Native Quotations

Don't think I am not homesick for America. I say 'homesick' advisedly because I am a man with two homes - America, which gave me hospitality for many happy years, and where my daughter was born; and my native England.

And when native man left off this form of development, his humanization was retarded in growth.

When I was a kid, I really loved Indians. Native Americans. Pardon. Me.

The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.

Golf is played by twenty million mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.

Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.

I would be ecstatic if the very first writer to step foot in a Storyknife cabin was an Alaska Native woman writer.

I think good actors are born with a kind of native gift. When you study too much with an acting teacher, that gets taken away. You lose your sense of spontaneity.

Lord, Bless our enemies; have mercy upon them, may they turn their course and let us alone, and let us live in peace at our homes in our own native land.

The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb, and he to whom such books are shut flounders about in outer darkness.

I am a nationalist... my native soil is the theatre.

We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit.

My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.

And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.

I was born on the prairies where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures.

I've come to the point in my life where I encourage young Native Americans to become much more selfish about their personal needs and wants.

I have good genes. My father is Danish and my mother is Irish and Native American. They both have good skin.

Grown men can learn from very little children for the hearts of little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss.

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.

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

We do not want riches, we want peace and love.

Al Zarqawi had a long history of terrorism. He was responsible for several bombings and beheadings in Iraq, including Pennsylvania native Nicholas Berg.

When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don't just say white. They give you a math equation. 'Well, I'm a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.'

I love Caribbean food. It's a great melting pot of so many cultures including the Native Americans.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.

I have a cousin who is a spiritual advisor for Native veterans in Canada, so I'm very familiar with the history of Natives in the military. And growing up as an American Indian myself, the story of Ira Hayes is one that is often told.

A Pike, in the California dialect, is a native of Missouri, Arkansas, Northern Texas, or Southern Illinois. The first emigrants that came over the plains were from Pike County, Missouri; but as the phrase, 'a Pike County man,' was altogether too long for this short life of ours, it was soon abbreviated into 'a Pike.'

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.

What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian.

Yancy is actually a Native-American name, but I'm Irish. Go figure.

It does not require many words to speak the truth.

I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry.

When somebody takes a child from their native culture, that is in itself an act of aggression.

It is important that Congress works to promote home ownership in Indian Country. These federal housing funds and programs will help young Native American families to stay on tribal lands in order to live, work and raise a family.

I've always been interested in the history of the West, our country and particularly as it relates to the Native Americans - the original Americans.

A Swedish physicist can not discuss his work with fifty people unless he goes abroad. A Swedish economist can get opinions and instructions in his native language from thousands upon thousands of his fellow citizens.

When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?

Native Americans are the original inhabitants of the land that now constitutes the United States. They have helped develop the fundamental principles of freedom of speech and separation of powers that form the foundation of the United States Government.

Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

My family is Native American, and I was raised with Native American ceremonies.

Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans.

People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.

It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.

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.

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

We need only look to our Navajo Code Talkers during World War II to see the value that Native languages bring not only to their culture, but to the security of all Americans.

Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands.

In the name of Hypocrites, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

As a child, I was raised by native Hawaiian elders - three old women who took care of me while my parents worked.

The first Western teacher of English in Japan was a Native American.

My friends call my style 'old man chic.' I wear loafers and stylish sweatpants. I love to stay comfortable, so I definitely funk it up, but I'm always comfortable. I wear lots of hats and feathers, and I kind of have a little obsession with Native American jewelry.

While they trace their history back to wars that helped to ethnically cleanse Native Americans and to their exploits in the Civil War fighting for the South, the modern-day Rangers were created to help rejuvenate a defeated and demoralized U.S. imperialism after the war in Vietnam.

Music is a performing art, as any Native American will tell you. It isn't there in the score.

The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it.

All things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man... the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.

Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.

What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and left me unfed? Who has seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken?

I'm very interested in heritage restoration, and I'm working with a group of people to create a number of academies and performance spaces to encourage native arts and crafts and to explore African history.

Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors - the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.

Second, this epic tale allows the audience to actually listen to the Native Americans and receive their wisdom. Spielberg conveys the respect for Native Americans that is normally lacking in Western films.

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

This is the city of dreamers and time and again it's the place where the greatest dream of all, the American dream, has been tested and has triumphed.

I represent more Native Americans than anyone else in Congress.

From where the sun now stands I will fight no more.

The native American has been generally despised by his white conquerors for his poverty and simplicity.

The home ownership process for Native Americans has been hobbled by bureaucratic delays and regulations.

Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what 'was' and 'were,' we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.

Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.

Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.

I always think of the Pacific Northwest as giant trees and rain and clouds and dampness, like the Native American art from that area. That all says Pacific Northwest to me. Salmon. It really only exists on the Western side of the Cascades.

There is no death, only a change of worlds.

Quakers are known for wanting to give back. Ban the bomb and the civil rights movement and the native American struggle for justice - those things were very, very front-burner in my childhood, as were the ideas of working for peace and if you have more than you need, then you share it with people who don't.

Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle.

In my own view, the life expectancy of Native Americans in the United States is one of the really great moral crises that we face.

You get one chance to do something about native title. You get perhaps one chance in your life to do something about a republic. You get one chance, your chance, to build a piece of the political architecture in the Pacific. I wasn't going to give those up.

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

On the Native American front, we have turned a new page in the 400-year history of the interface between the American settlers of this country and the nation's first Americans. That's included a new relationship where the sovereignty of tribes is in fact recognized.

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?

I definitely feel like a native New Yorker. My personality was formed there.

I have a high regard for Native languages and the pivotal role they have played in our nation's history

Let me be a free man - free to travel, free to stop, free to work.

The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island.

The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard.

Every book in the 'Dreams' cycle dramatizes a particular epoch in the ongoing cultural collision between North America's native peoples and its European colonizers.

The United States - you know, native people are large landowners, but the military has a huge chunk of our territories. And in those, there are a number of places that are our sacred sites.

Millennials regularly draw ire for their cell phone usage. They're mobile natives, having come of age when landlines were well on their way out and payphones had gone the way of dinosaurs. Because of their native fluency, Millennials recognize mobile phones can do a whole lot more than make calls, enable texting between friends or tweeting.

Arizona faces unique healthcare challenges including uncompensated care for illegal immigrants, and the large number of Native Americans who live in remote and isolated areas of the state.

Many young Japanese were hearing for the first time the words of Native people from the West.

Women are the majority of immigrants yet the minority of immigrant employment visas; immigrant and native born women who work in the service arena - such as domestic workers - are not valued for their work, making pennies on the dollar compared to male counterparts; and, women are disproportionately affected by family reunification policies.

It's really important to me to promote worthy causes. But not in a heavy, obligatory, responsibility way. I really admired that as a kid, learning about the 'Elton John AIDS Foundation.' And I was obsessed with The Indigo Girls. And they are the consummate activist group, always reaching out, especially to Native causes and things like that.

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

All men were made by the Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers.

It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.

While I appreciated the educational advantages I enjoyed in the school and was proud of what I could show in mental culture, I had an earnest desire for something more than a mere business education... I desired to study for a profession, and this prompted me to leave my native state.

I like Celtic folk music, Native American music, and any kind of early music. There isn't a lot of music that I don't like... except for Show Tunes.

Last year, I twice voted against the Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations bill because it did not adequately fund education in general, and Native American programs specifically.

The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a reverence for the life-giving earth, and the Native American shared this elemental ethic: The land was alive to his loving touch, and he, its son, was brother to all creatures.

The language of the land in the Parthian empire was the native language of Iran. There is no trace pointing to any foreign language having ever been in public use under the Arsacids.

The view of the local scene through the eyes of a native participant in that scene is a different window.

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.