Deb Haaland Quotes

Prior to my election, young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief.

Since my residence at Tippecanoe, we have endeavored to level all distinctions, to destroy village chiefs, by whom all mischiefs are done. It is they who sell the land to the Americans.

That the Indians possess the inherent right of expatriation, as well as the more fortunate white race, and have the inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," so long as they obey the laws and do not trespass on forbidden ground

On any state elections map, the reservations are blue places. Native people are most often progressives, Democrats, and by no means gun-toting vigilantes.

I can't imagine what it must be like to be one of the indigenous people of the United States of America. I can't imagine watching the news every day - as people debate whose country this is and who should be in charge of it and how to make it great again - and hardly ever see your people brought into the discussion.

I will not ever run for political office. I can assure you.

Barack Obama has brought glamour back to American politics - not the faux glamour-by-association of campaigning with movie stars or sailing with the Kennedys, but the real thing. The candidate himself is glamorous. Audiences project onto him the personal qualities and political positions they want in a president.

An Indian tribe is sovereign to the extent that the U.S. permits it to be sovereign.

The more I heard, the more I've learned, and the more I saw, the more resolved I became about helping to address the challenges that plague the Native American community.

In ancient British times, the whole country belonged to tribes, and the tribes owned their several districts. At the head of each tribe was the chief.

My plan after office is to get up and spend that entire first day helping my wife move into her new senatorial office.

You'll never find a candidate that you can identify 100 percent with unless you become one yourself.

PACs represent thousands of little people.

The Constitution does not apply to the Navajo Nation. The Navajo Nation predates the Constitution.

There is now a recognition that there are three sovereigns in this country, and they are the Federal Government, the state governments and the tribal governments.

We're all candidates all the time. Claude Pepper is eighty seven, and he's worried about redistricting in 1992.

... the rights of the first Americans to remain Indians while exercising their rights as Americans.

I have asked some of the great white chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They can not tell me.

I cannot but think that there are strong reasons for doubting the applicability of the epithet "state" to a people so low in the grade of organized society as our Indian tribes most generally

The white people have no right to take the land from the Indians, because they had it first; it is theirs. They may sell, but all must join. Any sale not made by all is not valid.

Have we, the first holders of this prosperous region, no longer a share in your history? Glad were your fathers to sit down upon the threshold of the long house. Had our forefathers spurned you from it, when the French were thundering at the opposite side to get a passage through, and drive you into the sea, whatever has been the fate of other Indians, the Iroquois might still have been a nation, and I, instead of pleading here for the privilege of living within your borders, I – might have had a country.

The Cherokee Nation has had a government for a long, long, long time. We had a government in this country long before there was a United States government.

I’ve got to go meet with the Choctaw Tribal Council monkeys.

In time of peace, no authority civil or military exists for transporting Indians from one section of the country to, another, without the consent of the Indians, nor to confine then to any particular reservation against their will; and where officers of the government attempt to do this and arrest and hold Indians who are at peace with the government for the purpose of removing teens to and confining them on a reservation in the Indian Territory they will be released on habeas corpus.

When you are not running for office, the people in the party listen to you more.