Old Tassel Quotes

We Indians only know that schools will make our children like white people, and some of us do not like white people and their ways.

It is urgently necessary that we recognize our own limitations as a moral and ideological force among the Asiatic peoples. Our political philosophy and our patterns for living have very little applicability to masses of people in Asia. They may be all right for us, with our highly developed political traditions running back into the centuries and with our peculiarly favorable geographic position; but they are simply not practical or helpful, today, for most of the people in Asia.

I cannot see that everything the white man does is to be copied.

The white people … are trying to make us over into their image

Civilization or death to all American savages!

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.

Do we wish the Indians any evil? No we would do them good, for they are human beings, though most awfully degraded. We would have taught them to plow & sow, and reap and thresh, but they prefer idleness and theft.

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.

But who is it that has made my people drunk? Indians cannot make whiskey. Indians do not sell it. But white people make it and bring it among us. It is they that have brought the evil upon us and we cannot remove it. The white people can remove it and now we call upon them to do it. We ask them to take their whiskey and run away, and leave us sober as they found us.

There must be in their [the Indian's] social bond, something singularly captivating, and far superior to anything to be boasted among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans.

Who came to this country first—the white man, didn’t he? That’s who made this country great.

Whole Indian nations have melted away like snowballs in the sun before the white man's advance. They leave scarcely a name of our people except those wrongly recorded by their destroyers.

All preceding experiments for the improvement of the Indians have failed. It seems now to be an established fact that they cannot live in contact with a civilized community and prosper.

When the savages come to the city of Philadelphia and see the handsome and magnificent buildings there, they wonder and laugh at the Europeans for expending so much toil and cost on houses. They say that it is quite unnecessary, as one can live without such houses. Still more they wonder at the garments of the Europeans and their costly finery

[There is] no Indian problem as created by the Indian himself. Every problem that exists today in regard to the Indian population is due to the white man’s cast of mind.

Though the civilized man may be truly said to have been the greatest enemy of the Indian, yet he has not always been so wilfully, and, in many instances, he has endeavored to be his benefactor. But, though his endeavors may occasionally, for a time, have arrested the progress of the evil, they have never altogether removed it, or been of permanent advantage.

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.

It is indispensably necessary that they be placed in positions [reservations] where they can be controlled and finally compelled by sheer necessity to resort to agricultural labor or starve. Considering, as the untutored Indian does, that labor is a degradation, and that there is nothing worthy of his ambitions but prowess in war, success in the chase, and eloquence in council, it is only under such circumstances that his haughty pride can be subdued, and his wild energies trained to the more ennobling pursuits of civilized life.

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.

White settlers possessed no traditions and institutions comparable to the Indians' hospitality and sharing, adoption, and complete social integration. ...Whites who educated Indians did so with the idea that the Indians would return to their own people as missionaries to spread the gospel, not that they might become functioning parts of White society.

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.

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

It was the wish of the Americans that their red brethren should remain peacefully round their own fires, and not embroil themselves in any disputes between the white people.

The whole Indian thing, I always say it's really the American holocaust. It's something we need to look at.

We are guilty for sending teams into foreign countries to advise them how to be like us.