Indigenous Identity Quotes

What's nice about 'Skinwalkers' is it's allowing an audience to see a different Indian perspective... I think, for myself, I'm trying to put the Indian perspective in a different dimension.

I know who I am and can deal with the use of Indian mascots... But I know it can be demeaning to a group of people. Maybe it would be all right if they were truly honoring the people and are giving due respect to the people they are representing.

I have made myself what I am. And I would that I could make the red people as great as the conceptions of my own mind, when I think of the Great Spirit that rules over us all.

Mexican Spaniards sought to deny their Spanish origins by identifying themselves with an idealized Indian past and creating the myth of “Our Lady of Guadalupe” as an independent source of religious authority for the Mexican Church.

Food sovereignty is an affirmation of who we are as indigenous peoples and a way, one of the most surefooted ways, to restore our relationship with the world around us.

This is a coca leaf. This is not cocaine. This represents the culture of indigenous people of the Andean region.

Although I didn't spend much time in New Zealand at all, I feel really privileged to have that Maori blood and link to my past. I got my tattoo out of respect to that.

It's important as a writer to do my art well and do it in a way that is powerful and beautiful and meaningful, so that my work regenerates the people, certainly Indian people, and the earth and the sun. And in that way we all continue forever.

I would say my flow is Aboriginal. Look at my face, nose, lips, and eyes.

There's been moments where I've felt, as an indigenous woman growing up in Australia, there's been that kind of rivalry of being indigenous... I've had that experience of someone saying, 'I don't know if she's going to go that far.'

I remember hearing stories from my mother and father about their parents and grandparents when they were taken off the reservation, taken to the boarding schools, and pretty much taught to be ashamed of who they were as Native Americans. You can feel that impact today.

Obviously, my Indigenous culture is very special to me.

I am a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society; I visit sacred places such as Devil's Tower and the Medicine Wheel. These places are important to me, because they've been made sacred by sacrifice, by the investment of blood and experience and story.

I'm a Native American actress.

I'm a member of the American Indian Movement, and I'm from the indigenous nations of the Western Hemisphere.

I'd love to work more with the American Indians, my people.

At issue when professional sports teams take the name of Native Americans is the problem of mimicry: having appropriated the land and wealth of America's vanquished peoples, settler culture then appropriates the supposed values and spirit of the vanquished as well.

God made me an Indian.

It's like, how did Columbus discover America when the Indians were already here? What kind of s-- is that, but white people's s--?

It is essential to collectively struggle to recover our status as Daughters of the Earth. In that is our strength, and the security, not in the predator, but in the security of our Mother, for our future generations. In that we can insure our security as the Mothers of our Nations.

Under the veneer of Westernization, the cultures of the Indian world - which have existed for 30,000 years! - continue to live. Sometimes in a magical way, sometimes in the shadows.

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.

My blood is Indian. I don't need tablas in my music to prove that.

I will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no buffalo or other game I will send my children to hunt and live on prairie, for where an Indian is shut up in one place his body becomes weak.

I am deeply gladdened that 1993 has been delcared the International Year of Indigenous Peoples by the United Nations. It is the first year we have had in five hundred years. This is thanks to the struggle of many untitled, unnamed indigenous brothers who, without understanding international law, patiently walked the corridors asking for some time. Thanks to them this international year has been declared.