I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?

Jesmyn Ward

Through the years, I found we had Native American blood in us. My great-grandmother came from the island of Martinique, and they hooked up with the Native Americans of Louisiana.

Aaron Neville

Great Art Years

People tend to forget that in our country, we'd pretty much all be immigrants, except for the Native Americans.

Amy Bloom

UN Try Tend

I've always been interested in the history of the West, our country and particularly as it relates to the Native Americans - the original Americans.

Beau Bridges

History Art West

Second, this epic tale allows the audience to actually listen to the Native Americans and receive their wisdom. Spielberg conveys the respect for Native Americans that is normally lacking in Western films.

Beau Bridges

Wisdom Respect Western

I love Caribbean food. It's a great melting pot of so many cultures including the Native Americans.

Bob Greene

Love Great Food

While they trace their history back to wars that helped to ethnically cleanse Native Americans and to their exploits in the Civil War fighting for the South, the modern-day Rangers were created to help rejuvenate a defeated and demoralized U.S. imperialism after the war in Vietnam.

Brendan Sexton III

War History Anger

I remember hearing stories from my mother and father about their parents and grandparents when they were taken off the reservation, taken to the boarding schools, and pretty much taught to be ashamed of who they were as Native Americans. You can feel that impact today.

Chaske Spencer

You Who Were

For many Native Americans across the land, the name of the Washington football team is a deeply personal reminder of a legacy of racism and generations of pain.

Dan Maffei

Washington Washing Wash

When I was a kid, I really loved Indians. Native Americans. Pardon. Me.

Dave Attell

Love T Rican

The public, the whites - not just in Oklahoma, but across the United States - were transfixed by the Osage wealth which belied images of Native Americans that could be traced back to the first brutal contact with whites.

David Grann

Age Wit Whites

American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent's goal; but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.

David Mamet

War Age Westward

Immigrants and Native Americans have made our country what it is today, and if we've learned anything through these hundreds of years - it should be that we can accomplish more when we work together.

Deb Haaland

Work Years Year

If anyone can say 'go back,' it's Native Americans. My Pueblo ancestors, despite being targeted at every juncture - despite facing famine and drought - still inhabit this country today. But indigenous people aren't asking anyone to go back to where they came from.

Deb Haaland

Where Very Us

In New Mexico, we're very lucky that we have laws in place that really help ensure that Native Americans' right to vote is unencumbered.

Deb Haaland

Vote Very UN

I believe Native Americans, women, and all of us deserve representation, and that we all need to fight with everything we have to make it so.

Deb Haaland

Women Men Wit

I spent my 20s earning minimum wage decorating cakes for a living. But one day, I looked in the mirror and realized I wanted more, for me and my people. I saw too many Native Americans struggling, and I realized we should have a voice in who our elected officials are.

Deb Haaland

Age Who Wanted

So the American government lied to the Native Americans for many, many years, and then President Clinton lied about a relationship, and everyone was surprised! A little naive, I feel!

Eddie Izzard

Relationship Men Government

It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.

Eric Hoffer

Love To Love T

In Texas, the rangers were established on an ad hoc basis in the 1820s to protect the settlers making inroads into Spanish borderlands. Soon, Mexicans and Mexican Americans replaced Native Americans as the prime target of ranger repression.

Greg Grandin

Anger Were Texas

At issue when professional sports teams take the name of Native Americans is the problem of mimicry: having appropriated the land and wealth of America's vanquished peoples, settler culture then appropriates the supposed values and spirit of the vanquished as well.

Greg Grandin

Sports Well Wealth

America is made up of people who came from someplace else. Even the Native Americans came over the Bering strait... America is what it is because people came from someplace else.

Isabel Wilkerson

All Americans are either immigrants or descendants of ancestors who came from somewhere else, including Native Americans. We should all respect and admire immigrants.

Jan C. Ting

It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.

Jared Diamond

Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands.

Jared Diamond

I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?

Jesmyn Ward

In my own view, the life expectancy of Native Americans in the United States is one of the really great moral crises that we face.

Jim Yong Kim

Native Americans are the original inhabitants of the land that now constitutes the United States. They have helped develop the fundamental principles of freedom of speech and separation of powers that form the foundation of the United States Government.

Joe Baca

The name 'reservation' has a negative connotation among Native Americans - an intern camp of sorts.

John Russell

Native Americans' families experience living surrounded, living in increasingly small reservations surrounded by the society that destroyed their civilization, and are still stigmatized. For decades and decades, for hundreds of years except in Indian schools, they weren't allowed to speak their language. That stigma takes a terrible toll.

Joshua Oppenheimer

The one thing about Lumbee people is that there's so many stereotypes about Native Americans, especially reservation Native Americans, and we all tend to get lumped under that umbrella. But the Lumbee are non-reservation. I grew up no different than anybody would in normal American communities.

Kelvin Sampson

One of the first things people think of when they think of Native Americans is reservations. We didn't have any idea what that was. We were just young kids growing up in normal blue-collar America.

Kelvin Sampson

My father when I was a kid was so deeply involved with Native Americans, he used to bring home these extraordinary headdresses and pipes.

Kerry Kennedy

Native Americans have faced centuries of atrocities to their people, their land, and their culture - all under various presidents who took an oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Markwayne Mullin

As a Cherokee, I can attest to the fact that Native Americans have been on the losing side of history. Our rights have been infringed upon, our treaties have been broken, our culture has been stolen, and our tribes have been decimated at the hands of our own United States government.

Markwayne Mullin

America is - and will always be - a success story. We have African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and members of other ethnic groups elected to positions inside our governments.

Markwayne Mullin

But my father also supported human rights, freedom and self-determination for all people, including Latino agricultural workers, Native Americans, and the millions of impoverished white men and women who were treated as second-class citizens.

Martin Luther King III

The typical Western is kind of a good-guy/bad-guy thing, and that's great, but initially when I heard about 'Into the West,' and what I love about it is it delves into both sides of our cultural past, and it puts more of a human face on the Native Americans.

Matthew Settle

I always see America as really belonging to the Native Americans. Even though I'm American, I still feel like a visitor in my own country.

Nicolas Cage

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

Philipp Meyer

To put it simply, as a black man, I started watching films at the age of six, and I've since seen the bad guys changing race - between the African savages, to the Native Americans, and then the blacks and the Arabs and the Chinese and the Vietnamese. Look at 'Rambo': it's exactly that.

Raoul Peck

Edward Curtis was a photographer in the late 19th century who tried to document the rapidly disappearing Native Americans. He assembled a canon of work which, today, is exemplary and invaluable.

Rhys Ifans

The home ownership process for Native Americans has been hobbled by bureaucratic delays and regulations.

Rick Renzi

Arizona faces unique healthcare challenges including uncompensated care for illegal immigrants, and the large number of Native Americans who live in remote and isolated areas of the state.

Rick Renzi

I represent more Native Americans than anyone else in Congress.

Rick Renzi

Here, we tell the story: why the people came here, what they did when they got here, going back to the Native Americans and coming all the way forward.

Robert Patterson

I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry.

Ron Eglash

Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans.

Russell Means

One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.

Sebastian Junger

For far too long, the voices of Native Americans have been woefully underrepresented in Congress.

Sharice Davids

Especially for blacks, but also for many Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans, group identity is now shaped more by a liberal politics in which past victimization is deferred to, and for which redress is sought with preferential treatment, than by a unified culture.

Shelby Steele