American Indian Quotes

120 American Indian Quotes

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All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
Chief Seattle

Continue to contaminate your own bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.
Chief Seattle

What is man without beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man.
Chief Seattle

My words are like stars that never set. What Seattle says, the great chief…can rely upon, with as much certainty as…the return of the seasons.
Chief Seattle

The son of the white chief says his father sends us greetings of friendship and goodwill. This is kind, for we know he has little need of our friendship in return, because his people are many. They are like the grass that covers the vast prairies, while my people are few, and resemble the scattering tress of a storm-swept plain.
Chief Seattle

The great, and I presume also good, white chief sends us word that he wants to buy our land but is willing to allow us to receive enough to live on comfortably. This indeed appears generous, for the red man no longer has rights that he need respect, and the offer may be wise, also, for we are no longer in need of a great country.
Chief Seattle

There was a time when our people covered the whole land….But that time has long since passed away with the greatness of tribes now almost forgotten.
Chief Seattle

I will not mouth over our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface brothers for hastening it, for we, too, may have been somewhat to blame. When our young men grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong, and disfigure their faces with black paint, their hearts, also, are disfigured and turn black, and then their cruelty is relentless and knows no bounds, and our old men are not able to restrain them.
Chief Seattle

But let us hope that hostilities between the red man and his paleface brothers may never return. We would have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
Chief Seattle

We are two distinct races and must ever remain so. There is little in common between us….Your religion was written on tablets of stone by the iron finger of an angry God, lest you might forget it. The red man could never remember nor comprehend it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors, the dreams of our old men, given them by the Great Spirit, and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.
Chief Seattle



Our great and good Father (President George Washington) sends us word that if we do as he desires he will buy our lands….allow us to live comfortably…protect us with his brave warriors; his wonderful ships of war will fill our harbours. Then our ancient northern enemies will cease to frighten.
Chief Seattle

But day and night cannot dwell together. The red man has ever fled the approach of the white man as morning must flee the rising sun.
Chief Seattle

When the last red man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the ship, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be along….At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone.
Chief Seattle

It is my land, my home, my father’s land to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among those mountains. If this could be I might die in peace, feeling that my people, placed in their native homes, would increase in numbers, rather than diminish as at present, and that our name would not become extinct.
Geronimo

I have several times asked for peace, but trouble has come from the agents and interpreters.
Geronimo

Very often there are stories put in the newspapers that I am to be hanged. I don’t want that any more. When a man tries to do right, such stories ought not to be put in the newspapers.
Geronimo

I and these others are too old now to follow your Jesus road. But our children are young. They should know about the white man’s God.
Geronimo

Suppose a white man should come to me and say, “Joseph, I like your horses, and I want to buy them.” I say to him, “No, my horses suit me, I will not sell them.” Then he goes to my neighbour, and says to him: Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell.” My neighbour answers, “Pay me the money and I will sell you Joseph’s horses.” The white man returns to me, and says, “Joseph, I have bought your horses and you must let me have them.” If we sold our lands to the government, this is the way they were bought.
Chief Joseph

I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed….The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food, no one knows where they are-perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired, my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.
Chief Joseph

They (government officials) all say they are my friends and that I shall have justice, but while their mouths all talk right I do not understand why nothing is done for my people.
Chief Joseph



General miles promised that we might return to our own country. I believed General Miles or I never would have surrendered.
Chief Joseph

I have heard talk and talk but nothing id done. Good words do not last long unless they amount to something. Words do not pay for my dead people. They do not pay for my country, now overrun by white men….Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying. Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick.
Chief Joseph

You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases….I have asked some of the great white chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place while he sees white men going where they please. They cannot tell me. Let me be a free man-free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself-and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.
Chief Joseph

You (white men) say, “Why do you not become civilized?” We do not want your civilization. We would live as our fathers did, and their fathers before them.
Crazy Horse

One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.
Crazy Horse

We preferred hunting to a life of idleness on the reservations, where we were driven against our will. At times, we did not get enough to eat, and we were not allowed to leave the reservation to hunt.
Crazy Horse

We preferred our own way of living. We were no expense to the government. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone.
Crazy Horse

Soldiers were sent out in the winter, who destroyed our villages. Then “Long Hair” (Custer) came in the same way. They say we massacred him, but he would have done the same to us has we not defended ourselves and fought to the last. Our first impulse was to escape with our squaws and papooses, but we were so hemmed in that we had to fight.
Crazy Horse

Brothers-the white people are like poisonous serpents: when chilled, they are feeble and harmless, but invigorate them with warmth, and they sting their benefactors to death.
Tecumseh

Brothers - who are the white people that we should fear them? They cannot run fast, and are good marks to shoot at: They are only men; our fathers have killed many of them; we are not squaws, and we will stain the earth red with their blood.
Tecumseh



Brothers-we must be united; we must smoke the same pipe; we must fight each other’s battles; and more than all, we must love the Great Spirit; he is for us; he will destroy our enemies, and make his red children happy.
Tecumseh

Accursed be the race that has seized on our country and made women of our warriors. Our fathers from their tombs reproach us as slaves and cowards. I hear them now in the wailing winds…the spirits of the mighty dead complain. Their tears drop from the wailing skies. Let the white race perish. They seize your land, they corrupt your women, they trample on the ashes of your dead! Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven.
Tecumseh

It is my determination, nor will I give rest to my body feet until I have united all the red men.
Tecumseh

Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the advance and the oppression of the White Man, as snow before a summer sun.
Tecumseh

Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without a struggle, give up our homes, our country bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit, the graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us? I know you will cry with me, “Never! Never!”
Tecumseh

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.
Tecumseh

Show respect to all men, but grovel to none.
Tecumseh

Touch not the poisonous firewater that makes wise men turn to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.
Tecumseh

Red Power means we want power over our own lives….We simply want the power, the political and economic power, to run our own lives in our own way.
Vine Deloria Jr

Duster died for your sins.
Vine Deloria Jr



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