Indigenous People Quotes

I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes

The sad truth is that mass migration, whatever the colour of the skins of those involved, upsets and worries indigenous people, especially the poorest.

When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are..

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, 'Ours.'

Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.

We, as Americans, at least - I mean, I love my country - but we're so self-righteous sometimes, in terms of, like, our nationality, our country. But we're people from somewhere else; the true 'Americans' are the original peoples. It's funny, but we're a very territorial species.

As an indigenous leader from Bolivia, I know what exclusion looks like. Before 1952, my people were not allowed to even enter the main squares of Bolivia's cities, and there were almost no indigenous politicians in government until the late 1990s.

I will say that I like an Indian better dead than living. I have never in my life seen a good Indian (and I have seen thousands) except when I have seen a dead Indian.

The first people, next after the Syrians and Jews, who occupy this country are husbandmen

The Europeans liked to believe it was their valor, superior weapons and culture that won the New World. The real conquistadors were the armies of pathogens that raced on ahead to infect and kill 9 out of 10 of all the Indians of North, Central, and South America. The civilizations of the New World crumbled under the onslaught of invading microbes. Without this invisible army, Cortez and those who followed might never have stood a chance.

Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.

The fighting back by indigenous people started in 1900: OK, they've cornered us. Our population is almost gone; they've defeated us. From there, the modern Indian rights movement started, and it was a very hard fight, with a lot of stuff going against them.

We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture.

If U.S. focuses on truth and justice, we'll realize that Israel has been there for 3,000 years - the same language, the same people, the same culture for 3,000 years - and it's always astonishing to me that we somehow now think that they're the occupiers.

I have made myself what I am. And I would that I could make the red people as great as the conceptions of my own mind, when I think of the Great Spirit that rules over us all.

Not five generations distant, Fijians were cannibalizing each other. The missionaries and the colonial administration imposed a veneer of civilization on their native subjects. However, it is not apparent that they imparted to them any profound understanding of the process involved in the maintenance and upholding of the law.

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

Those damn Presbyterian Indians!

The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers.

When I first pitched my Navy tent on the island of Espiritu Santo to the north of Vila, the natives on nearby Malakula were cannibals. Today, they have representation in the United Nations.

For the good of the souls of said cannibals … the greater the number sent over to Spain the better … They [the Caribe Indians] are a wild people, fit for any work, well proportioned and very intelligent, and who … will be better than any other kind of slaves.

I talk to children in schools all over the world, and I've found that both boys and girls are fascinated by how hunter-gatherers manage to survive entirely on what's around them in their environment: trees, rocks, animals and plants.

Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country's British heritage

Among the colonists were spies who took note of the conversations and the schemes of the natives and supplied the information to the governors, who sent it to Cuzco without delay, to be submitted to the Inca. In this way all was made secure.

White men come in like a river. They told us that they only wanted a little land. But we knew better.