Indigenous Peoples Quotes

English is so hierarchical. In Cree, we don't have animate-inanimate comparisons between things. Animals have souls that are equal to ours. Rocks have souls, trees have souls. Trees are 'who,' not 'what.

~ Tomson Highway

After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race's agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages' sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think of your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with?

~ David Mitchell

A racist notion found in neoshamanic circles is placing high value on indigenous wisdom but not on indigenous people.

~ S. Kelley Harrell

If I stay here, I will be just fine. Before I shut the door, I got a box of crackers from the kitchen, so I will be fine.

~ Kathleen Alcalá

Adams has shown a nearly inexhaustible desire, leavened with an equal amount of sheer talent- five decades' worth and counting- in an unrelenting effort to stabilize, strengthen, and improve the standing of indigenous peoples, minority groups, and the larger society as well. He is an exemplary Native activist, indeed.

~ David E. Wilkins

How then can the US society come to terms with its past? How can it acknowledge responsibility? The late Native historian Jack Forbes always stressed that while living persons are not responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in, which is a product of that past. Assuming this responsibility provides a means of survival and liberation. Everyone and everything in the world is affected, for the most part negatively, by US dominance and intervention, often violently through direct military means or through proxies.

~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz