Native Identity Quotes

Indians should teach Indians; … Indians should serve Indians, especially on reservations.

Indians are immigrants like everyone else, they just came earlier

When I was here before, the President gave me my country, and I put my stake down in a good place, and there I want to stay.... You speak of another country, but it is not my country; it does not concern me, and I want nothing to do with it. I was not born there.... If it is such a good country, you ought to send the white men now in our country there and let us alone...

Do you think we care about the feelings of Native Americans when we celebrate Columbus Day? That's the day that the white man discovered a land where Indians had been living for a few thousand years.

I remember hearing stories from my mother and father about their parents and grandparents when they were taken off the reservation, taken to the boarding schools, and pretty much taught to be ashamed of who they were as Native Americans. You can feel that impact today.

The Indian is a human being.

I'd love to work more with the American Indians, my people.

Had the white settlers in North America called the natives 'Americans' instead of 'Indians', the early Americans could not have said that the 'only good Indian is a dead Indian' and could not have deprived them so easily of their lands and lands and lives. Robbing people of their proper names is often the first step in robbing them of their property, liberty, and life.

The Great White Father now calls you his brother, not his children.

We are Indians, firstly and lastly.

I'm a member of the American Indian Movement, and I'm from the indigenous nations of the Western Hemisphere.

I'm proud of being from Hawaii, and I'm proud of being Hawaiian, but I'm more than that, too.

In 1492, the natives discovered they were Indians; they discovered they lived in America.

I'm from a reserve. A reservation. So I know everybody. Everybody knows me.

I don't want to be remembered as an activist; I want to be remembered as an American Indian patriot.

... the rights of the first Americans to remain Indians while exercising their rights as Americans.

I'm half Native American and half Mexican and I support all native peoples around the world.

I'm originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, and I just feel like it's something that always been inside of me.

It was the tribes of the Lenni Lenape!... It was but yesterday that the children of the Lenape were masters of the world.

On any state elections map, the reservations are blue places. Native people are most often progressives, Democrats, and by no means gun-toting vigilantes.

I have deep roots in this Oklahoma soil. It makes me proud.

You need to understand this. We did not think we owned the land. The land was part of us. We didn't even know about owning the land. It is like talking about owning your grandmother - you can't own your grandmother. She just is your grandmother. Why would you talk about owning her?

You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

Trees always remind me of Aboriginal people.

I consider myself an embodiment of the American dream: an all-American Indian.