John Trudell Quotations

When I left politics in the early Eighties and started writing and recording, my idea was that I could have an influence further down into other generations. That Natives could come into the culture through arts and music.

My influences in this world have always been Crazy Horse and Malcolm X, my overall influences. But I was influenced by rock n' roll, blues, and country music. I was influenced by singers.

One Earth, one mother - one does not sell the Earth.

I have experienced within my own lifetime the attack of my winter camp and the killing of the women and children. It left me even angrier than I was - and I was never too calm to begin with.

I am just a human being trying to make it in a world that is rapidly losing its understanding of being human.

Because we are all of an oral tradition in our beginning histories, the voice of the poet in this particular society will be heard.

I'm a member of the American Indian Movement, and I'm from the indigenous nations of the Western Hemisphere.

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.

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.

From activist stage, I just spoke and said whatever I had to say. When the writing started, I would just read it. Then I had the interest into going into musical aspects. When that happened in '86, I liked the result of work we did in the studio.

For us, it's a matter of just staying alive and getting the best deal we can now. Eventually, this will all straighten out. It may be two generations away or 10 generations away, but time is irrelevant in that sense. As long as we, as a people, stay alive, we will survive.

Whatever their reasons, Hollywood, or the entertainment industry, is saying something about Indians. I don't see the rest of the media knocking down any doors to do that.

I was going mad. One day, I just started writing, and it was like therapy because I was in a position where I couldn't rage. I never expected to be a writer; it's a different world than I ever expected to be in.

I wasn't interested in having to live with a camera - I have a hard enough time getting along with myself. I don't need cameras around and all that action.

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

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.

There have been some positive things that have happened for the tribes, but it's a constant, vigilant fight about protecting what resources we have in terms of land and rights.

What I view life like is about energy. Everything is about energy - everything. We physically are little units of electrical energy, and we vibrate and project electromagnetic thought.

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.

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.

Everybody interprets things differently with their own perception, and I want poetry to pull out of them their own feelings.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

The whole point is to take from our native culture and from contemporary culture without using one art form to mimic the other, so that our native identity remains the native identity, the contemporary identity remains the contemporary identity, and the mixing of these two musical identities creates a third musical identity.

They took all our land; I don't have any land to toil. My crops have to grow somewhere else.

All politics to me - Indian or white - is an illusion preventing us from being authentic because we're communicating through something that isn't real to us.

For decades, my identity was political, but I've come to understand that there's no political solution when you're dealing with someone else's rules.

It's always good to go home. It's strengthening to see your past and know you have someplace to go where you're part of a people.

The average human being in America is going through some sort of hard times - physical, emotional, psychological. Everybody's carrying a bit of bone days in them.

I wanted to take the power of thought and the word, along with the power of speaking and heart, and see if we could wire what was coming out of us as humans with electric instruments.

In a personal context, I'm not in the ground, and I'm not in an institution. So I guess I'm doing pretty good.

I'm not a musician making words to go with my music.

I knew I had to stop running. I had to be in a place. Los Angeles became that place.

Before Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had dream of soldiers falling from the sky.

I appreciate all of your expressions of concern, and I appreciate all of your expressions of love. It has been like a fire to my heart.

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

I consider the electric guitar to be like a drum with strings. It became the drum of the Baby Boom generation. And the drum has always been the center of the tribe, a new electronic tribe.

I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything. Or these lines will come into my head and I'll write 'em down in a little book, just little sets of lines, but I won't try to make stories or poems out of them. I'm doing a lot of that now, just the lines.

We use our intelligence, our creative intelligence, because we create with intelligence.

In the society of illusion, reality must manifest itself. The story songs of Joel Rafael are that manifestation... the essence of minstrel.

As human beings, we're given intelligence. This is how we make our way through this reality, how we manifest our reality clearly and coherently.

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.

Class is material consumed.

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.

They’re called poems but in reality they’re lines given to me to hang on to

The strength of the poetry as we enter into whatever it is we are entering into, will be determined by the clarity of the thinking we put into it.

Because you look at it, you know, and there's basically one set of rules that protect that industrial ruling class. That's what the governments do, that's what the religions do. They protect the interests of that industrial ruling class.

As human beings we're living in a reality of industrial madness.

The past is more than a memory.

It’s like there is this predator energy on this planet, and this predator energy feeds on the essence of the spirit.

I think that if the political and social movement groups and organizations that operate in this country today had the same kind of energetic commitment that the medical marijuana people have, many things could change in this country.

Sometimes when it rains, it's not that simple, when the sky has reasons to cry.

I've gone through most of my life not believing anything. Either I know or I don't know, or I think.

We're all human beings and we all have feelings. And we all live in this industrial meat grinder where we don't really understand love anymore.

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

The thing is, it has to do with heart - we have to understand what hearts are for before we can get back to heaven or paradise or the power in our minds.

I think we live in an industrial dimensional reality where we're programmed to believe what we're told. We're programmed to believe them. We're programmed to believe what that ruling class wants us to believe.

Everything that has ever happened to us is there to make us stronger.

I think it's the responsibility of every human being, not just those who wear the identity of poet, activist, voter, religious person... it's the responsibility of every person. Our responsibility is to use our intelligence as clearly and coherently as we possibly can.

Our bones, flesh and blood are made up of the metals, liquids and minerals of the earth and everything on this planet is made up of the same things. As humans we have being, so everything on the earth does too in our culture, because we are made of the same thing.

Believing isn't thinking, but we've been programmed to believe that believing is thinking. To use our intelligence to think means we're keeping the energy active, we're thinking, we're really using the power of our intelligence in a thinking way. But when we've been programmed to believe, we're no longer thinking, because energy flows.

When we're believing, we're not really thinking, because the belief has walls: "This is what I believe." So what I believe is like a box, and we're taking the energy of our thinking and putting into a box of beliefs, pretending that we're thinking. But we're really stifling our own energy. We create these mental stresses and frustrations, because we're blocking our spirit, so to speak.

Don't trust anyone who isn't angry.

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.

We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off.

Protect your spirit, because you are in the place where spirits get eaten.

I'm just a human being trying to make it in a world that is very rapidly losing it's understanding of being human.

Every human being is a raindrop. And when enough of the raindrops become clear and coherent they then become the power of the storm.

We have power... Our power isn’t in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems... they have power... but it’s not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings.

Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. Its five hundred years later and they still cant see us. We are still invisible.

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.

All that I am is me. So I'm not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist; I'm me, and these are things that I do.