“[Black Hawk] has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against white men, who came year after year, to cheat them and take away their lands.”

A Native American grandfather was talking to his grandson about how he felt. He said, ‘I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart.

Nothing can be sold but such things as can be carried away

No white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion.

Nobody asks to be a hero, it just sometimes turns out that way.

The white men speak bad of the Indian, and look at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies; Indians do not steal.

What, do y’all think you’re heroes?’ I didn’t know what to say at the time, but if he asked me again, I’d say no. I’d say there’s no way in hell. Nobody asks to be a hero. It just sometimes turns out that way.

If you treat a sick child as an adult and a sick adult as a child, it usually works out pretty well.

I got my best foot forward onto greener grass, cause there ain’t no future living in the past.

My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon. So long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have a right to the soil.

When I get home and people ask me,’Hey, Hoot, why do you do it, man? What are you? Some kind of war junkie?

The white men despise the Indians, and drive them from their homes. But the Indians are not deceitful.

The accent of a man’s native country remains in his mind and his heart, as it does in his speech.

Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There’s more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it’s awfully close to human.

One of the things I tell about Refugee is that unless you’re Native American or a descendant of slaves.

I don’t ask employers, for example, to like blacks or Jews or native people.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

The Arab, like all sons of Sham, has sharp and crafty mind . . . Should time come when life of our people in Palestine imposes to a smaller or greater extent on the natives, they WILL NOT easily step aside.

We [Americans] have a historical trauma when it comes to the past relationships when it comes to Native Americans and the history of how America was created.

We [Native Americans] respect being human beings, but also the natural and spiritual world and I thought that came across wonderfully