John Trudell People Quotations

When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.

I find there is room in music to talk with music. It may expand ways people can participate with music. It doesn't sound hokey or like some kind of voice-over.

I've never not been pleased with one of my albums. I figure because it's spoken word, there will be people who relate to it, and people who don't, so I don't worry about any of that. I've been doing it for over twenty years. I've always written because it was something I had to do, never for the glory.

A lot of my writing is basically about observation, and things that I've seen, either through personal experiences or the experiences of people around me, or society at large.

When I go around in America and I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed; they feel powerless [. . .] and we understand the psychological genocide that they have already inflicted upon their own people

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.

I have a real interest in working with younger Native artists. I think it's a very important way for Native people to communicate the realities of our culture and remember our ancestors.

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.

We cannot change the political system, we cannot change the economic system, we cannot change the social system, until the people control the land, and then we take it out of the hands of that sick minority that chooses to pervert the meaning and the intention of humanity.

I don't want to tell people how to remember me. I want people to remember me as they remember me.

White people don't seem to have many Elders. They do have a lot of oldsters.