Winona LaDuke Quotes

As a Cherokee, I can attest to the fact that Native Americans have been on the losing side of history. Our rights have been infringed upon, our treaties have been broken, our culture has been stolen, and our tribes have been decimated at the hands of our own United States government.

I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. … I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.

Native Americans' families experience living surrounded, living in increasingly small reservations surrounded by the society that destroyed their civilization, and are still stigmatized. For decades and decades, for hundreds of years except in Indian schools, they weren't allowed to speak their language. That stigma takes a terrible toll.

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

The native American has been generally despised by his white conquerors for his poverty and simplicity.

The name 'reservation' has a negative connotation among Native Americans - an intern camp of sorts.

This land was our land; it was taken from us illegally …. John Smith did not bring a civilization here. There was already civilization here…. We should have burned the boat and killed them. all.

I am one of the forgotten (in this land), one of the faceless ones, a Native American. I am One from whom this Land was stolen through the use of Deceit, through Lies, through Ravage, through Rape, through Pillage. I am one of those who knows the degradation continues...

I once thought that I was the only man who persevered to be the friend of the white man, but since they have come and cleaned out our lodges, horses, and everything else, it is hard for me to believe the white man anymore.

It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.

Native Americans have faced centuries of atrocities to their people, their land, and their culture - all under various presidents who took an oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

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.

Native American activists have been present as long as the Europeans have been working to colonize us.

Colonialism has completed the destruction of the American Indian in the United States - the cultural destruction.

'Indian policy' has now been brought down upon the American people, and the American people are the new Indians of the 21st Century.

Looking at the purpose of our government toward the Indians, we find that after subjugating them it has been our policy to collect the different tribes on reservations and support them at the expense of our people.

The Canadians have managed to live peacefully with their Indians. It is disgrace that the United States has not done the same.

Like all of Latin America, Mexico after independence in 1821 turned its back on a triple heritage: on the Spanish heritage, because we were newly liberated colonies, and on our Indian and black heritages, because we considered them backward and barbaric. We looked towards France, England and the U.S., to become progressive democratic republics.

What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian.

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?

For many Native Americans across the land, the name of the Washington football team is a deeply personal reminder of a legacy of racism and generations of pain.

You get people talking about being worried about their art, and dances... their culture being wiped out or taken over, and yet these same people are taking advantage of their people to use them as cheap labour.

I disapprove... of the proposal to subject the Indians to our laws without their consent,... It is so little in concord with our principles of government.

White domination is so complete that even American Indian children want to be cowboys. It's as if Jewish children wanted to play Nazis.