Native Indian Quotes

“Whole heap o’ folks, ’cludin’ me till I got grown, ain’t knowed at firs’ weren’t nobody in dis country but Indians, fishin’ an’ huntin’ an’ fightin’ one ’nother, jes’ mindin’ dey own business. Den here come l’il ol’ boat o’ white folks a-wavin’ an’ grinnin’. ‘Hey, y’all red mens! How ’bout let us come catch a bite an’ a nap ’mongst y’all an’ le’s be friends!’ Huh! I betcha nowdays dem Indians wish dey’s made dat boat look like a porcupine wid dey arrows!”
― Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family

“It is too often the case,' Crook said, "that border news-papers disseminate all sorts of exaggerations and falsehoods about the Indians, which are copied in papers of high
character and wide circulation, in other parts of the country, while the Indians' side of the case is rarely ever heard. In this way the people at large get false ideas with reference to the matter. Then when the outbreak does come public attention is
turned to the Indians, their crimes and atrocities are alone condemned, while the persons whose injustice has driven them to this course escape scot-free and are the loudest in their denunciations. No one knows this fact better than the Indian, therefore
he is excusable in seeing no justice in a government which only punishes him, while it allows the white man to plunder him as he pleases.”
― Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

“But when you’re away for too long, you forget things, and they want it that way. They used to steal children: cut their hair, make them speak English and wear European clothes. They want us to assimilate, because that’s how they’ll beat us, by making us forget who we are.”
― M.B. Miller, Neon and Tinsel

“Sitting Bull gave most of the money away to the band of ragged, hungry boys who seemed to surround him wherever he went. He once told Annie Oakley, another one of the Wild West Show's stars, that he could not understand how white men could be so unmindful of their own poor. "The white man knows how to make everything," he said, "but he does not know how to distribute it.”
― Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

“Colorado was swept clean of Indians. Cheyenne and Arapaho, Kiowa and Comanche, Jicarilla and Ute - they had all known its mountains and plains, but now no trace of them remained but their names on the white man's land.”
― Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West