Top Native American Quotes Collection
Discover a curated collection of Native American quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category.
One of the things I've been taught by Native American elders is the importance of patience, of waiting to do things when the time is right. As an Onondaga friend put it to me, "you can't pick berries until the berries are ripe."Collection: Native American
Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view and demand that they respect yours.Collection: Native American
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.Collection: Native American
When Europeans arrived on this continent, they blew it with the Native Americans. They plowed over them, taking as much as they could of their land and valuables, and respecting almost nothing about the native cultures. They lost the wisdom of the indigenous peoples-wisdom about the land and connectedness to the great web of life...We have another chance with all these refugees. People come here penniless but not cultureless. They bring us gifts. We can synthesize the best of our traditions with the best of theirs. We can teach and learn from each other to produce a better America.Collection: Native American
In more recent years, I've become more and more fascinated with the indigenous folklore of this land, Native American folklore, and also Hispanic folklore now that I live in the Southwest.Collection: Native American
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.Collection: Native American
Listen, or your tongue will make you deaf.Collection: Native American
We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.Collection: Native American
The whites, too, shall pass - perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.Collection: Native American
All things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man... the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.Collection: Native American
Your religion was written on tablets of stone, ours on our hearts. 8. We are part of the earth and the earth is part of us.Collection: Native American
I reached the age of 70, because I have cultivated an association of multicultural intellectuals who are informed and alert to whatever "tricknology" that's laid on us by the powers that be. These include White ethnic intellectuals- people who know their roots- as well as Native American, Asian American, Hispanic and Black intellectuals. These are thirty, forty-year associations with some of the best minds around. Minds that are ignored by the media.Collection: Native American
The Justice Department ruled that Native American tribes are allowed to grow and sell marijuana on reservations. This decision was hailed as a victory by Native American leader Giggling Eagle.Collection: Native American
Confronted with a choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.Collection: Native American
Being Native American has been part of my story I guess since the day I was born.Collection: Native American
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.Collection: Native American
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.Collection: Native American
Our land is more valuable than your money. It will last forever. It will not even perish by the flames of fire. As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land will be here to give life to men and animals. We cannot sell the lives of men and animals. It was put here by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not belong to usCollection: Native American
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.Collection: Native American
I do not see a delegation for the four-footed. I see no seat for the eagles. We forget and we consider ourselves superior, but we are after all a mere part of the Creation. And we must continue to understand where we are. And we stand between the mountain and the ant, somewhere and there only, as part of the Creation.Collection: Native American
One thing to remember is to talk to the animals. If you do, they will talk back to you. But if you don't talk to the animals, they won't talk back to you, then you won't understand, and when you don't understand you will fear, and when you fear you will destroy the animals, and if you destroy the animals, you will destroy yourself.Collection: Native American
The time will soon be here when my grandchild will long for the cry of a loon, the flash of a salmon, the whisper of spruce needles, or the screech of an eagle. But he will not make friends with any of these creatures and when his heart aches with longing, he will curse me. Have I done all to keep the air fresh? Have I cared enough about the water? Have I left the eagle to soar in freedom? Have I done everything I could to earn my grandchild's fondness?Collection: Native American
Where no one intrudes, many can live in harmony.Collection: Native American
Look at the Native American culture. They revere the elders.Collection: Native American
If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, and in my heart he put other and different desires. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.Collection: Native American
A cold wind blew on the prairie on the day the last buffalo fell. A death wind for my people.Collection: Native American
I know Great Spirit is looking down upon me from above, and will hear what I say.Collection: Native American
Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows. Now we are poor but we are free. No white man controls our footsteps. If we must die, we die defending our rights.Collection: Native American
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.Collection: Native American
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.Collection: Native American
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.Collection: Native American
The more I consider the condition of the white men, the more fixed becomes my opinion that, instead of gaining, they have lost much by subjecting themselves to what they call the laws and regulations of civilized socieities.Collection: Native American
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.Collection: Native American
How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.Collection: Native American
It is my wish and the wishes of my people to live peaceably and quietly with you.Collection: Native American
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.Collection: Native American
Traditional people of Indian nations have interpreted the two roads that face the light-skinned race as the road to technology and the road to spirituality. We feel that the road to technology.... has led modern society to a damaged and seared earth. Could it be that the road to technology represents a rush to destruction, and that the road to spirituality represents the slower path that the traditional native people have traveled and are now seeking again? The earth is not scorched on this trail. The grass is still growing there.Collection: Native American
Environmental policies are driven by a kind of emotional spiritualism that threatens the very foundation of our society. There is increasing evidence of a government-sponsored religion in America. This religion, a cloudy mixture of new-age mysticism, Native American folklore, and primitive Earth worship, is being promoted and enforced by the Clinton administration in violation of our rights and freedoms.Collection: Native American
The word is important in Native American tradition. You speak the path on which you walk. Your words make the trail.Collection: Native American
By peace our condition has been improved in the pursuit of civilized life.Collection: Native American
I'd like to invoke the Native American Navajo because their word for road is used as a verb. Their whole relationship to road has to do with how you travel it, who you are traveling it with, what the environment might be, where you're headed, in what direction, the weather and so on.Collection: Native American
For the Lakota there was no wilderness. Nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly.Collection: Native American
Only to the white man was nature a 'wilderness'.Collection: Native American
In its sacredness, families get together to (unintentionally?) celebrate one genocide (against Native Americans) by committing another (against turkeys).Collection: Native American
In our culture, the Native Americans, when two strangers come together. You know what we do in our culture? We smoke the peace pipe.Collection: Native American
Everywhere is the center of the world. Everything is sacred.Collection: Native American
Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the world always works in circles.Collection: Native American
I'm not against knowing the history of white people in the U.S. - that's not the point. The point is that there's so much greater history. We don't know about Native Americans. Very basically, we don't know that much about African American history, except that they were enslaved. You only get bits and pieces.Collection: Native American
I want to get rid of the Indian problem. [...] Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian Question and no Indian Department.Collection: Native American
You cannot really conceive of how insulting it is to Native Americans to be told they were discovered.Collection: Native American