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. 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

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

Dave Attell

#4. 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

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

Bob Greene

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

Russell Means

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

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

Stephen Colbert

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Daniel Brook

#28. 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

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

Rick Renzi

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

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

Amy Bloom

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

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

Tracy Letts

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

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

Rick Renzi

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

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

John Russell

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent's goal; but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.

David Mamet

#69. It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.

Eric Hoffer

#70. You cannot really conceive of how insulting it is to Native Americans to be told they were discovered.

Ivan Van Sertima

#71. No one would stand for it [being the fool in the media] in a minute if you took any other group -Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, women - but somehow it's okay to do that with hillbillies.

John Shelton Reed

#72. Makeup's just crazy, anyways. Native Americans used to wear it, and it did all right for them until, uh ... well, until you killed them all, I suppose.

Eddie Izzard

#73. 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

#74. During 1866 and 1922, Native Americans and black soldiers often intermingled in the American west, on the frontier.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#75. Rachel? my dad prompts.
Do I have to...?"
His stern expression answers my question
Fine. I'm grateful that the Native Americans are finally getting revenge on the white man for destroying their culture, by building megacasinos.

Melissa Schorr

#76. Arizona faces unique healthcare challenges including uncompensated care for illegal immigrants, and the large number of Native Americans who live in remote and isolated areas of the state.

Rick Renzi

#77. All Americans are either immigrants or descendants of ancestors who came from somewhere else, including Native Americans. We should all respect and admire immigrants.

Jan C. Ting

#78. Immigrants have been coming here for a long time. The Americans that are afraid of others coming were immigrants once themselves, so they have a lot of nerve. We have a lot of nerve as a country. The only people that should have xenophobia are Native Americans. Everyone else should shut up.

Godfrey

#79. In our culture, the Native Americans, when two strangers come together. You know what we do in our culture? We smoke the peace pipe.

Tatanka

#80. 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

#81. Native Americans are the original inhabitants of the land that now constitutes the United States. They have helped develop the fundamental principles of freedom of speech and separation of powers that form the foundation of the United States Government.

Joe Baca

#82. I continued, "The painting shows this fish with a big eye and a halo, floating in air, and underneath the fish are all these Native Americans having sex." "What? What does that have to do with Custer's Last Stand?" "Well, the painting is titled, Holy Mackerel, Look at All Those Fucking Indians.

Nelson DeMille

#83. It's interesting to think about the history of Israel in relation to the history of the U.S.. There were Native Americans living here that U.S. settlers totally displaced, and that narrative is not connected with the Isreal-Palestinian struggle at all.

Jill Soloway

#84. Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.

Salman Rushdie

#85. A member of the Archery Club tries to say that we are all foreigners and we should give the country back to the Native Americans, but she's buried under disagreement.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#86. In my own view, the life expectancy of Native Americans in the United States is one of the really great moral crises that we face.

Jim Yong Kim

#87. For most Native Americans, there's no more offensive name in English. That non-Native folks think they get to measure or decide what offends us is adding insult to injury.

Suzan Shown Harjo

#88. When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

Philipp Meyer

#89. It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.

Jared Diamond

#90. Bone grease with dried meat and berries to make pemmican, the energy bars of a thousand years ago, and with a pouch of pemmican, the Native Americans were good to travel far and wide. (If you can't pack portable food, you spend most of your time hunting and foraging).

Marilyn Johnson

#91. For once, I believe that PETA, at least on the level of logic, is correct. If the NCAA has to protect offended Native Americans ... by God, PETA ought to advocate for the protection of every organism in the animal kingdom.

Tom Feeney

#92. I know that if a team had a derogatory name for African Americans, I would help those who helped extinguish that name. I have quite a few friends who are Native Americans. And even if I didn't have Native American friends, the name of the team is disrespectful.

Mike Carey

#93. For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance.

Slavoj Zizek

#94. 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

#95. 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

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

Dennis Banks

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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