“There’s a romanticism in the glory to the Little Bighorn. We defeated Custer and all this and that, at that emotional level. But you know, within 15 years our leader Crazy Horse was dead. Sitting Bull was dead. You know, and we were herded up.”
“Who was Crazy Horse? Not who was Crazy Horse, who is Crazy Horse. Who he is is he’s an idea. He’s an embodiment of the human spirit. He’s an embodiment of what can be done when you’re centered and balanced within yourself as a human being. When you have a relationship to the spiritual reality that you are a part of. See to me, he’s an embodiment of that.”
“See when they got off the boat they didn’t recognize us. They said who are you? And we said we’re the People, we’re the human beings. And they said oh Indians, cause they didn’t recognize what it meant to be a human being.”
“I’m a human being. This is the name of my tribe. This is the name of my People, But I’m a human being. But then the predatory mentality shows up and starts calling us Indians and commiting genocide against us as a vehicle of erasing the memory of being a human being.”
“So they used war, textbooks, history books, and when film came along they used film.”
“You go in our own communities, how many of us are fighting to protect our identity of being an Indian? And 600 years ago that word Indian, that sound was never made in this hemisphere. That sound, that noise was never ever made. Ever. And we’re trying to protect that as an identity. See, so it affects all of us. It’s reached a point, evolutionarily speaking, we’re starting to not recognize ourselves as human beings. We’re too busy trying to protect the idea of a Native American or an Indian. But we’re not Indians and we’re not Native Americans. We’re older than both concepts. We’re the People, we’re the human beings.”
[Regarding hippies in the ‘60s] “They were in a way trying to imitate us, but in another way they were trying to remember who they were. Every human being is the descendant of a tribe. So these white people, they’re the descendents of tribes. There was a time in their ancestry when they wore feathers alright, and they wore beads, and shells. There was a time in their ancestry, alright, before this colonizing mentality came and did to them, to turn them into the white people they are, and then it came and did it to us. The very same thing that happened to us happened to them.”
“From the time I went to Alcatraz, I had been out of the non-Native world for six years trying to find a place and there was just no place that really, that I felt like I fit. That’s when Alcatraz happened.”
“The main accomplishment is that it rekindled the spirit of the People. The spirit that is the People. It was diminishing. Because Indians were ashamed. Because just the hostility of the non-native communities around native communities, and in it’s own way the hostility of the media through the film, cause these are subtle hostilities if they’re not blatant hostilities. So something was diminishing the spirit and I think that this activist period of time rekindled the spirit.”
“The American government fought a war against us. From the tanks that they used at Wounded Knee, to the way they used the FBI as paramilitary and national guards. We were fighting for our lives. Our death casualty went quite high.”
“He was the key that brought that warmth and authenticity of who native people really are because he had that sense of humor. See, one of things that I think is a very vital part in our community, what has kept us alive is humor. Our ability to laugh at just, ya know it gets ugly sometimes and our ability to laugh at the ugly. Humor is the thread we weave our lives around as native people because the humor has saved us. The great spirit and humor. That’s what saved us.” – On Chief Dan George
“It’s a story about a white guy. And Indians are the T&A. But it gets promoted as being about native people or Indians, but it’s not really. We’re just backdrop.” – On Dances with Wolves
“The Government wiped out the political movement by the eighties. What is emerging out of that is a cultural, artistic, voice. And I see it coming. There’s more native filmmakers, songwriters and so out of all that native creativity that’s coming out. See we will find our voice.” ~