Native American Quotes

To the untutored sage, the concentration of population was the prolific mother of all evils, moral no less than physical. He argued that food is good, while surfeit kills; that love is good, but lust destroys; and not less dreaded than the pestilence following upon crowded and unsanitary dwellings was the loss of spiritual power inseparable from too close contact with one's fellow-men.

~ Charles Alexander Eastman

I have learned that the point of life's walk is not where or how far I move my feet but how I am moved in my heart.

~ Anasazi Foundation

The true Indian sets no price upon either his property or his labor. His generosity is limited only by his strength and ability. He regards it as an honor to be selected for difficult or dangerous service and would think it shameful to ask for any reward, saying rather: Let the person I serve express his thanks according to his own bringing up and his sense of honor. Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new sweet earth, and the Great Silence alone!. What is Silence? It is the Great Mystery! The Holy Silence is His voice!

~ Charles Alexander Eastman

There is a power in nature that man has ignored. And the result has been heartache and pain.

~ Anasazi Foundation

Unfortunately, modern man has become so focused on harnessing nature's resources that he has forgotten how to learn from them. If you let them, however, the elements of nature will teach you as they have taught me.

~ Anasazi Foundation

Whether we walk among our people or alone among the hills, happiness in life's walking depends on how we feel about others in our hearts.

~ Anasazi Foundation

They say that perhaps it is not by love, but by blood, that land is bought. They say that perhaps my people had to die to nourish this earth with their truth. Your people did not have ears to hear. Perhaps we had to return to the earth, so that we could grow within your hearts. Perhaps we have come back and will fill the hills and valleys with our song. Who is to know?

~ Kent Nerburn

WEST SALEM ~ October 2011A sudden vision, fraught with malevolence and darkness, obscured her sight. The face of a menacing figure turned from the shadows of his grisly handiwork and stared at Sorcha.Her muscles tensed. By the Goddess, could he see her?Please! No!She wanted to scream, to run, but the vision ensnared her into the horrific moment like a fly in a spider's web.

~ Chérie De Sues

Consider how textbooks treat Native religions as a unitary whole. ... These Native Americans ... believed that nature was filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held spirits too. People were never alone. They shared their lives with the spirits of nature. ... Stated flatly like this, the beliefs seem like make-believe, not the sophisticated theology of a higher civilization. Let us try a similarly succinct summary of the beliefs of many Christians today: These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son's body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died. describe Christianity this way. It's offensive. Believers would immediately argue that such a depiction fails to convey the symbolic meaning or the spiritual satisfaction of communion.

~ James W. Loewen

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

~ Martin Pretchel

Next to the day when I was almost shot by that arrow, the worst day of my life was when I was almost eaten.

~ Jennifer Frick-Ruppert

No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country...we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.

~ Luis Valdez

But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it...The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the Freeman had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others. Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but created equal was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched away what belonged to other people, whether it was something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or something you could not, like freedom.

~ Colson Whitehead

Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round . . . The sky is round and I have heard the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind in its greatest power whirls, birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. Our teepees were round like the nests of birds. And they were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop.

~ Chief Black Elk

Consider how textbooks treat Native religions as a unitary whole. ... These Native Americans ... believed that nature was filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held spirits too. People were never alone. They shared their lives with the spirits of nature. ... Stated flatly like this, the beliefs seem like make-believe, not the sophisticated theology of a higher civilization. Let us try a similarly succinct summary of the beliefs of many Christians today: These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son's body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they

~ James W. Loewen

Where the mountain crosses.On top of the mountain, I do not myself know where.I wandered where my mind and my heart seemed to be lost.I wandered away.

~ Jane Bierhorst

Modern man has lost the sense of wonderabout the unknown and he treats it asan enemy.

~ Laurens Van Der Post

Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

You and I have to rejoice that we have not to answer for our fathers’ crimes, neither shall we do right to charge them one to another. We can only regret it, and flee from it, and from henceforth, let peace and righteousness be written upon our hearts and hands forever.

~ William Apess

We want trumpets that sound like thunder, and men to act as though they were going to war with those corrupt and degrading principles that rob one of all rights, merely because he is ignorant, and of a little different color. Let us have principles that will give every one his due; and then shall wars cease, and the weary find rest.

~ William Apess

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.

~ Tom Holm

Before Sutter, native people had heeded the cycle of the seasons, time was infinite, and life's rhythms were unchanging. Now, for at least part of their lives, some Indians were wedded to a concept that proclaimed that time was limited and that it had economic value. The clang of Sutter's bell announced that time was money, that it marched onward, and that it waited for no man, including Indians in the 1840s.

~ Albert L. Hurtado

In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be troublesome, and who must be cajoled or forced into leaving his hunting-grounds for the occupation of very orderly and virtuous white people, who sell him gunpowder and whiskey, but send him now and then a missionary to teach him that it is wrong to get drunk and murder his neighbor.

~ Mary H. Eastman

Wherever forests have not been mowed down, wherever the animal is recessed in their quiet protection, wherever the earth is not bereft of four-footed life - that to the white man is an 'unbroken wilderness.' But for us there was no wilderness, nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly. Our faith sought the harmony of man with his surroundings; the other sought the dominance of surroundings.For us, the world was full of beauty; for the other, it was a place to be endured until he went to another world.But we were wise. We knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard.

~ Chief Luther Standing Bear

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills and the winding streams with tangled growth, as 'wild'. Only to the white man was nature a 'wilderness' and only to him was the land 'infested' with 'wild' animals and 'savage' people. To us it was home. Earth was beautiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. - Chief Standing River of the Lakota

~ Paul Goble

It's not about Indians, it's about people... the overall philosophy is to reconnect all people to nature and inevitably themselves. - Larry Stillday

~ Michael Meuers

For every inch of skin, there is memory. Devils are so made. Saints, too, if you believe in them. His humanity has been broken as an old walking stick that once held up a crippled man named Thomas. He realizes the stick and the man are one thing and he can fall. He has violated the laws beneath the laws of men and countries, something deeper, the earth and the sea, the explosions of trees. He has to care again. He has to be water again, rock, earth with its new spring wildflowers and its beautiful, complex mosses.

~ Linda Hogan

We travel only as far and as high as our hearts will take us.

~ Anasazi Foundation

The success of my journey depended on whether my heart walked forward—toward my people—instead of backward, away from them.

~ Anasazi Foundation

Mother Earth reintroduced me to my people.

~ Anasazi Foundation

I have learned that the point of life's walk is not where or how far I move my feet but how I am moved in my heart. If I walk far but am angry toward others as I journey, I walk nowhere. If I conquer mountains but hold grudges against others as I climb, I conquer nothing. If I see much but regard others as enemies, I see no one.

~ Anasazi Foundation

The most beautiful thing in the world is a heart that is changing.

~ Anasazi Foundation

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.

~ Anasazi Foundation

Life is a walking, a journey. So, if life upon Mother Earth is a journey, there are two ways to walk. We can choose to walk forward or we can choose to walk backward. Forward Walking choices are rewarded with consequences that light the way to peace, happiness, joy, comfort, knowledge, and wisdom. Backward Walking choices bring to the Two-Legged beings consequences of misery despair, and darkness.

~ Anasazi Foundation

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.

~ Anasazi Foundation

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

~ Anasazi Foundation

Don't believe the dark whisperings that invite you to walk backward. At any time in your life, you have the power to turn forward.

~ Anasazi Foundation

There is much to be learned from the world around us—far more than we normally comprehend. The Ancient Ones knew this well—most particularly the wise teachers among them—those who, in the Navajo tongue, were called Anasazi.

~ Anasazi Foundation

Would it surprise you to hear that man's unhappiness is due in large measure to the way he is seeking after happiness? You know this already from your own life. For when you have been unhappy, you have been unhappy with others—with your father or mother, your sister or brother, your spouse, your son, your daughter. If unhappiness is with others, wouldn't it stand to reason that happiness must be with others as well?

~ Anasazi Foundation

Would it surprise you to hear that man's unhappiness is due in large measure to the way he is seeking after happiness?

~ Anasazi Foundation