“Had North America been a wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived.They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, and other crops domesticated over centuries, took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs.”
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

“I surveyed the country that had cost us so much trouble, anxiety and blood, and that now caused me to be a prisoner of war. I reflected upon the ingratitude of the whites when I saw their fine houses, rich harvests and everything desirable around them; and
recollected that all this land had been ours, for which I and my people had never received a dollar, and that the whites were not satisfied until they took our village and our graveyards from us and removed us
across the Mississippi.”
- Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak (Black Hawk)

“There's a type of despair that is unique to those who are exiled on their own lands. When you are taken from your home and transported to a different place you can hold the dream of home in your heart. But, when your home is taken and you are hunted and killed on your own land, there is no home for you to dream about.”
- Sherri Mitchell Weh'na Ha'mu Kwasset

“I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered.”
- Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks