Quotes from John Trudell

Because we are all of an oral tradition in our beginning histories, the voice of the poet in this particular society will be heard.

I wasn't interested in having to live with a camera - I have a hard enough time getting along with myself. I don't need cameras around and all that action.

Every human being is a raindrop. And when enough of the raindrops become clear and coherent they then become the power of the storm.

The thing is, it has to do with heart - we have to understand what hearts are for before we can get back to heaven or paradise or the power in our minds.

We cannot change the political system, we cannot change the economic system, we cannot change the social system, until the people control the land, and then we take it out of the hands of that sick minority that chooses to pervert the meaning and the intention of humanity.

All that I am is me. So I'm not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist; I'm me, and these are things that I do.

For us, it's a matter of just staying alive and getting the best deal we can now. Eventually, this will all straighten out. It may be two generations away or 10 generations away, but time is irrelevant in that sense. As long as we, as a people, stay alive, we will survive.

As human beings, we're given intelligence. This is how we make our way through this reality, how we manifest our reality clearly and coherently.

There are a lot of people who want to give orders and be bossy that don't deserve respect.

I'm just a human being trying to make it in a world that is very rapidly losing it's understanding of being human.

I've gone through most of my life not believing anything. Either I know or I don't know, or I think.

I'm a member of the American Indian Movement, and I'm from the indigenous nations of the Western Hemisphere.

In a personal context, I'm not in the ground, and I'm not in an institution. So I guess I'm doing pretty good.

All politics to me - Indian or white - is an illusion preventing us from being authentic because we're communicating through something that isn't real to us.

I appreciate all of your expressions of concern, and I appreciate all of your expressions of love. It has been like a fire to my heart.

When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.

A lot of my writing is basically about observation, and things that I've seen, either through personal experiences or the experiences of people around me, or society at large.

You go back and you read your Constitution. You read your Declaration of Independence. And you will see that the only people who could decide these freedoms were white males who owned property, and all the rest of us were excluded.

The strength of the poetry as we enter into whatever it is we are entering into, will be determined by the clarity of the thinking we put into it.

The average human being in America is going through some sort of hard times - physical, emotional, psychological. Everybody's carrying a bit of bone days in them.

Everybody interprets things differently with their own perception, and I want poetry to pull out of them their own feelings.

I wanted to take the power of thought and the word, along with the power of speaking and heart, and see if we could wire what was coming out of us as humans with electric instruments.

I have experienced within my own lifetime the attack of my winter camp and the killing of the women and children. It left me even angrier than I was - and I was never too calm to begin with.

I was going mad. One day, I just started writing, and it was like therapy because I was in a position where I couldn't rage. I never expected to be a writer; it's a different world than I ever expected to be in.