Top 25 Indigenous People Quotes

If I meet someone who’s Native American and I don’t know anything about indigenous people in New Jersey – which I kind of don’t, which is not really good – I can learn more and more about their lives, and that makes me a more open person and a more accepting person.

We are seeing healing among the stolen generations, and initiatives which are enabling Indigenous people to make their distinctive contribution to our national life.

You either keep the forest standing, which takes jobs away from indigenous people who need to feed themselves, or you cut down the trees, which affects the climate. In the long term, you have to protect the forest.

Americans don’t want immigration. They don’t want any more. Why can’t we have a home? You see on ‘National Geographic,’ ‘Oh, the indigenous people, they have a home.’ Everyone else can have a home. We are the only people on Earth not allowed to have a home.

I was shocked when I moved to Sydney how very few indigenous people I came across. And so when I go to places like Maroubra or Redfern or Waterloo or Erskineville, I feel more at home because of the people I’m around – anywhere I can see a face that reflects someone that looks like my family, I feel much more at home.

The truth is nobody can own anything. That was an unheard-of concept among indigenous people. We invented that.

I support the indigenous people anywhere in the planet.

I think the relationship of indigenous people to their environment… that those were ethical omnivores.

Here in Canada, the people who oppose the tar sands most forcefully are Indigenous people living downstream from the tar sands. They are not opposing it because of climate change – they are opposing it because it poisons their bodies.

All definitions of wilderness that exclude people seem to me to be false. African ‘wilderness’ areas are racist because indigenous people are being cleared out of them so white people can go on holiday there.

In everything I’ve done, I’ve always tried to make room for indigenous people, to include them.

There are people all over Australia who use their homes as hubs that they travel from, and they encourage their indigenous people to continue to stay there.

There are many, many different kinds of intersectional exclusions – not just black women but other women of color. Not just people of color, but people with disabilities. Immigrants. LGBTQ people. Indigenous people.

Yet there are thousands of Indigenous people searching for family members.

Pergamon, a prosperous city in western Anatolia, was fabled to have been founded by Hercules’ son. Like many Hellenistic cities populated by Greeks who intermarried with indigenous people, Pergamon after Alexander the Great’s death (323 B.C.) had evolved a hybrid of democracy and Persian-influenced monarchy.

It seems to be the modern Canadian approach to Indigenous people: rather than deny their problems or accuse them of creating them through their own laziness, which was how my parents’ generation dealt with the question, we now smother them with humid apologies and abnegation, but not actual compensation.

There are certain regions in the country where the indigenous people eat dogs.

What we do to our native Australians, our own indigenous people, is nothing short of horrific.

We are lagging far behind comparable countries in overcoming the disadvantages Indigenous people face.

I’d like to talk about free markets. Information in the computer age is the last genuine free market left on earth except those free markets where indigenous people are still surviving. And that’s basically becoming limited.

The presidents and the founding fathers and all of the people we sort of raise up as false idols, we don’t wrestle with the fact that many of these were brilliant men, but they were also men with deep prejudices against people of color, against indigenous people, against women.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be one of the indigenous people of the United States of America. I can’t imagine watching the news every day – as people debate whose country this is and who should be in charge of it and how to make it great again – and hardly ever see your people brought into the discussion.

Why is it that we ask the question about whether or not Indigenous people should have clean drinking water? We’ve got to take a minute and think why is that even a question. Yes, they deserve clean drinking water.

Quibbling over the definition of genocide does nothing but help obscure the long history of vicious racism and undeniable suffering of Indigenous people in this country. It’s bad enough whatever you want to call it.

Indigenous people all over the world take quite a lot of trouble with their hair and their clothes.