Native Quotes

The Church in the colonies is the white people's Church, the foreigner's Church. She does not call the native to God's ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor.

If a man loses anything and goes back and looks carefully for it, he will find it.

I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place.

Native ability without education is like a tree without fruit.

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

Being Native American has been part of my story I guess since the day I was born.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

That man's the best cosmopolite Who loves his native country best.

Don't use that foreign word: ideals. We have the excellent native word: lies.

I was born where there were no enclosures.

Confronted with a choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.

I know Great Spirit is looking down upon me from above, and will hear what I say.

The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.

The Tonkawa killed him it make my heart hot. I want my people follow after white way. Some white people do that, too.

All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth, befalls the children of the Earth.

Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.

Our native language is like a second skin, so much a part of us we resist the idea that it is constantly changing, constantly being renewed.

As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men's native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying.

Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country?

The old Lakota was wise. He knew that a man's heart away from nature becomes hard.

You know that just before that first Thanksgiving dinner there was one wise, old Native American woman saying, Don't feed them. If you feed them, they'll never leave.

Every part of the earth is sacred to my people.

Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view and demand that they respect yours.

All things are bound together. All things connect.

The fact is that my native land is a prey to barbarism, that in it men's only God is their belly, that they live only for the present, and that the richer a man is the holier he is held to be.

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.

The native must realize that colonialism never gives anything away for nothing.

The African, because of the violent differences between what was native and what he was forced to in slavery, developed some of the most complex and complicated ideas about the world imaginable.

I was very sorry when I found out that your intentions were good and not what I supposed they were.

For the whole world, without a native home, Is nothing but a prison of larger room.

The earth was created by the assistance of the sun, and it should be left as it was. The country was made without lines of demarcation, and it is no man's business to divide it.

The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing.

I want to be understood by my country, but if I fail to be understood - what then?, I shall pass through my native land to one side, like a shower of slanting rain.

We are going by you without fighting if you will let us, but we are going by you anyhow!

I was warmed by the sun, rocked by the winds and sheltered by the trees as other Indian babes. I can go everywhere with a good feeling.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is slicked o'er with the pale cast of thought

To us, the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground.

It is only in the mountains that I can fully appreciate my existence as a man in America, and my own native land

The native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; and enterprises of great pitch and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.

Everywhere is the center of the world. Everything is sacred.

I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.

Only to the white man was nature a 'wilderness'.

Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinitive is native to it.

[Seeing an ornately chained Native American for the first time] What Eden have they torn you from?

I have never had to face anything that could overwhelm the native optimism and stubborn perseverance I was blessed with.

Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit.

Laughter is the loaded latency given us by nature as part of our native equipment to break up the stalemates of our lives and urge us on to deeper and more complex forms of knowing.

Walking takes longer... than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed.

In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man's values.