indian Quotes

“I have no father nor mother; I am alone in the world. No one cares for Cochise; that is why I do not care to live, and wish the rocks to fall on me and cover me up. If I had a father and mother like you, I would be with them and they with me”

“They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.”

“The Whites told only one side. Only his own best deeds, only the worst deeds of the Indians, has the white man told”

“Not all of Anthony’s officers, however, were eager or even willing to join Chivington’s well-planned massacre. Captain Silas Soule, Lieutenant Joseph Cramer, and Lieutenant James Connor protested that an attack on Black Kettle’s peaceful camp would violate the pledge of safety given the Indians by both Wynkoop and Anthony, “that it would be murder in every sense of the word,” and any officer participating would dishonor the uniform of the Army.”

“The bad men on both sides brought about this trouble.”

“To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature - the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy grades, the water, the soil, the air itself.”

“Another Chief remembered that since the Great Father promised them that they would never be moved they had been moved five times. “I think you had better put the Indians on wheels,” he said sardonically, “and you can run them about whenever you wish.”

“They may be surprised to hear words of gentle reasonableness coming from the mouths of Indians stereotyped in the American myth as ruthless savages.”

“You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government, your children are educated by the government, and all you have and are today is because of the government. If it were not for the government you would be freezing and starving today in the mountains. The government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men.

“Living in a paradise of magnificent meadows and forests abundant with wild game, berries, and nuts, the Utes were self-supporting and could have existed entirely without the provisions doled out to them by their agents at Los Pinos and White River.”

“The white people were as thick and numerous and aimless as grasshoppers, moving always in a hurry but never seeming to get to whatever place it was they were going to.”

“No one, who fights with the white people, ever becomes rich, or remains two days in one place, but is always fleeing and starving.”

“The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”

“The Apaches were once a great nation; they are now but few, and because of this they want to die and so carry their lives on their fingernails. Many have been killed in battle. You must speak straight so that your words may go as sunlight to our hearts.”

“If they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung.”

“I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there are no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls.

“I heard him call to the people not to be afraid, that the soldiers would not hurt them; then the troops opened fire from two sides of the camp.”

“In his humourless and overbearing way, Meeker set out systematically to destroy everything the Utes cherished, to make them over into his image, as he believed he had been made in God’s image.”

“When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it.”

“This is not a cheerful book, but history has a way of intruding upon the present, and perhaps those who read it will have clearer understanding of what the American Indian is, by knowing what he was.”

“Ok, so maybe my white teammates had problems, serious problems, but none of their problems was life threatening . . . But I looked over at the Wellpinit Redskins, at Rowdy . . . I knew that two or three of those Indians might not have eaten breakfast that morning.”

“I’d always been the lowest Indian on the reservation totem pole – I wasn’t expected to be good so I wasn’t. But in Reardan, my coach and the other players wanted me to be good. They needed me to be good. They expected me to be good . . . And so I became good.”

“I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other . . . It was like being Indian was my job, but it was only a part-time job. And it didn’t pay well at all.”

“I know, I know, but some Indians think you have to act white to make your life better. Some Indians think you become white if you try to make your life better, if you become successful.”

“I love Indians. I love our songs, your dances, and your souls. And I love your art.”

“Well, life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.”

“One day in the woods he met an Indian. They stood in the wet, cold woods and looked at each other, and they could not talk because they did not know each other’s words.”

“They were going to the Indian country. Pa said there were too many people in the Big Woods now.”

“When the war-cry was over, Laura knew it had not got her yet. She was still in the dark house and she was pressed close against Ma. Ma was trembling all over.”

“When I was about eleven I had read all the books about Indians in the children’s library and was actually admitted to the stacks. I remember coming home from the library with stacks of books. And I think that’s where my life as a scholar began. I know it did.”

“By the time I was thirteen I knew about as much about American Indians as a good many anthropologists that I have met since.”

“By the time he was twelve he was voraciously reading books about American Indians. He soon recognized the parallels between these stories and those of his own Roman Catholic tradition, a discovery that would fire a cross-cultural study in the arcane discipline of mythology for the rest of his life.”

“Along about 1917, and right nearby was a man whose books about Indians I had been reading.”

“I went to school and had no problems with my studies, but my own enthusiasm was in this maverick realm of the American Indian mythologies.”

“They know the sociological interpretations of why the Indians are the way they are or were, but they don’t know much about Indians. And I did know.”

“Well, Daddy is going to own that building, ‘cause I’m gonna fly over it and give it to him. Then it won’t matter that he’s not in their old union, or whether he’s colored a half-breed Indian, like they say.”

“Cook, if you are ever captured by pirates, or surrounded by Indians, or if you should fall into the sea and be chased by a shark, I will see to it that this day’s work is not forgotten, if it costs me the last drop of my blood.”