Top 1200 Native American Indian Inspirational Quotes & Sayings

November is Native American Heritage month, and a good time to honor the legacy of our ancestors, but every day we should stop to think about our country's beginning and that the United States would not exist if not for a great deal of sacrifice, blood, and tears by Indian Tribes across the country.

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.

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

I think the worst one [indian mascot] is the Cleveland Indians' Big Chief Wahoo. It's just a red face on a baseball with a big, toothy grin. It's the Sambo of all other offensive mascots. I have never seen a Native American smile that hard before, not even at a casino opening.

It is important that Congress works to promote home ownership in Indian Country. These federal housing funds and programs will help young Native American families to stay on tribal lands in order to live, work and raise a family.

I once said, "You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent." When Bobby Jindal entered the Republican campaign, my comment should have been covered again, more prominently. I mean, Jindal is not Native American, he's a real Indian.

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

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.'

My native place is Belgaum and I understand Kannada and have a flavor for acting in South Indian languages.

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.

I exist in this hyphen. I'm an Indian-American-Muslim kid, but am I more Indian, or am I more American? What part of my identity am I?

There have been players with Indian heritage, but there hasn't been a Native-American professional basketball player who became a regular for all sorts of social and political reasons.

Spirituality is indeed the master key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinitive is native to it.

There's this whole notion of being an Indian - the idea that "warrior" is a positive description of us [Indians as native Americans]. When an Indian guy does well, he's a warrior, even now. He could be a computer salesman, but if he does well, he's a warrior. I'm not a pacifist by any measure, but I'm also fully aware that the reasons I might go to war could be very dubious.

When I talk of primordial innocence, I hear it in Sufi music with the nay flute. I see it in Coptic icons, in most traditional art, particularly art of the American Indian. I find the texts extraordinarily beautiful and very childlike and very simple. I've been particularly interested in American Indian texts.

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

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

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

Benazir Bhutto was an inspirational leader and an inspirational woman.

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.

I'm not even Indian-American: I'm Indian-Indian. Everybody expected me to have henna and a nose pin and talk in an accent like Apu from 'The Simpsons.' I was nervous because I wasn't sure if America was ready for a lead that looked like me.

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.

It is the fundamental right of every American, as guaranteed by the first amendment of the Constitution, to worship as he or she pleases... This legislation sets forth the policy of the United States to protect and preserve the inherent right of American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiian people to believe, express, and exercise their traditional religions

American Indian and Alaska Native people suffer from unacceptable and disproportionately high levels of violence, which can have lasting impacts on families and communities.

In this instance of the fire-arms, the Asiatic has been most improperly bracketed with the native. The British Indian does not need any such restrictions as are imposed by the Bill on the natives regarding the carrying of fire-arms. The prominent race can remain so by preventing the native from arming himself. Is there a slightest vestige of justification for so preventing the British Indian?

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 following twenty years would be the nadir of American Indian history, as the total Indian population between 1890 and 1910 fell to fewer than 250,000. (It was not until 1917 that Indian births exceeded deaths for the first time in fifty years.)

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

When I was young, kids who were more Native American than me would call me 'white boy.' To my white friends, I was 'that Indian kid.'

I consider myself an embodiment of the American dream: an all-American Indian.

What we did in the 1960s and early 1970s was raise the consciousness of white America that this government has a responsibility to Indian people. That there are treaties; that textbooks in every school in America have a responsibility to tell the truth. An awareness reached across America that if Native American people had to resort to arms at Wounded Knee, there must really be something wrong. And Americans realized that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing. From that, our own people began to sense the pride.

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.

I've always considered myself a man of integrity as a leader of the American Indian Movement and of Indian people. I will stand that test against anyone at anytime, anywhere.

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.

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.

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.

I'm different. I don't speak perfect American. I do have a lilt of an Indian accent. I thought, 'Maybe the world's not okay with what I bring, being Indian.'

Having portrayed English-speaking Indian characters in British and American projects, I have always wanted to use my mother tongue in an Indian film.

President Obama met with leaders of the American Indian tribes and they honored the president by giving him his own Indian name: Running Deficits.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We should get into the habit of reading inspirational books, looking at inspirational pictures, hearing inspirational music, associating with inspirational friends.

Native people such as the Cherokees are just as human and complex and real as Americans are, and our nation needs to respect American Indian cultures and traditions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I want to get rid of the Indian problem. [...] Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian Question and no Indian Department.

Spirituality is indeed the master-key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinitive is native to it.

Even though the American Indian Movement on a national-international scale has proven to be extremely dysfunctional, the American Indian Movement I was associated with I'm very proud of. We were a revolutionary, militant organization whose purpose was spirituality first, and that's how I want to be remembered.

From my teenage years on, I sought out Native elders from many tribal nations and listened to their words. I also started a small press, The Greenfield Review Press, and became very involved with publishing the work of other American Indian authors, especially books of poetry.

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!

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.

I have a cousin who is a spiritual advisor for Native veterans in Canada, so I'm very familiar with the history of Natives in the military. And growing up as an American Indian myself, the story of Ira Hayes is one that is often told.

Inspirational leadership connects to a highly motivated workforce which, in turn, means inspirational results

Be proud that thou art an Indian, and proudly proclaim, "I am an Indian, every Indian is my brother." Say, "The ignorant Indian, the poor and destitute Indian, the Brahmin Indian, the Pariah Indian, is my brother."

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