These Native American quotes will inspire you. Native Americans, also known as American Indians, First Americans, Indigenous Americans, and other terms are the indigenous peoples of the United States; sometimes including Hawaii and territories of the United States, and other times limited to the mainland.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Native American quotes, Native American sayings, and Native American proverbs.
Famous Native American Quotes
- “There is no death, only a change of worlds.” ~ Chief Seattle
- “When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.” ~ Tecumseh
- “All things share the same breath – the beast, the tree, the man… the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.” ~ Chief Seattle
-
“It does not require many words to speak the truth.” ~ Chief Joseph
- “May the stars carry your sadness away, may the flowers fill your heart with beauty, may hope forever wipe away your tears. And, above all, may silence make you strong.” ~ Chief Dan George
- “Earth does not belong to us; we belong to earth. Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.” ~ Chief Seattle
- “No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers…. Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Didn’t the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children? The way, the only way to stop this evil is for the red man to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was first, and should be now, for it was never divided.” We gave them forest-clad mountains and valleys full of game, and in return what did they give our warriors and our women? Rum, trinkets, and a grave.” ~ Tecumseh
-
“It is the mothers, not the warriors who create a people and guide their destiny.” ~ Luther Standing Bear
- “Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.” ~ Tecumseh
- “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.” ~ Dennis Banks
- “They say there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in this country. But if you ask a Native American, that number is more like 300 million.” ~ David Letterman
-
“Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.” ~ Tecumseh
- “I am poor and naked, but I am the chief of the nation. We do not want riches but we do want to train our children right. Riches would do us no good. We could not take them with us to the other world. We do not want riches. We want peace and love.” ~ Red Cloud , Native American quotes about love
- “I see a time of Seven Generations when all the colors of mankind will gather under the Sacred Tree of Life and the whole earth will become One Circle again.” ~ Crazy Horse
- “The secret of our success is that we never, never give up.” ~ Wilma Mankiller
-
“How smooth must be the language of the whites when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.” ~ Black Hawk
- “I was born on the prairies where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures.” ~ Geronimo
- “If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys.” ~ Chief Dan George
- “Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist.” ~ Winona LaDuke
-
“Take only memories, leave only footprints.” ~ Chief Seattle
- “Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and the oppression of the White Man, as snow before a summer sun. Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without a struggle, give up our homes, our country bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit, the graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us? I know you will cry with me, ‘Never! Never!'” ~ Tecumseh
- “Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.” ~ Robert Orben
- “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
-
“Where no one intrudes, many can live in harmony.” ~ Chief Dan George
- “If a man loses anything and goes back and looks carefully for it, he will find it.” ~ Sitting Bull
- “It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we, therefore, yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.” ~ Sitting Bull
- “The way you treat yourself sends a very clear message to others about how they should treat you.” ~ Denise Linn
-
“We are going by you without fighting if you will let us, but we are going by you anyhow!” ~ Chief Joseph
- “To heal will require real effort, and a change of heart, from all of us. To heal means that we will begin to look upon one another with respect and tolerance instead of prejudice, distrust and hatred. We will have to teach our children-as well as ourselves-to love the diversity of humanity….We can do it. Yes, you and I and all of us together. Now is the time. Now is the only possible time. Let the Great Healing begin.” ~ Leonard Peltier , Native American quotes about healing
- “The American Indian is of the soil, whether it be the region of forests, plains, pueblos, or mesas. He fits into the landscape, for the hand that fashioned the continent also fashioned the man for his surroundings. He once grew as naturally as the wild sunflowers, he belongs just as the buffalo belonged.” ~ Luther Standing Bear
- “If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian, he can live in peace. Treat all men alike. Give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The Earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself, and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.” ~ Chief Joseph , Native American quotes about equality
-
“Every human longs for peace and love.” ~ Hiawatha
- “A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” ~ Chief Seattle , Native American quotes about life
- “Things which do not grow and change are dead things.” ~ Louise Erdrich
-
“Every part of the earth is sacred to my people.” ~ Chief Seattle
- “We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit.” ~ Tom Brown, Jr.
- “Listen, or your tongue will make you deaf.” ~ Terri Farley
- “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” ~ Chief Seattle
-
“Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit.” ~ Sitting Bull
- “The old Lakota was wise. He knew that a man’s heart away from nature becomes hard.” ~ Luther Standing Bear
- “Do right always. It will give you satisfaction in life.” ~ Wovoka
- “The old Indian teaching was that it is wrong to tear loose from its place on the earth anything that may be growing there. It may be cut off, but it should not be uprooted. The trees and the grass have spirits. Whatever one of such growth may be destroyed by some good Indian, his act is done in sadness and with a prayer for forgiveness because of his necessities.” ~ Wooden Leg
-
“I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place.” ~ Sitting Bull
- “Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.” ~ Will Rogers
- “I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.” ~ Black Elk
- “I want my people to stay with me here. All the dead men will come to life again. Their spirits will come to their bodies again. We must wait here in the homes of our fathers and be ready to meet them in the bosom of our mother.” ~ Wovoka
-
“Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view and demand that they respect yours.” ~ Tecumseh
- “Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows. Now we are poor but we are free. No white man controls our footsteps. If we must die, we die defending our rights.” ~ Sitting Bull
- “I do not see a delegation for the four-footed. I see no seat for the eagles. We forget and we consider ourselves superior, but we are after all a mere part of the Creation. And we must continue to understand where we are. And we stand between the mountain and the ant, somewhere and there only, as part of the Creation.” ~ Oren Lyons
- “Each man is good in His sight. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.” ~ Sitting Bull
-
“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
- “He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart he put other different desires.” ~ Sitting Bull
- “Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.” ~ Tecumseh
- “When the Earth is sick, the animals will begin to disappear, when that happens, The Warriors of the Rainbow will come to save them.” ~ Chief Seattle
-
“As a child, I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I became civilized.” ~ Charles Alexander Eastman
- “We live, we die, and like the grass and trees, renew ourselves from the soft earth of the grave. Stones crumble and decay, faiths grow old and they are forgotten, but new beliefs are born. The faith of the villages is dust now… but it will grow again… like the trees.” ~ Chief Joseph
- “You have driven me from the East to this place, and I have been here two thousand years or more….My friends, if you took me away from this land it would be very hard for me. I wish to die in this land. I wish to be an old man here….I have not wished to give even a part of it to the Great Father. Though he would give me a million dollars or more I would not give to him this land….When people want to slaughter cattle they drive them along until they get them to a corral, and then they slaughter them. So it was with us….My children have been exterminated; my brother has been killed.” ~ Standing Bear
- “Conversation was never begun at once, nor in a hurried manner. No one was quick with a question, no matter how important, and no one was pressed for an answer. A pause giving time for thought was the truly courteous way of beginning and conducting a conversation. Silence was meaningful with the Lakota, and his granting a space of silence to the speech-maker and his own moment of silence before talking was done in the practice of true politeness and regard for the rule that, “thought comes before speech.”” ~ Luther Standing Bear
-
“I hope the Great Heavenly Father, who will look down upon us, will give all the tribes his blessing, that we may go forth in peace, and live in peace all our days, and that He will look down upon our children and finally lift us far above this earth.” ~ Red Cloud
- “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
- “A wee child toddling in a wonder world, I prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan.” ~ Zitkala-Sa
- “We know our lands have now become more valuable. The white people think we do not know their value; but we know that the land is everlasting, and the few goods we receive for it are soon worn out and gone.” ~ Canasatego
-
“We know our lands have now become more valuable. The white people think we do not know their value, but we know that the land is everlasting, and the few goods we receive for it are soon worn out and gone.” ~ Canasatego
- “Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country?” ~ Sitting Bull
