Native American Quotes - Page 9

• Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pcanet, and other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun.

  Tecumseh

  Summer, Powerful, Men

  Quoted in Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970)

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• The average American is nothing if not patriotic.

  Herbert Croly

  Uplifting, Memorial Day, Patriotic

  Herbert Croly (2005). “The Promise of American Life”, p.1, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Do the very best you can.

  Dale Carnegie

  Success, Giving Up, Fear

  Dale Carnegie (2010). “How To Enjoy Your Life And Your Job”, p.62, Simon and Schuster

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• Our land is everything to us.... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember that our grandfathers paid for it - with their lives.

  John Wooden

  Land, Grandparent, Grandfather

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

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Basketball, American West, Soldier

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• By peace our condition has been improved in the pursuit of civilized life.

  John Ross

  Pursuit, Civilized, Has Beens

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• The song and the drumming were like this: Behold, a sacred voice is calling you; All over the sky a sacred voice is calling.

  Black Elk

  Song, Sky, Voice

  Black Elk (2000). “Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux”, Bison Books

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• 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

  Dinner, Bunch, Pilgrim

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• 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

  Giving, Encounters, Fiction

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

  Sitting Bull

  Spirit, Knows, Looking Down

  Sitting Bull, Mark Diedrich (1998). “Sitting Bull: The Collected Speeches”

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

  Sitting Bull

  Im Sorry, I Am Sorry, Saying Sorry

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• You think I am a fool, but you are a greater fool than I am.

  Sitting Bull

  Stupid, Thinking, Sitting

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• I want to tell you that if the Great Spirit had chosen anyone to be the chief of this country, it is myself.

  Sitting Bull

  Country, Sitting, Want

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• 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.

  Helen Chenoweth-Hage

  Emotional, Government, Rights

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• An environmental revolution is taking shape in the United States. This revolution has touched communities of color from New York to California and from Florida to Alaska - anywhere where African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans live and comprise a majority of the population. Collectively, these Americans represent the fastest growing segment of the population in the United States. They are also the groups most at risk from environmental problems.

  Robert D Bullard

  New York, Alaska, Florida

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• 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

  Upset, Offensive, Jew

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• 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

  Football, Pain, Team

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• The forest is the first cathedral. I felt that from the time I was a child. I credit my mother with that. I used to think it came from her Native-American side. Whichever it was, she instinctively connected with nature, and taught me that.

  Alice Walker

  Mother, Children, Thinking

  "Alice in Walkerland!". Interview with Kam Williams, www.pittsburghurbanmedia.com.

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• 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

  Healing, People, Holocaust

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Luxury spreads its ample board before their eyes; but they are excluded from the banquet. Plenty revels over the fields; but theyare starving in the midst of its abundance: the whole wilderness has blossomed into a garden; but they feel as reptiles that infest it.

  Washington Irving

  Eye, Garden, Luxury

  "Traits of Indian character". Book by Washington Irving, 1819.

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• That those tribes [the Sac and Fox Indians] cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizensis certain. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition.

  Andrew Jackson

  Desire, Essentials, Foxes

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• There can be no more ancient and traditional American value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought it with them to this country three centuries ago, and they quickly imposed it on the Africans--who were not allowed to learn to read and write--and on the Native Americans, who were simply not allowed.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Country, Writing, Ignorance

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

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• The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too.

  Luther Standing Bear

  Wise, Heart, Men

  Luther Standing Bear (1978). “Land of the Spotted Eagle”, p.197, U of Nebraska Press

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• What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?

  Massasoit

  Mother, Children, Men

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• 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.

  Dylan Brody

  Thanksgiving, Wise, Dinner

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