renzi

#90. On the Native American front, we have turned a new page in the 400-year history of the interface between the American settlers of this country and the nation's first Americans. That's included a new relationship where the sovereignty of tribes is in fact recognized.

Ken Salazar

#91. 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

#92. Before me, my grandfathers, my uncles and my father were all boxers because Native Americans had to box in boarding schools. But in my time, when I grew up in Lawton Oklahoma, we didn't have boxing. I was a wrestler.

George Tahdooahnippah

#93. 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

#94. We are not better than native born Americans, and of course not smarter. We've just been to the last stop of this bus.

Sergei Dovlatov

#95. The name 'reservation' has a negative connotation among Native Americans - an intern camp of sorts.

John Russell

#96. I'm not encouraged by the silence. I can think of no benign reason for it. I'm afraid we may expect something closer to Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas than a scene from Close Encounters, and we all know how that turned out for the Native Americans.

Rick Yancey

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. Now, we're Americans. Technically, who is from this country? Only the Indians, who we graciously let dwell on their native casinos.

Greg Proops

#100. I've come to the point in my life where I encourage young Native Americans to become much more selfish about their personal needs and wants.

Sherman Alexie