Tribal Wisdom

For generation after generation, the people who inhabited the North American continent were different in many ways, and the same in others. While not alike in tradition, ceremony, language or lifestyle, they did seem to share a reverence for the earth and all things in nature. Three centuries ago, however, Europeans who arrived in the Americas saw things differently and to the contrary. While American Indians sought to be part of the beauty and wild around them, white cultures saw these same gifts as things to conquer, tame and ultimately own. As Western civilization faces a new millennium reflection on the ways of the world has finally increased and with it has come a realization that perhaps the Indian way of thinking might have been the better path. For thousands of years Indians maintained an ecological and social balance undone in a fraction of the time. For many years their philosophies were not heard because no one was listening.

ANISHINABE
It is less a problem to be poor than to be dishonest.

No one else can represent your conscience.

APACHE

It makes no difference as to the name of the God, since love is the real God of all the world.

Even your silence holds a sort of prayer.
 

ARAPAHO

Before eating, always take a little time to thank the food.

Easy money breeds indolence.

CHEYENNE

An Indian, a partridge and a spruce tree cannot be tamed.

Judge not by the eye but from the heart.

CHIRICAHUA

You must speak straight so that your words may go as sunlight into our hearts.
- Cochise, Chiricahua Chief

COMANCHE

I was born upon the prairie where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, and not within walls.
- Ten Bears, Yamparika Comanche

CREE

Never sit while your elders stand.

The white man who is our agent is so stingy that he carries a linen rag in his pocket into which to blow his nose, for fear he might blow away something of value.
- Piapot, Cree Chief

CREEK

We are afraid if we part with any more of our lands the white people will not let us keep as much as will be sufficient to bury our dead.
- Doublehead, Creek Chief

CROW

Man's law changes with his understanding of man. Only the laws of the spirit remain always the same.

The only things that need the protection of men are the things of men, not the things of the spirit.

DAKOTA

We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.

DELAWARE

Good and evil cannot dwell together in the same heart, so a good man ought not to go into evil company.

When you begin a great work you can't expect to finish it all at once; therefore do you and your brothers press on, and let nothing discourage you until you have entirely finished what you have begun.
- Teedyuscung

HOPI

A lazy man is apt to be envious.

You are never justified in arguing.

Truth does not happen, it just is.

To gossip is like playing checkers with an evil spirit: you win occasionally but are more often trapped at your own game.

One foe is too many and a hundred friends too few.

Trouble follows sin as surely as fever follows chill.

HURON

Let your nature be known and proclaimed.

KIOWA

I love the land and the buffalo and will not part with it... I want the children raised as I was... I don't want to settle. I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when we settle down we grow pale and die.
- Satanta, Kiowa chief