Best 329 quotes in «native american quotes» category

I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there are no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and, like them, I lived happily. Para-Wa-Samen (Ten Bears) of the Tamparika Comanches

I will willingly abandon this miserable body to hunger and suffering, provided that my soul may have its ordinary nourishment.

I wish I had been more interested or learned sooner, but I didn’t , and now I must face the consequences.

Josephy visited several leading Manhattan bookstores and sadly discovered the explanation [from his agent] to be generally correct; books about Indians were shelved in the back of the stores alongside books about natural history, dinosaurs, plants, birds, and animals rather than being placed alongside biographies and histories of Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, and other great world cultures. Puzzled, Josephy began asking bookstore managers for a justification of this marketing tactic and was informed that Indian books had “just always been placed there.” The longer he pondered booksellers’ indifference toward Indians, the more annoyed Josephy became with the realization that bookstore marketing tactics were simply a reflection of the pervasive thinking throughout the United States in 1961: Americans believed Indians to be a vanished people. “Thinking about it made me angry,” Josephy wrote in his autobiography, “and I vowed that someday, some way, I would do something about this ignorant insult.

Like an unfinished symphony, her story played on my mind for most of my life. It would rock to the tune of the passage of time, an adagio of high notes, low notes an illusive movements. Then when I least expected it, I happened upon the missing notes in the life of Charlotte Howe Taylor.

Light chases away darkness.

Many of these mixed-blood Indian people were eventually forced into hiding or denial of their Indian ancestry because of their fear of removal to the west by the United States Government.

Mackenzie, our profession courts death, madness is always just over the next rise, the next hillock…” Sherman’s voice dropped off, “I’m out in that landscape wavering between madness and sanity. Be careful Mackenzie you don’t cross over that rise and find yourself in the arid desert of madness … I fear it is this desert for me.

Man's obsession with his own wants is taking him further from those without whom happiness cannot be found. It is taking him from his people.

Modern man has lost the sense of wonder about the unknown and he treats it as an enemy.

Minnie Spotted Wolf from Butte, Montana, was the first Native American to enlist in the Marine Corps Womens' Reserve. Spotted Wolf joined in 1943. She commented that Marine Corps boot camp was "hard, but not that hard.

Molly grabbed a vase off the mantel and flung it at the wall, knocking it into a painting of a mountain scene. The vase shattered and the picture frame swayed back and forth on the wall, taunting her with an image of what life was supposed to be like. . .

Mni Wiconi means "water is life". It's a historical time in history, where we are facing something dire. Even with the assault on the water, the new hope is the miracle birth of the child.

Mother Earth reintroduced me to my people.

Mother Earth has never been more crowded, yet her inhabitants have never been more lonely.

Nature doesn’t need knowledge, because nature is knowledge, knowledge manifest.

[My grandmother Mamie] used to say, 'Marion, if you don't feel right, if you don't feel good, just go outside. Take care of your flower bed and forget about everything else. If it's wintertime, go dig yourself a path in the snow whether you need it or not. You don't have to think too much to plant anything or scoop snow, and your mind can go back and figure out what's wrong.' I still take her advice to this day. (From Marion "Strong Medicine" Gould)

Native peoples do not look for salvation from worlds beyond. They need no alternate reality, because the mortal world and the spirit world are the same. This Earth is heaven, hell and purgatory; but most importantly, it is home. The greatest of spiritual mysteries may be revealed just beyond the front door, in the life of a community.

Nector [speaking to Bernadette] could have told her, having drunk down the words of Nanapush, that comfort is not security and money in the hand disappears. He could have told her that only the land matters and never to let go of the papers, the titles, the tracks of the words, all those things that his ancestors never understood how the vital relationship to the dirt and grass under their feet.

No matter how hard I try to forget you, you always come back to my thoughts When you hear me singing I am really crying for you.

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.

No, no, my friend. You are kind, and you mean well, but you can never understand these things as I do. You've never been oppressed.

No, not my spirit, just my ego, and my arms, and my chest, and my back, but luckily they are just bruised.” Squanto responded, “I fear you may not be so lucky.

Of an inanimate being, like a table, we say “What is it?” And we answer Dopwen yewe. Table it is. But of apple, we must say, “Who is that being?” And reply Mshimin yawe. Apple that being is. Yawe— the animate to be. I am, you are, s/he is. To speak of those possessed with life and spirit we must say yawe. By what linguistic confluence do Yahweh of the Old Testament and yawe of the New World both fall from the mouths of the reverent Isn’t this just what it means, to be, to have the breath of life within, to be the offspring of creation The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world.

Orvil mainly listens to powwow music. There's something in the energy of that big booming drum, in the intensity of the singing, like an urgency that feels specifically Indian. He likes the power the sound of a chorus of voices makes too, those high-pitched wailed harmonies, how you can't tell how many singers there are, and how sometimes it sounds like ten singers, sometimes like a hundred.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 9: 35 a.m., I am usually in a lecture hall at the university, expounding about botany and ecology— trying, in short, to explain to my students how Skywoman’s gardens, known by some as “global ecosystems,” function.

She smirked and felt the familiar pain of her fangs elongating and piercing through her gums. She inhaled the night air deeply and smiled at the intoxicating aroma. Multiple scents hit her nose at once. They were thick and rich, mixed with booze and teenage pheromones. Her leather jacket fluttered slightly as a night breeze swept under it.

Our individual consciousnesses were sieves of the divine. We could only know what our minds could encompass safely.

Phillip hardened his grip on Totka’s. “For all our manipulations, God always manages to get His way.” “A beautiful woman once told me our Jesus Creator is a good and wise chief, worthy of obedience without question. His plan is perfect. Wait, and you will see.

Pulling back, like a savage carnivore at its prey, it tore a large chunk of meat rendering his left arm useless...regardless he did not require it for long.

She remembered the old man in the bar in the Mission District telling her, ‘We are the biggest tribe of all, us displaced ones, us urban Indians, us sidewalk redskins.

She was glad of this, her mind turning a corner as she let go of the past.

Pumpkin compote in a masa shell," she says. "It's a new recipe I'm going to try this week." "So, a pumpkin tamale? You know you can just call it a pumpkin tamale. Nobody's going to be impressed because you used some fancy words." Her mouth turns down. "Thank you for the editorial. Just try it." I take a bite. It's good. Better than I expected. The balance of cinnamon and nutmeg is perfect, a hint of allspice. And some ingredient I can't place. Almost... coppery? But it works.

She whirls around and around in her red English stockings and white moccasins, her cloak of wampum and feathers flying out around her like the wings of a great hawk.

She worked there for several months as a slave in a Mexican family until they sold her to a wealthy Hispanic man from Santa Fe, N.M. He also purchased another young captive Apache woman from New Mexico to accompany them. Both women were loaded onto an oxcart bound for Santa Fe in a journey that could take at least three months.

Shit," he said. "I don't know why you're feeling sorry for yourself because you ain't had to fight a war. You're lucky. Shit, all you had was that damn Desert Storm. Should have called it Dessert Storm because it just made the fat cats get fatter. It was all sugar and whipped cream with a cherry on top. And besides that, you didn't even have to fight in it. All you lost during that was was sleep because you stayed up all night watching CNN.

Sometimes you hear people say: "Those Apaches were bad." I don't know. They are peaceful people today, doing a good job with their livestock. In the early days they did cause the Pimas, and others, some trouble. We had plenty from our farms and those Apaches only had what they could hunt over their wild mountains. Sometimes they would come down and raid us and we fought them back away from our settlements and then left them alone. They never tried to drive us off our land and away from our homes. We never tried to drive them out of their own country. But the white man did. If you were an Apache what do you think you would have done? (from chapter "The Apache Wars")

Stallions," Frank said, "they're fightin' over a girl. - DANIEL'S ESPERANZA

That’s it, Skyco. That is the way to be a hunter. Never be in a hurry, never rush things. Wait until the prey is within your grasp, then strike swiftly and strike hard. Don’t miss or it may be a long time before another opportunity appears.

Strangely it came to Gale then that he was glad. Yaqui had returned to his own — the great spaces, the desolation, the solitude — to the trails he had trodden when a child, trails haunted now by ghosts of his people, and ever by his gods. Gale realized that in the Yaqui he had known the spirit of the desert, that this spirit had claimed all which was wild and primitive in him.

The greatest achievement ever accomplished in this universe is life on earth. Let's take care of it.

The acknowledgement of White cowardice has driven literally tens of millions of White Americans to try to escape it by undergoing a voluntary human metamorphosis and becoming "part-Indian." 95% would become proven liars by a simple DNA test, but their children grow up believing the lie. Abandoning the White race means not having to fight for it or defend it in any way.

The [Apache] tribe was under siege by government agents, who had jailed some of the medicine men for practicing their rituals. Freedom of religion was cherished as a sacrosanct American right -- everywhere, that is, but on the archipelago of Indian life.

The forces that we deal with have two sides: one is good and helpful and the other is dark and dangerous. Part of your training is to learn to distinguish between them, and know when to use which.” (Nakoma)

The Diné are children of the sun. They are rugged and graceful people. They love the radiance of color and silver, the purity of nature, and the speed of horses. They have a gift for adaptation and creativity. They do everything with spontaneity and flair.

The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites one family. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. The earth is sacred and men and animals are but one part of it. Treat the earth with respect so that it lasts for centuries to come and is a place of wonder and beauty for our children.

There is a falling from the sky The sacred hoop is broken But different hands with different voice Hear the ancient songs And soon All men will see That truth and justice Must Prevail.

The Irish-Indians, who were of dark complexion, would many times claim to be Black Dutch or Black Irish and deny their rightful Indian descent in order to stay in their aboriginal lands.

The morning sun filtered through the curtains and into Violet’s room, awakening her from dreams of wolves howling to a full moon. Her body felt different…changed somehow, but she was unable to pinpoint exactly what was new.

The Old Ones say you can feel your spirit during a Vision Quest.