Indian Reservations Quotes

“The steam trains crossed the country, the gleaming tracks clumsy sutures across wounded miles of stolen land.”
― Libba Bray, Lair of Dreams

“When the entire nation becomes a reservation, perhaps then we’ll understand the price of ignoring history’s lessons.”
― Kempton Olney, Mother Earth vs Corporate Greed: The Betrayal of America's Traditional Farmers and Ranchers from Corrupt Government Programs and Corporate Greed

“Rapes on the reservations are a big scandal. The victims are mostly full-blood girls, too shy and afraid to complain. A few years back the favorite sport of white state troopers and cops was to arrest young Indian girls on a drunk-and disorderly, even if the girls were sober, take them to the drunk tanks in their jails, and there rape them. Sometimes they took the girls in their squad cars out into the prairie to "show you what a white man can do. I'm really doin' you a favor, kid." After they had done with them, they often kicked the girls out of their cars and drove off. Then the girl who had been raped had to walk five or ten miles home on top of everything else. Indian girls accusing white cops are seldom taken seriously in South Dakota. "You know how they are," the courts are told, "they're always asking for it.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“Now some entrepreneurs from Connecticut, and the East generally, want to turn our reservation into a garbage dump. The wasichu have already given us smallpox, measles, and whiskey, and now they want to bury us in their waste.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“I do not want to give a wrong impression. There is good beside the bad on the res. Nature is beautiful, and there is bravery in the face of adversity. There is goodness and people helping each other, poor people sharing what they have with those who have even less. We have stouthearted women and great powwows, songs and ceremonies. We have our sacred medicine and eagles are still flying over the sandhills. But drinking is a great problem. I would like to dedicate this chapter to the Pima Indian Ira Hayes, hero of Iwo jima, holder of the Congressional Medal of Honor, who, being drunk, drowned in a ditch. He was one more victim of a country that has no use for its heroes if they happen to be Native Americans.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“Children are torn from their families for the flimsiest reasons, to wind up in white foster homes or orphanages. We also oppose the many attempts by white childless couples to adopt our kids. A child adopted out of its tribe is lost to us. Our kids are our greatest hope for the future and we cannot afford to lose them.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“But we fight not only for our own, much diminished, Rosebud Reservation. We also fight for what rightfully belongs, or did belong, to all Sioux and Cheyennes—the sacred Black Hills. There has been a legal battle going on over this for a lifetime, and the white lawyers who worked for us on our claims have become millionaires, and that is the only result so far. The government and the highest courts in the land have admitted that this huge area was stolen from us. But stolen or “bought,” Uncle Sam never gives any Indian land back. Instead he has forked over some 122 million dollars to pay for the stolen land. But we have not accepted it. What we are saying is: “Give us the Black Hills back. Then, maybe we will accept the money you are holding in escrow for us as payment for all the gold and uranium you have taken, and are still taking, out of the hills.” Fourteen billion dollars in gold alone have been taken out of our sacred land and they offer us 120 million in compensation! That’s like someone stealing my brand-new car and coming back twenty years later saying: “I’m sorry I stole that car from you but I want to make it up to you. Here’s twenty bucks.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman