These Cherokee quotes will inspire you. The Cherokee, are one of the indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Cherokee quotes, Cherokee sayings, and Cherokee proverbs.
Best Cherokee Quotes
- “Give me strength, not to be better than my enemies, but to defeat my greatest enemy, the doubts within myself. Give me strength for a straight back and clear eyes, so when life fades, as the setting sun, my spirit may come to you without shame.” ~ P. C. Cast
- “It affords me sincere pleasure to be able to apprise you of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi.” ~ Martin Van Buren
- “Prior to my election, young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief.” ~ Wilma Mankiller
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“I’m proud of being part Cherokee, and I think it’s time all us Indians felt the same way.” ~ Loretta Lynn
- “Individually and collectively, Cherokee people possess an extraordinary ability to face down adversity and continue moving forward.” ~ Wilma Mankiller
- “I was told all my life I was part Cherokee. Then it was Crow. The latest is Blackfoot.” ~ Kathie Lee Gifford
- “My name is Mankiller, and in the old Cherokee Nation, when we lived here in the Southeast, we lived in semi-autonomous villages, and there was someone who watched over the village, who had the title of mankiller. And I’m not sure what you could equate that to, but it was sort of like a soldier or someone who was responsible for the security of the village, and so anyway this one fellow liked the title mankiller so well that he kept it as his name, and that’s who we trace our ancestry back to.” ~ Wilma Mankiller
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“An Indian is an Indian regardless of the degree of Indian blood or which little government card they do or do not possess.” ~ Wilma Mankiller
- “I’m lucky because I have so many clashing cultural, racial things going on: black, Jewish, Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee. I can float and be part of any community I want.” ~ Rashida Jones
- “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the Sunset.” ~ Crowfoot
- “Be the buffalo. Wilma Mankiller, the first female principal chief of the Cherokee nation, once told me how the cow runs away from the storm while the buffalo charges directly toward it—and gets through it quicker. Whenever I’m confronted with a tough challenge, I do not prolong the torment. I become the buffalo.” ~ Donna Brazile
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“The secret of our success is that we never, never give up.” ~ Wilma Mankiller
- “I’m lucky because I have so many clashing cultural, racial things going on: black, Jewish, Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee. I can float and be part of any community I want. The thing is, I do identify with being black, and if people don’t identify me that way that’s their issue. I’m happy to challenge people’s understanding of what it looks like to be biracial because guess what? In the next 50 years, people will start looking more and more like me.” ~ Rashida Jones
- “It should be remembered that hundreds of people of African ancestry also walked the Trail of Tears with the Cherokee during the forced removal of 1838-1839. Although we know about the terrible human suffering of our native people and the members of other tribes during the removal, we rarely hear of those black people who also suffered.” ~ Wilma Mankiller
- “The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.” ~ Black Elk
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“My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called “standing people. . . .”” ~ Wallace Stevens
- “I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry. When I saw myself in Daddy Glen’s eyes, I wanted to die. No, I wanted to be already dead, cold and gone. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid.” ~ Dorothy Allison
- “Negative thoughts were treated by Cherokee healers with the same medicines as wounds, headaches, or physical illness. It was believed that unchecked negative thoughts can permeate the being and manifest themselves in negative actions.” ~ Wilma Mankiller
- “The second thing that happened is, DNA analysis is much more sophisticated. All you have to do now is spit in a test tube and you find out all kind of things in six weeks – where they are from in Africa or Europe. You can prove or disprove the fundamental African-American myth that you descended from a Cherokee great, great grandmother.” ~ Henry Louis Gates
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“If I practice Cherokee along with backing tracks would it be Cherokee?” ~ Rob Schwimmer
- “I was called “T-Bow” but the people got it mixed up with “T-Bone.” My name is Aaron Walker but “T-Bone” is catchy, people remember it. My auntie gave it to me when I was a kid. Mother’s mother was a Cherokee Indian full-blooded. There were sixteen girls and two boys in my mother’s family, all dead but two.” ~ T-Bone Walker
- “Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skins and furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “She’s Cherokee Indian, which is great ’cause whenever we have sex, it rains.” ~ Jay Mohr
- “A flower is your cousin…Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken’s or a hog’s when you need it…But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower. Cherokee great-grandmother” ~ Barbara Kingsolver
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“I’m Irish and Cherokee Indian. I can’t faint.” ~ Lynn Collins
- “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. My folks were Indian. Both my mother and father had Cherokee blood in them. I was born and raised in Indian Territory. ‘Course we’re not the Americans whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, but we met them at the boat when they landed.” ~ Will Rogers
- “I am extremely excited to develop and design a brand representative of my life, experiences, and style. Working closely with Cherokee will help establish a worldwide presence with best-in-class retailers and category leaders.” ~ Alessandra Ambrosio
- “Smallpox in a blanket, which the U.S. Army gave to the Cherokee Indians on their long march to the West, was nothing compared to what I’d like to see done to these people” ~ Michael Savage
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“The power of the world always works in circles.” ~ Black Elk
- “I owned a Ferrari, a Range Rover, a Mercedes 560SL convertible, a Jeep Cherokee and a Nissan 300ZX. I can’t remember the intricate decision tree I had to climb in order to determine which one to drive to work on any given day – it probably had something to do with the weather, or which car had more gas in the tank, or upholstery that best matched whatever shirt I happened to throw on that morning.” ~ Michael J. Fox
- “Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a person is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.” ~ Black Elk
- “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.” ~ Joseph Bruchac
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“Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.” ~ Black Elk
- “A significant number of people believe tribal people still live and dress as they did 300 years ago. During my tenure as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, national news agencies requesting interviews sometimes asked if they could film a tribal dance or if I would wear traditional tribal clothing for the interview. I doubt they asked the president of the United States to dress like a pilgrim for an interview.” ~ Wilma Mankiller
- “My mother’s mother is Jewish and African, so I guess that would be considered Creole. My mother’s father was Cherokee Indian and something else. My dad’s mother’s Puerto Rican and black, and his father was from Barbados.” ~ Meagan Good
- “We are a revitalized tribe. After every major upheaval, we have been able to gather together as a people to rebuild a community and a government. Individually and collectively, Cherokee people possess an extraordinary ability to face down adversity and continue moving forward. We are able to do that because our culture, though certainly diminished, has sustained us since time immemorial. This Cherokee culture is a well-kept secret.” ~ Wilma Mankiller
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“[last words] What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night.” ~ Crowfoot
- “Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the world always works in circles.” ~ Black Elk
- “My father was one-eighth Cherokee Indian and my mother was quarter-blood Cherokee. I never got far enough in arithmetic to figure out how much injun that made me, but there’s nothing of which I am more proud than my Cherokee blood.” ~ Will Rogers
