Charles Eastman Quotes

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.

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

We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture.

The only good Indian is a dead Indian.

White Man’s Road Thru Black Man’s Home!

Day and night cannot dwell together. The Red Man has ever fled the approach of the White Man, as the morning mist flees before the morning sun.

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

I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.

I had been preserved from the spirit-breaking Indian schools… My psychology, therefore, had not been shot to pieces by that cheap attitude of the Indian service, whose one aim was to “civilize” the race youth, by denouncing his parents, his customs, his people wholesale, and filling the vacuum they had created with their vulgar notions of what constituted civilization.

An Indian who is as bad as the white men could not live in our nation.... The white men do not scalp the head; but they do worse. They poison the heart.

I will say that I like an Indian better dead than living. I have never in my life seen a good Indian (and I have seen thousands) except when I have seen a dead Indian.

The United States has always had little sympathy for the native and has always seen settlements as a positive and civilizing force….they saw the native as a squatter with no rights.

They are like any other class of people. They like to defend their rights. I think the Indians have been more sinned against than they have sinned.

Treat the native as a child and withdraw the franchise.

A wild Indian, to reach the civilized world, must needs travel some thousands of miles in vehicles of conveyance, to which he is unaccustomed -- through latitudes and longitudes which are new to him -- living on food that he is unused to -- stared and gazed at by the thousands and tens of thousands whom he cannot talk to -- his heart grieving and his body sickening at the exhibition of white men's wealth and luxuries, which are enjoyed on the land, and over the bones of his ancestors. And at the end of his journey he stands (like a caged animal) to be scanned -- to be criticized -- to be pitied -- and heralded to the world as a mute -- as a brute, and a beggar.

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...

Civilization or death to all American savages!

This present race of Indians will never be converted. It mattereth not whether they kill one another off or if somebody else does it. And as for our sending missionaries among them to convert them, it is of no use

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.

They [Native Americans] should not be allowed to come into the settlements, for every visit an Indian makes to a town, it is more or less injury to him.

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

The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people.

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 conflict between the creatures of Native Lore and the immigration of the European preternatural hosts is hinted at in 'Blood Bound' and reflects the conflicts between the human immigrants and the Indian people who were already here.

The Americans will never solve the Indian problem till the Indian is extinct. They have treated them after a fashion which has intensified their treachery and 'devilry' as enemies, and as friends reduces them to a degraded pauperism, devoid of the very first elements of civilization.