Top 1200 Native American Culture Quotes & Sayings

I'm a third-culture child. It's an interesting concept. Having an American father, a South American mother, born in England, grew up in Hong Kong, went to school in Europe - it makes me a third-culture child, which means you take on the culture of the place where you live. So I'm very adaptable.

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.

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

If you don't have a bed, or a dresser or a wall, or a book or a toy you are oppressed. An African American in a white world. A Jew in a Christian world. A gypsy. A Native American. A Chinese American. Let's say, you were born deprived.

There are better mothers than disaster. A native land is the best of all mothers. We American Jews have a native land we love. But it is even better to have a native land who loves us.

Look at the Native American culture. They revere the elders.

No matter where you're from - you can be Native American, Italian, Jewish, Latino, African-American - whatever you are, we're all distant relatives.

The whole point is to take from our native culture and from contemporary culture without using one art form to mimic the other, so that our native identity remains the native identity, the contemporary identity remains the contemporary identity, and the mixing of these two musical identities creates a third musical identity.

Above all, I wanted to be appreciated as a prima ballerina who happened to be a Native American, never as someone who was an American Indian ballerina.

The foreign audiences are somewhat surprised and happy to find an American film that asks questions about American culture. There's a certain kind of cultural imperialism that we practice. Our films penetrate every market in the world. I have seen and have had people reflect to me, maybe not in so many words or specifically, but I get the subtext of it - they're somewhat charmed and surprised and happy to see an American film reflect on our culture. Because they see other cultures reflect on our culture but they don't see US culture reflecting on itself in quite the same way.

Yes, we become stronger when black and whites, Latino, Asian American, Native American, when all of us stand together.

You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

The greatest moments of Native History lie ahead of us if a great spiritual renewal and wakening should take place. The Native American has been a sleeping giant. He is awakening. The original Americans could become the evangelists who will help win America for Christ! Remember these forgotten people!

Christians must go beyond criticizing the degradation of American culture, roll up their sleeves, and get to work on positive solutions. The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture.

I think the African American community, the Latino community, the Native American communities have borne an unfair burden in the last century, and continue to.

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.

Miami, which has already aired, has this wonderful blend of Caribbean culture and Latin American culture and Southern American culture (talking about fried chicken). All those combine to make for a very very interesting array of ingredients, restaurants, and the chefs that come there. It also has great seafood, not to mention the glorious citrus that's there. And all those things inform what you do - and they should.

The power of these recommendations is that they come from leaders representing a broad spectrum of religious conviction. At the table were people with Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Native American and humanist perspectives, as well as individuals from advocacy groups ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the American Center for Law and Justice.

American culture is kind of an international culture, isn't it? British culture is a bit more unique. I think funny things are sort of funny around the world, really.

Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.

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.

Today, we have come a distance. We have made a lot of progress. That cannot be denied. You cannot dispute the fact that our country is so different from 50 years ago. But we still have problems. There are too many people that have been left out and left behind, and they are African American, they are White, Latino, Asian American, and Native American.

I have four relatively small children, and around fourth grade, they start doing big projects on Native Americas: everything is Native Americans in elementary school. Do you know how many Native American dresses I've sewn, on and on; it's a full yearlong study. And then never again. As journalists, we never even cover Native Americans.

The Justice Department ruled that Native American tribes are allowed to grow and sell marijuana on reservations. This decision was hailed as a victory by Native American leader Giggling Eagle.

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

Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what 'was' and 'were,' we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.

In our culture, the Native Americans, when two strangers come together. You know what we do in our culture? We smoke the peace pipe.

In every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture--and American culture has triumphed.

Well, as a native, as a colonized people you do live in the in between. The thing is I'm native. But necessarily because I'm a member of the country, I'm also a White American.

I know that if a team had a derogatory name for African Americans, I would help those who helped extinguish that name. I have quite a few friends who are Native Americans. And even if I didn’t have Native American friends, the name of the team is disrespectful.

Through the years, I found we had Native American blood in us. My great-grandmother came from the island of Martinique, and they hooked up with the Native Americans of Louisiana.

This is going to sound weird, but when I was a kid my old man used to tell us that he was a Sioux Indian warrior in his former life. Native American culture was always big in my house - I don't know why.

For almost 20 years, I've worked on various campaigns. I started out as a phone volunteer. I'd go into campaign offices, ask for lists of Native American voters, and just start calling people because I felt that I just wanted to help more Native folks get to the polls.

One of the things which separates British and American culture is the reverence for the flag in American culture.

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

The March on Washington was a March for Jobs and Freedom. There are still too many people who are unemployed or underemployed in America - they're black, white, Latino, Native American and Asian American.

If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture - not only national culture but global culture.

In spite of our agonizing history, Native American people find much to celebrate. The songs, the dances, the culture and traditions surrounding planting and harvests, the prayers that are sent upward for healing and peace, and the welcoming of children into our families, are all reasons for us to keep moving forward with optimism.

I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry.

There is nothing so American as our national parks. The scenery and the wildlife are native. The fundamental idea behind the parks is native. It is, in brief, that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us. The parks stand as the outward symbal of the great human principle.

The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt.

There is an imagined thing called black culture. But culture is a construction. It is learned behavior, not innate. The black American experience is the American experience.

I love and admire the American culture and the American dream. I learnt so many things about the American shoe industry and marketing strategies. I caught the secrets of American casual wear, that is elegant and wearable, retro and modern, and mixed it with an Italian touch, luxurious and handmade.

We do not have an American culture. We have a white American culture and a black American culture. So when those two groups try to get together, [it's] very difficult because they each feel like they have the right to their culture.

I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans. Generally speaking Indians don't read books. It's not a book culture. That's why I'm trying to make movies. Indians go to movies; Indians own video recorders.

The western has always been, for me, the bread and butter. It's the easiest place for an identifiable Native American to be able to work. But I do yearn to be known as an actor rather than a 'Native American actor.'

In American culture at large, but especially in African American culture, it's a sign of weakness to ask for help.

Over the years, we settled into American life and embraced it fully. But having come from a different culture, I didn't know the boundaries of American culture. Which is that, as a girl, you didn't play football or soccer at lunch with the boys, and to be cool, you didn't get into math Olympiad.

We also have a piece about the Mayflower, but it's just a very different, very gritty, very character-driven version of why those people were on that boat and what the experience was like for them, emotionally, physically and spiritually, and also the Native Americans and what the state of Native American society was at that time.

Horsemanship and the cowboy lifestyle and my culture as a Native American are all three things that are very, very important to me.

Millennials don't want to be bombarded by ads. But what is so interesting to me, though, is how willingly they accept native content. Or native advertising - it's not even native content.

I think that every individual is a microcosm of the culture that they're born into. They reflect the anxieties, insecurities, and strengths of that culture. I'm also American and I reflect on what it's like to be an American in the 21st century.

I'm tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro - that's the Scotch-Irish part.

Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.

I think the American sports culture has the idea that professional athletes need so much, like flying private planes, which obviously we don't, but that's the American sports culture when they think of the NFL and the NBA.

You see the one thing I've always maintained is that I'm an American Indian. I'm not a Native American. I'm not politically correct. Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans. And if you notice, I put American before my ethnicity. I'm not a hyphenated African-American or Irish-American or Jewish-American or Mexican-American.

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

The one thing about Lumbee people is that there's so many stereotypes about Native Americans, especially reservation Native Americans, and we all tend to get lumped under that umbrella. But the Lumbee are non-reservation. I grew up no different than anybody would in normal American communities.

I have a real interest in working with younger Native artists. I think it's a very important way for Native people to communicate the realities of our culture and remember our ancestors.

My Native American heritage was not embraced by our family, and we grew up African-American, so I didn't have a lot of access or history to that line of my family.