Native American Quotes

“Earth Breathes in Us.”
― Matthew Edward Hall

“The same people that outlawed the practice of Native American Medicine (without a colonizer centric degree), outlawed the traditional practice of healing those that are hurt/ill without expecting anything in return. Free healthcare. The basis of community.”
― San Mateo, San Mateo: Proof of The Divine

“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.”
― Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Owning land is like owning the ocean, or the air. no one owns land.”
― Tamanend

“The Holy Land is everywhere”
― Black Elk

“As it occurs in nature, without medical treatment: Rh- (blood type) girls, can only make the baby with Rh- boys. How they gravitate towards each other out of the crowd proves higher order (destiny, fate, superintelligent design).”
― Matthew Edward Hall, San Mateo: Proof of The Divine

“Wherever forests have not been mowed down, wherever the animal is recessed in their quiet protection, wherever the earth is not bereft of four-footed life - that to the white man is an 'unbroken wilderness.'

But for us there was no wilderness, nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly. Our faith sought the harmony of man with his surroundings; the other sought the dominance of surroundings.

For us, the world was full of beauty; for the other, it was a place to be endured until he went to another world.

But we were wise. We knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard.”
― Chief Luther Standing Bear

“To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

“Never has America lost a war ... But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict. Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

“In 1492, the natives discovered they were indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that the Sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and the dress, and had sent to be burnt alive who worships the Sun the Moon the Earth and the Rain that wets it.”
― Eduardo Galeano, Los hijos de los días

“Coyote, who is the creator of all of us, was sitting on his cloud the day after he created Indians. Now, he liked the Indians, liked what they were doing. This is good, he kept saying to himself. But he was bored. He thought and thought about what he should make next in the world. But he couldn't think of anything so he decided to clip his toenails. ... He looked around and around his cloud for somewhere to throw away his clippings. But he couldn't find anywhere and he got mad. He started jumping up and down because he was so mad. Then he accidentally dropped his toenail clippings over the side of the cloud and they fell to the earth. They clippings burrowed into teh ground like seeds and grew up to be white man. Coyote, he looked down at his newest creation and said, "Oh, shit.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country...we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.”
― Luis Valdez

“They're all gone, my tribe is gone. Those blankets they gave us, infected with smallpox, have killed us. I'm the last, the very last, and I'm sick, too. So very sick. Hot. My fever burning so hot.
I have to take off my clothes, feel the cold air, splash water across my bare skin. And dance. I'll dance a Ghost Dance. I'll bring them back. Can you hear the drums? I can hear them, and it's my grandfather and grandmother singing. Can you hear them?
I dance one step and my sister rises from the ash. I dance another and a buffalo crashes down from the sky onto a log cabin in Nebraska. With every step, an Indian rises. With every other step, a buffalo falls.
I'm growing, too. My blisters heal, my muscles stretch, expand. My tribe dances behind me. At first they are no bigger than children. Then they begin to grow, larger than me, larger than the trees around us. The buffalo come to join us and their hooves shake the earth, knock all the white people from their beds, send their plates crashing to the floor.
We dance in circles growing larger and larger until we are standing on the shore, watching all the ships returning to Europe. All the white hands are waving good-bye and we continue to dance, dance until the ships fall off the horizon, dance until we are so tall and strong that the sun is nearly jealous. We dance that way.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept us safe among them... The animals had rights - the right of man's protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man's indebtedness. This concept of life and its relations filled us with the joy and mystery of living; it gave us reverence for all life; it made a place for all things in the scheme of existence with equal importance to all.”
― Chief Luther Standing Bear

“Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren’t looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

“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, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means

“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, Flight

“Like a man who has been dying for many days, a man in your city is numb to the stench.”
― Chief Seattle

“I have learned that the point of life's walk is not where or how far I move my feet but how I am moved in my heart.”
― Anasazi Foundation, The Seven Paths: Changing One's Way of Walking in the World

“The most beautiful thing in the world is a heart that is changing.”
― Anasazi Foundation, The Seven Paths: Changing One's Way of Walking in the World

“Tourists came around and looked into our tipis. That those were the homes we choose to live in didn`t bother them at all. The untied the door, opened the flap, and barged right in, touching our things, poking through our bedrolls, inspecting everything. It boggles my mind that tourists feel they have the god-given right to intrude everywhere.”
― Russell Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means

“If I want my people to be free, Americans have to be free. ”
― Russell Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means

“Our job is to be an awake people...utterly conscious, to attend to our world.”
― Louis Owens

“Peace of mind is the meaning of life" -Talisa Santiago (Spirit Seeker)”
― Jamie Haden, Spirit Seeker

“But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it...
The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the Freeman had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others. Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but created equal was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched away what belonged to other people, whether it was something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or something you could not, like freedom.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Attending to your own words and ideas as well as those of others is an admirable trait in any person, but a necessity in a leader.”
― Jennifer Frick-Ruppert, Spirit Quest

“No man is as wise as Mother Earth. She has witnessed every human day, every human struggle, every human pain, and every human joy. For maladies of both body and spirit, the wise ones of old pointed man to the hills. For man too is of the dust and Mother Earth stands ready to nurture and heal her children.”
― Anasazi Foundation, The Seven Paths: Changing One's Way of Walking in the World

“I gently urged Clyde toward a big elm tree standing twenty yards from the front of the cabin and reined him to a stop partially behind the wide trunk. Pulled my rifle out of its boot and rested it across the big gelding’s withers. “You Wilbur Redhand?”
He kept whittling without looking up. “Who’s askin?”
“I’m Deputy Marshal Jubal Smoak. Looking for an outlaw named Crow Redhand. If you’re Wilbur, I was told you’re his kin.”
He nodded and kept whittling. Presently, he said, “Crow ain’t here. He come, but he left. Needed doctoring. Someone shot him in the foot.”
“Reckon that’d been me,” I said. “Had a shootout down near Fairland. I shot him in the foot. He shot me in the back.”
He squinted at me. “Surprised you’re alive. Crow usually aims to kill. Never knew him to miss.”
― Phil Truman, Dire Wolf of the Quapaw: a Jubal Smoak Mystery

“Zlata Dromenko was a stout Cossack about my height with a thick single eyebrow giving her a serious, severe look. I found out she’d been a mail-order bride who came over from Ukraine to marry a local farmer, a Russian immigrant. He died, though, and now Mrs. Dromenko worked in the hospital bullying patients like me. I called her “Hun,” because she made me think of Attila. I was curious as to how Mr. Dromenko died but was afraid to ask.”
― Phil Truman, Dire Wolf of the Quapaw: a Jubal Smoak Mystery

“Go and be fish again.”
― Ernest J. Gaines