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American Indians Quotes

Browse 19 quotes about American Indians.

American Indians Quotes

“The Indian regarded the human being as a 'divine mortal', or a 'divine physical being'. Indeed, I have had it explained to me that the prefix "hu" in some tongues meant 'divine', and "man" of course, is mortal. So a human being is a divine mortal being - a dual being existing in the realms of both spirit and matter; one spiritual, the other physical; one eternal, the other temporal.”

HumansSpiritualityHumanMortalsNative AmericansEtymologyAmerican IndiansDivine Being
Book:Earth Medicine: Revealing Hidden Teachings of the Native American Medicine Wheel
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“Whatever the intentions behind land acknowledgments, I am intrigued that otherwise well-educated listeners (especially university audiences) require continuous reminders that they occupy stolen land. Settler colonialism not only erases, it feeds on its own forgetfulness.”

Native AmericanAcademiaNorth CarolinaIndigenous PeoplesAmerican IndiansLumbee IndiansIndigenous Peoples DayLand Back
Book:On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice
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“These are the ancestral lands of. . . .' The phrase carries both truth and trauma that can slip past uneducated ears. Indigenous homelands on the Coastal Plain are places of deep connection and remembrance, but they are also places where horrific colonial experiences befell our ancestors. The trauma of those experiences still flows through our communities today. The pain of racial oppression and cultural loss combines with the radical transformation of our homelands, and it haunts us from generation to generation.”

EducationUniversityNorth CarolinaNative AmericansIndigenous PeoplesPresentationsAmerican IndiansLumbee IndiansLand AcknowledgementsSoutheast Us
Book:On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice
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“Crazy Horse was dead. He was brave and good and wise. He never wanted anything but to save his people, and he fought the Wasichus only when they came to kill us in our own country. He was only thirty years old. They could not kill him in battle. They had to lie to him and kill him that way. I cried all night, and so did my father.”

DeathColonialismImperialismNative AmericansLakotaAmerican IndiansCrazy HorseBlack ElkOglala Lakota
Book:Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux
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“Here in the United States, very little effort has been made to voice formal apologies, make reparations, or pass political mandates about education. Yet this country was founded in part by genocidal policies directed at Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people. Both of these things are morally repugnant. Still I love my country. In fact, it is because I love my country that I want to make sure the mistakes of our past do not get repeated. We cannot afford to cover over the dark chapters of our history, as we have for decades upon decades. It is time for that to stop.”

HistorySlaveryAmerican HistoryColumbusNative AmericansSlavery In The United StatesSlavery In AmericaAmerican IndiansNative American GenocideUnited States History
Book:Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask: Young Readers Edition
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“In the United States we are at such a disadvantage because we do not know how to talk about the genocide inflicted on indigenous people. We do not know how to talk about slavery. Otherwise it would not have been assumed that simply because of the election of one Black man to the presidency we would leap forward into a postracial era. We do not acknowledge that we all live on colonized land. And in the meantime, Native Americans live in impoverished conditions on reservations. They have an extremely high incarceration rate—as a matter of fact, per capita the highest incarceration rate—and they suffer disproportionately from such diseases as alcoholism and diabetes. In the meantime, sports teams still mock indigenous people with racially derogatory names, like the Washington Redskins. We do not know how to talk about slavery, except, perhaps, within a framework of victim and victimizer, one that continues to polarize and implicate.”

HistoryUs HistoryReparationsNative AmericansAmerican IndiansRevisionist HistoryWhitewashingNative Mascots
Book:Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
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“It Was Never Stolen Land. It Was Bought and Paid For. Now the Indians Are Trying to Renege.” By James Fulford, December 4, 2020, VDARE [Fulford is quoting Felix S. Cohen:] Fortunately for the security of American real estate titles, the business of securing cessions of Indian titles has been, on the whole, conscientiously pursued by the Federal Government, as long as there has been a Federal Government. The notion that America was stolen from the Indians is one of the myths by which we Americans are prone to hide our real virtues and make our idealism look as hard-boiled as possible. We are probably the one great nation in the world that has consistently sought to deal with an aboriginal population on fair and equitable terms. We have not always succeeded in this effort but our deviations have not been typical. It is, in fact, difficult to understand the decisions on Indian title or to appreciate their scope and their limitations if one views the history of American land settlement as a history of wholesale robbery." The quotation is from The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers Of Felix S Cohen,1960.”

Native AmericanEthnic ConflictAmerican IndiansLand Acknowledgements
Book:The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers of Felix S. Cohen
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“A land acknowledgement or territorial acknowledgement is a formal statement, often spoken at the beginning of a public event, that it is taking place on land originally inhabited by or belonging to indigenous people. In Canada, land acknowledgements became popular after the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (which argued that the country's Indian residential school system had amounted to cultural genocide) and the election of liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau that same year.[2] By 2019, they were a regular practice at events including National Hockey League games, ballet performances and parliament meetings. Critics of land acknowledgements have described them as excesses of political correctness or expressed concerns that they amount to empty gestures that avoid actually addressing the issues of indigenous communities. Ensuring the factual accuracy of acknowledgments can be difficult due to problems like conflicting land claims or unrecorded land exchanges between indigenous groups. In the United States, the practice of land acknowledgements has been described as "catching on" as of 2020.”

Native AmericansEthnic ConflictAmerican IndiansLand Acknowledgements
Author:Wikipedia: Land Acknowlegement
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“The flow of energy moves from the unseen - the non-physical - to the seen, to that which appears; from the realm of that which is not yet manifest to the realm of appearance; from what the American Indian call the 'Nagual' to the 'Tonal', to the everyday world of 'ordinary' existence.”

CreationMetaphysicsMetaphysicalManifestingAmerican IndiansMetaphysical PhilosophyPhysical RealityCreating RealityPhysical RealmNon Physical
Book:Earth Medicine: Revealing Hidden Teachings of the Native American Medicine Wheel
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“Wherever we went, the soldiers came to kill us, And it was all our own country. It was ours already when the Wasichus made the treaty with Red Cloud, that said it would be ours is long as grass should grow and water flow. That was only eight winter’s before, and they were chasing us now because we remembered and they forgot.”

TreatiesNative AmericansAmerican IndiansBlack Elk
Book:Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux
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“. . . [H]ad North America been a wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived. They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, and other crops domesticated over centuries, took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs.”

ColonialismConquestAmerican IndiansNative American Genocide
Book:An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
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“The eagle is a bird that flies higher than any other, so the Indian considered it to be 'closer to the sky'. To the Indian, the sky was synonymous with spiritual things [like] principles. [When close to the sky,] from that elevated viewpoint [you are] detatched from the Earth and material things. The eagle is also attributed with remarkable vision. It can see clearly over great distances and identify small creature and objects from a long way off. So the eagle is associated with far-sightedness and the ability to look ahead. From an elevated viewpoint [you are] able to see more clearly where things on Earth fitted together. Since the eagle is able to look directly into the un without being blinded by its intensity, this ability indicates [the] attribution of illumination, which comes to the mind through spiritual vision or the ability to see into the essence or spirit of things.”

EaglesNative AmericansEagleAmerican IndiansEagle QuotesEagle Eyes
Book:Earth Medicine: Revealing Hidden Teachings of the Native American Medicine Wheel
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“I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day– not an empty chamber in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house. It suggested, too, that the same experience always gives birth to the same sort of belief or religion. One revelation has been made to the Indian, another to the white man. I have much to learn of the Indian, nothing of the missionary. I am not sure but all that would tempt me to teach the Indian my religion would be his promise to teach me his. Long enough I had heard of irrelevant things; now at length I was glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood.”

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Book:Canoeing in the Wilderness
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“Meanwhile, hemlocks kept their footings in the deep, shady wrinkles of lower mountain slopes— coves shaped by intimate creeks and gorges carved by thundering rivers. Even east of the mountains, hemlocks survived on steep, north- facing slopes. In all of these places, microclimates continued to mimic conditions experienced in the region during the ice age. These isolated pockets are the last vestiges of a forest that once covered much of the Southeast. They are refugia.”

ScienceSafetyClimate ChangeRefugeEcologyIndigenous PeoplesAmerican IndiansLumbee Indians
Book:On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice
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“Paleoecology teaches that refugia are not only physical places, but they also represent bottlenecks along a timeline. Large populations of trees, insects, birds, and more shrink down to tiny remnants during times of adversity, but when glaciers retreat and weather warms, populations rebound. If conditions permit, populations spring from their refugia into their former ranges or, perhaps, into new places with favorable soils and climate. Sometimes I imagine that Lumbee ancestors who sought refuge in the remotest parts of their lands were biding their time, waiting to spring forth into a radically transformed world.”

ScienceSafetyClimate ChangeRefugeEcologyIndigenous PeoplesAmerican IndiansLumbee Indians
Book:On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice
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