John Trudell Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Life is all about the spirit.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.