Native American Quotes

Our land is more valuable than your money. It will last
forever. It will not even perish by the flames of fire.
As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land
will be here to give life to men and animals. We cannot
sell the lives of men and animals. It was put here by
the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because
it does not belong to us.

- Crowfoot

It may be regarded as certain
that not a foot of land will ever be taken
from the Indians without their own consent.

- Thomas Jefferson (1786)

You might as well expect the rivers to run backward
as that any man who was born free should be contented
to be penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.

- Chief Joseph (Nez Percé)

"The U.S. government broke more than 98 percent of all the hundreds of treaties - signed and ratified by Congress - made with the sovereign First Nations of North America. . . . My supposition, based upon the biblical concept of covenant, is that the United States of America may very well be held to give an accounting for her broken treaties with the First Nations people of North America. Few will disagree that America is struggling spiritually. . . . I doubt that without the aid of the Holy Spirit it would ever enter our own thinking to make the connection between America's broken covenants with Native American sovereign nations and our current spiritual and moral decline. Perhaps it's time to consider what the Spirit of the Lord may be saying to the Church in America today about the sins her forefathers committed in breaking hundreds of treaties with the Gibeonites of this land."

- Richard Twiss
One Church Many Tribes

"For the Lakota there was no wilderness.
Nature was not dangerous but hospitable,
not forbidding but friendly."

– Luther Standing Bear

"All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth
befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave
the web of life. He is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."

– Chief Seattle (1854)

Crying for a vision, that’s the beginning of all religion. The thirst for a dream from above, without this you are nothing. This I believe. It is like the prophets in your Bible, like Jesus fasting in the desert, getting his visions. It’s like our Sioux vision quest, the hanblecheya. White men have forgotten this. God no longer speaks to them from a burning bush. If He did, they wouldn’t believe it, and call it science fiction.

Your old prophets went into the desert crying for a dream and the desert gave it to them. But the white men of today have made a desert of their religion and a desert within themselves. The White Man’s desert is a place without dreams or life. There nothing grows. But the spirit water is always way down there to make the desert green again.

– Lame Deer

When we show our respect for other living things,
they respond with respect for us.

Arapaho Proverb

I am preparing the sweatlodge for the Ghost Dance. . . . Not the old Ghost Dance, which was supposed to roll up the white’s Earth and bring back the Indian Earth underneath, but a new-old spirit. It is like raindrops making a tiny brook, many drops making a stream, many streams making a mighty river bursting all dams. We are the first raindrops.

- Henry Crow Dog