“Protect your spirit, because you are in the place where spirits get eaten.”
“The great lie is that it is civilization. It’s not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That’s the great lie, is that it represents civilization. That’s the great lie. Or, if it does represent civilization, and that’s truly what civilization is, then the great lie is that civilization is good for us.” – Spoken Word Tour Interview, 1994.
“The Great White Father? That dude’s dead.”
“Alcatraz was nineteen months of temporariness. Indians are used to temporariness. We are always permanently nowhere and temporarily somewhere.”
“To win through violence, you have to be more violent and more aggressive than those you oppose. So how do you win? You become the new them.”
“We just want to be us. That’s all there is to it.”
“I started out idealistic. I believed. But I got past that pretty quick with the lies and violence and brutality and character assassination every step of the way when all we were saying was, ‘Hey, we’re human beings, and we want to be treated that way.'”
“They lie to you. They confuse you. They told you that you had freedom and democracy. But 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.”
“It’s hard, sometimes, to get people to listen to what we’re saying because when we say what we say, we have to criticize the government.”
“They went after our culture. It was genocide and they wanted to erase every cultural perception of reality that we had.”
“There’s no place on Earth that the Indian could lead the life of his choosing today. But oppressors and money are transient things. They come and go. The land is forever. As long as there is land, we will never give up.”
“Peltier is a victim of the Energy Corporations land grab of Indian Peoples lands. The FBI is acting as no more than a private army for the corporate state. We look at the trials as based on racism rather than truth and we know America has not ended its war against the Indian People. We look at inflation, recession, racism, class separation, sexism, and ageism, in the name of democracy and freedom, and we see a death of the human spirit while the corporations maximize their profits. Leonard Peltier is not the criminal, nor is he the enemy. He is a victim.”
“This is some day when they arrest Indians for trespassing.”
“We don’t hate white people. We’ll never fight a man because he’s white. We’ll fight him because he’s the enemy. We want them to accept the truth of what the American system has done to the non-white people.”
“We want it known that we will no longer wait for their revelations. We have some revelations of our own for the church. We have peace within ourselves and love for our people.”
“Asking native people to celebrate Columbus Day is like asking people of the U.S. to celebrate Osama bin Laden day.”
“My poetry was born out of the rage of losing my family, but also out of pain, clarity and confusion. My whole life experience, when bad things happen, poetry exploded out of me. I’ve been told that people perceive anger in my work. I don’t have a problem with anger. Fear and courage are part of the natural process. I didn’t discover my poetic gift. It discovered me.”