Winona LaDuke Quotes

God made me an Indian.

Judaism is important to me from a tribal point of view.

I'm Cherokee, and there were times when social expansion was something that is needed by a cultural group or a national group.

Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans.

The one thing I've always maintained is that I'm an American Indian. I'm not politically correct.

I'm proud of being part Cherokee, and I think it's time all us Indians felt the same way.

My family is Native American, and I was raised with Native American ceremonies.

I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place.

I'm half Native American and half Mexican and I support all native peoples around the world.

I had an Indian face, but I never saw it as Indian, in part because in America the Indian was dead. The Indian had been killed in cowboy movies, or was playing bingo in Oklahoma. Also, in my middle-class Mexican family indio was a bad word, one my parents shy away from to this day. That's one of the reasons, of course, why I always insist, in my bratty way, on saying, Soy indio! - "I am an Indian!"

I grew up in Oregon so I grew up around reservations, so I've always kind of had this knowledge. Not a tremendous amount of knowledge, but an outsider's knowledge of what reservation life was like.

Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country?

I don't feel any connection to Russia.

I have never felt any ethnic connection between the Greeks and me other than how hairy I am.

A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman.

We of French origin have the sentiment of our own individuality. We want to hand down to our children the language we received from our forefathers.

Nationalism is spiritual and all-embracing, in the sense that it opens its arms to and spreads its wings over all those who have shared with the Arabs their history and have lived in the environment of their language and culture for generations, so that they have become Arab in thought and feeling. There is no fear that nationalism will clash with religion, for, like religion, it flows from the heart and issues from the will of God; they walk arm in arm, supporting each other, especially when religion represents the genius of the nationality and is in harmony with its nature.

The Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionable … right to the lands they occupy.

You cannot turn the clock back, you cannot give the island of Manhattan back to the indigenous, but on the other hand, you can ensure that the indigenous can maintain their way of life.

… tribes with flags

It has been established that most Indians have the same DNA profile irrespective of caste, religion, or region. Yet we find our text books talking about India being multiethnic.

One of the first things people think of when they think of Native Americans is reservations. We didn't have any idea what that was. We were just young kids growing up in normal blue-collar America.

Both of my parents were first-generation Americans, the children of Jews who left Eastern Europe around the turn of the century.

Since its inception, the government has broken and coerced treaties with hundreds of Native American tribes. And this is even worse when you realize that the native peoples of this land are negotiating for land that is, by all common sense and elementary school logic, their land.