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Quotes About Indians

Early farming villages worldwide were much less authoritarian places than later societies. But the Indians of the eastern seaboard institutionalized their liberty to an unusual extent—the Haudenosaunee especially, but many others, too.
~ Charles C. Mann
I'm just happy the city has something to be proud of. The Cavs, the Indians, the Monsters. It just shows that we are the land of champions.
~ Stipe Miocic
There were no mail-order catalogues in 1492. Marco Polo's journal was the wish book of Renaissance Europe. Then, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in Sears' basement. Despite all the Indians on the escalator, Columbus' visit came to be known as a discovery.
~ Tom Robbins
It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping. Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets. It weeps for the black people who think like white people. It weeps for the Indians who think like settlers. It weeps for the children who think like adults. It weeps for the free who think like prisoners. Most of all, it weeps for the cowgirls who think like cowboys.
~ Tom Robbins
Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for making poetry is the same as the verb to breathe. Such tidbits of ethnic lore delighted Amanda, and she vowed from that time onward she would try to regulate each breath as if she were composing a poem.
~ Tom Robbins
We Indians know about silence," he said. "We aren't afraid of it. In fact, to us it is more powerful than words.
~ Kent Nerburn
The spy also warned his monarch that the English would set about converting the Indians not to the Roman Catholic faith, but to the hated Protestant faith. "The preparations they are making here are the most urgent they know how to make, for they have seen to it that the ministers, in their sermons, stress the importance of filling the world with their religion.… In this way a good sum of money is being collected.
~ Kieran Doherty
The little satellite settlement was in disarray, with no discipline, no rule other than every man for himself. West himself, the putative leader of the settlement, was gone, searching for gold. The situation was so bad that Smith was unable to smooth relations between the colonists and the Indians,
~ Kieran Doherty
Eventually settlers grew to be like the Indians themselves, she remarked. Westerners such as her family, she said, were "frontiersmen," so accustomed to an unrelenting succession of wilderness hazards that it "made us … apathetic. I can't get the right word for it. Indians were like that you know and they lived under nearly the same conditions."51 Those conditions determined the attitude, she seemed to be saying, not culture or color of skin.
~ Caroline Fraser
Chad is a slim blond boy with a strange witch-doctor face that goes with his interest in anthropology and prehistory Indians, His nose beaks softly and almost creamily under a golden flare of hair; he has the beauty and grace of a Western hotshot who's danced in roadhouses and played a little football. A quavering twang comes out when he speaks.
~ Jack Kerouac
What a thing, Europe. Europe! The cultured Europe! We are the barbarians, the Indians, the blacks, the southerners. How cynical is Europe. Chavez the tyrant! Chavez the strongman! Chavez, who wants to stay forever. While there, they have kings, my friend!
~ Hugo Chavez
The last word about the Little Bighorn belongs to perhaps Custer's most insightful chronicler, Robert Utley. "The simplest answer, usually overlooked, is that the army lost largely because the Indians won," he writes. "To ascribe defeat entirely to military failings is to devalue Indian strength and leadership." The invasion of the Black Hills and the order to abandon the unceded lands galvanized the Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes.
~ T.J. Stiles
For decades, the Left has occupied a special place in the minds of educated Indians - outside of the two states (Bengal and Kerala) where it has a political presence and is therefore treated like any other political party.
~ Barkha Dutt
I'm always for the Indian in the cowboy movie. Always.
~ Johnny Depp
The first encounter was when the Vikings came across 10 Indians taking naps under their overturned canoes - and the Vikings killed them. That did not set up a very good mutual relationship.
~ Russell Freedman
Indians are sometimes accused of being condescending toward Westerners and of being excessively preachy in their attitude toward other nations. That accusation is sometimes correct.
~ Gary Weiss
Back in the buffalo days, the Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine had seen a vision of men with hair on their faces who would come bringing a white sand that was poison to Indians. The prophecy had come true, the white sand was sugar, and Adeline blamed the white man for poisoning her right up to two hundred pounds.
~ Christopher Moore
Juet's journal frequently records how only a tiny quantity of alcohol was needed to get the Indians drunk, 'for they could not take it'; and tales of the drunkenness that greeted Hudsons' arrival persisted among the native Indians until the last century. Indeed Heckewelder claims that the name Manhattan is derived from the drunkenness that took place there, since the Indian word 'manahactanienk' means 'the island of general intoxication'.
~ Giles Milton
It was the year in which the two races approached a state of equilibrium: the Indians still owned the land and still controlled it, the buffalo were plentiful, and white soldiers had not yet begun to shoot at Indians they were fearful of, and peace was still possible.
~ James A. Michener
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors
~ James Baldwin
You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish
~ James Baldwin
Many people compare the agitation of MNS with Shiv Sena because of the mode of agitation. But the main difference is that while Shiv Sena launched an agitation for the poor Marathi unemployed youth, the agitation of MNS is directed against the 'goondaism' of North Indians.
~ Raj Thackeray
I am aware that in presenting myself as the advocate of the Indians and their rights, I shall stand very much alone.
~ Sam Houston
Do you think we care about the feelings of Native Americans when we celebrate Columbus Day? That's the day that the white man discovered a land where Indians had been living for a few thousand years.
~ Carlos Mencia