John Trudell

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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'm basically a starving artist.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Life is all about the spirit.”

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

“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.”