Quotes from John Trudell

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.

Class is material consumed.

When I left politics in the early Eighties and started writing and recording, my idea was that I could have an influence further down into other generations. That Natives could come into the culture through arts and music.

I am just a human being trying to make it in a world that is rapidly losing its understanding of being human.

They took all our land; I don't have any land to toil. My crops have to grow somewhere else.

We're all human beings and we all have feelings. And we all live in this industrial meat grinder where we don't really understand love anymore.

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.

I don't want to tell people how to remember me. I want people to remember me as they remember me.

Don't trust anyone who isn't angry.

My influences in this world have always been Crazy Horse and Malcolm X, my overall influences. But I was influenced by rock n' roll, blues, and country music. I was influenced by singers.

I consider the electric guitar to be like a drum with strings. It became the drum of the Baby Boom generation. And the drum has always been the center of the tribe, a new electronic tribe.

Whatever their reasons, Hollywood, or the entertainment industry, is saying something about Indians. I don't see the rest of the media knocking down any doors to do that.

Before Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had dream of soldiers falling from the sky.

For decades, my identity was political, but I've come to understand that there's no political solution when you're dealing with someone else's rules.

Life is all about the spirit.

From activist stage, I just spoke and said whatever I had to say. When the writing started, I would just read it. Then I had the interest into going into musical aspects. When that happened in '86, I liked the result of work we did in the studio.

I'm not a musician making words to go with my music.

What I view life like is about energy. Everything is about energy - everything. We physically are little units of electrical energy, and we vibrate and project electromagnetic thought.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

I'm basically a starving artist.

It's always good to go home. It's strengthening to see your past and know you have someplace to go where you're part of a people.

White people don't seem to have many Elders. They do have a lot of oldsters.

There have been some positive things that have happened for the tribes, but it's a constant, vigilant fight about protecting what resources we have in terms of land and rights.

I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything.