Native American Quotes

These illustrated quotes by Native Americans are available as posters or art prints at AllPosters.com. Most quotations can be purchased unframed, mounted, or framed.
 

Native American Quotes
Sitting Bull "What treaty have the white man ever made with us that they have kept? Not one. When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?....What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my father lived; because I would die for my people and my country?" - Sitting Bull	Chief Seattle "Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch." - Chief Seattle, 1854	Red Cloud "We were told that they [federal troops] wished merely to pass through our country... to seek for gold in the far west... Yet before the ashes of the council fire are cold, the Great Father is building his forts among us. You have heard the sound of the white soldier's axe upon the Little Piney. His presence here is... an insult to the spirits of our ancestors. Are we then to give up their sacred graves to be plowed for corn? Dakotas, I am for war." - Red Cloud, 1866	Chief Joseph "Our Chiefs are killed... The old men are all dead.... The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are - perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my Chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever." - Chief Joseph, 1877	Chief Joseph "Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, 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..." - Chief Joseph, 1879
Geronimo "[Arizona] is my land, my home, my father's land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among those mountains. If this could be I might die in peace, feeling that my people, placed in their native homes, would increase in numbers, rather than diminish as at present, and that our name would not become extinct." - from Geronimo's autobiography, 1906