Russell Means Quotes

Issues that have relevance to the tribal community have routinely been minimized and ignored.

In the end, there is no absence of irony: the integrity of what is sacred to Native Americans will be determined by the government that has been responsible for doing everything in its power to destroy Native American cultures.

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.

The white man expelled the Indian, took his possessions, developed the unexplored resources, and now he devotes a portion of his accumulations to establish institutions where the red man learn the secret and method of his power.

If you have got to wear golden slippers to enter the white man's heaven no Indian will ever get there, as the whites have got the Black Hills and with them all the gold.

These white people think this country belongs to them—they don't realize that they are only in charge right now because there's more of them than there are of us. The whole country changed with only a handful of raggedly-ass pilgrims that came over here in the 1500s. And it can take a handful of raggedy-ass Indians to do the same, and I intend to be one of those raggedy-ass Indians.

The system of domination is founded on depriving nations of their true identity. It seeks to deprive nations of their culture, identity, self-confidence and in this way dominate them.

It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or through the 'chronically dysfunctional' prism, and I suspect that is so often the case.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

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

I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization. Their rights invaded, their morals corrupted, their lands wrested from them, their customs changed, and therefore lost to the world; and they at last sunk into the earth, and the ploughshare turning the sod over their graves, and I have flown to their rescue--not of their lives or of their race (for they are "doomed" and must perish), but to the rescue of their looks and their modes, at which the acquisitive world may hurl their poison and every besom of destruction, and trample them down and crush them to death

Civilization or death to all American savages!

White men come in like a river. They told us that they only wanted a little land. But we knew better.

Millions of dollars have been expended to excavate and transport to museums the tools, weapons, and other artifacts of Indians--but scarcely a penny has been spent to save the living descendants of those who made them

No one who knew the true nature of the Indian felt any regret that they were driven off their hunting grounds. This attitude was found wherever the Whites came in conflict with them and explains why they were scarcely regarded as human beings.

Whites looking for gold kill Indians just as they would kill bears and pay no regard for treaties.

What colonialism does is cause an identity crisis about one's own culture.

If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans.

If you asked someone who was a Maori about how they felt about how they were treated in Australia or New Zealand, you'll get an answer. They'll have something to tell you. And you might not like what you hear.

Racism is very characteristic of imperialism. Racism is very characteristic of capitalism.

Slowly but surely, little by little, many different groups of vulnerable bodies and people have been targeted from since the beginning of time, from since the beginning of the construction of America and all the civilizations from around the world pre-colonially.

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.

When it comes to American Indians, mainstream America suffers from willful blindness.

Issues affecting tribal communities have routinely been minimized and ignored.

It's a fact that Anglo-Saxon supremacy impacts other cultures. That is plain and simple.