Native Sovereignty Quotes

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, 'Ours.'

Brother when we came here to relate our grievances about our lands, we expected to have something done for us .... You are not to expect to hear of me any more, and brother we desire to hear no more of you.

The land was ours before we belonged to the land.

Englishman! – Although you have conquered the French, you have not yet conquered us. We are not your slaves. These lakes, these woods and mountains, were left to us by our ancestors. They are our inheritance, and we will part with them to none.

We do not want your civilization. We would live as our fathers did, and their fathers before them.

The white people have no right to take the land from the Indians, because they had it first; it is theirs. They may sell, but all must join. Any sale not made by all is not valid.

The Cherokee Nation has had a government for a long, long, long time. We had a government in this country long before there was a United States government.

The white people should go back to Europe, and the country should be returned to the American Indians. This is the future I would like to see for the so-called United States.

The whites didn’t really steal the land, because the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves

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.

We, as Indian tribes, should be able to prosecute non-Indians on tribal lands. But on Indian land, we have no ability to prosecute anyone but another Indian. American Indians having status as a foreign nation is good for us, but it's not good in some ways if we don't have the jurisdictional power that the federal government claims.

What white man can say I never stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet they say that I am a thief.

Of course, since we don't see the Indian as a living figure - having turned the Indian into a kind of mascot for the ecology movement, a symbol of prehistory - we can't see the Indian among us.

I myself, as an American Indian, feel like a failure in a way. I have not been able to do anything about the fact that these large corporations are taking so much natural gas and oil out of the soil. It seems like we're always involved in fighting something. It's tiresome.

Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because their members — surrounded by direct examples of free life — always had the option to vote with their feet....Historians have been puzzlingly reluctant to acknowledge this Indian contribution to the end of tyranny worldwide.

The white people have no right to take the land from the Indians, because the Indians had it first.

When I first came to Harvard, I thought to myself, 'What kind of an Indian am I?' because I did not grow up on a reservation. But being an Indian is a combination of things. It's your blood. It's your spirituality. And it's fighting for the Indian people.

There is a perception of the general irrelevance of aboriginal culture….We haven't gone anywhere. We still exist. …. Get the hell out of our lives and give us our land back.

We have looked back, and remembered how the Yorkers purchased our lands in former times. They bought them, piece after piece – for a little money paid to a few men in our nation, and not all our brethren – until our planting and hunting grounds have become very small, and if we sell them, we know not where to spread our blankets.

I remember saying to the chairman after serving the first year, 'Why are we doing this? Why don't the Hawaiians have control?' 'Well, we have no mechanism to do it,' I was told.

The white man has got the gold out of the land which belonged to the red man.

Though the Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionable, and heretofore unquestioned right to the lands they occupy … it may well be doubted whether those tribes which reside within the acknowledged boundaries of the United States can, with strict accuracy, be denominated foreign nations….They occupy a territory to which we assert a title independent of their will… they are in a state of pupilage. Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian. They look to our government for protection; rely upon its kindness and its power; appeal to it for relief to their wants; and address the President as their Great Father. They and their country are considered by foreign nations, as well as by ourselves, as being so completely under the sovereignty and dominion of the United States that any attempt to acquire their lands, or to form a political connection with them, would be considered by all as an invasion of our territory and an act of hostility.

While Indians were in a state of at least semi-independence, there did not seem to be any great necessity for interference.

It is my hope that I could be not just a Prime Minister, but a Prime Minister for Aboriginal affairs, the first I imagine that we've ever had.

The Mohawks have on all occasions shown their zeal and loyalty to the Great King; yet they have been very badly treated by his people.