Indian Education Quotations

[Carlisle Indian School] Indian students at Carlisle Indian School performed physics experiments in this historical photo from the National Archives. Although they were taught Newton's law, they were taught none of their own rich intellectual heritage.

Boarding school educators ate potatoes, corn, tomatoes and beans, but didn't tell students that they were American Indian inventions.

Students were punished for speaking their own languages, at the same time that Indian words such as caucus, chipmunk, coyote, honk, and skunk were considered part of English.

The Quotes Below Speak for Themselves

"And who, down to the lowest idiot, will not think blind and downright malicious those who dare spread this belief and defame so many people, saying Indians need tutors, because they are incapable of organization, when in reality, they have kings and governors, villages, houses and property rights."
Fray Bartolome de Las Casas, Spanish Missionary, 1511

"If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man, he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit. It is not necessary that eagles should be crows."
Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Sioux

"Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit."
Capt. Richard Henry Pratt, founder Carlisle Indian School

"According to the white man, the Indian, choosing to return to his tribal manners and dress, 'goes back to the blanket.' True, but 'going back to the blanket' is the factor that has saved him from, or at least stayed his final destruction. Had the Indian been as completely subdued in spirit as he was in body, he would have perished within the century of his subjection. But it is the unquenchable spirit that has saved him — his clinging to Indian ways, Indian thought and tradition, that has kept him and is keeping him today."
Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Sioux

"This [English] language which is good enough for a white man or a black man ought to be good enough for the red man. It is also believed that teaching an Indian youth in his own barbarous dialect is a positive detriment to him. The impracticability, if not impossibility of civilizing Indians of this country in any other tongue than our own would seem obvious."
U.S. Commissioner on Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner on Indian Affairs, 1887

"If you take the words from a people, it will backfire. They forced all of us to learn English. Now, for the first time in history, Native peoples are united by language. That's permitted us to communicate with one another in such a way that the missionaries and the colonizers may someday come to regret."
Wendy Rose, Hopi and Miwok

"Kill the Indian, Save the Man."
Motto of Carlisle Indian Boarding School founded by Capt. Richard Henry Pratt

"Oh, yes, I went to the white man's schools. I learned to read from school books, newspapers, and the Bible. But in time I found that these were not enough. Civilized people depend too much on man made printed pages. I turn to the Great Spirit's book which is the whole of creation. You can read a big part of that book if you study nature."
Tatanga Mani, Stoney

"They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement…Established in the midst of another and superior race…they must necessarily yield…and ere long disappear."
U.S. President Andrew Jackson, Message of the President to the Two Houses of Congress, 23rd Congress, 1833

"The white people, who are trying to make us over into their image, they want us to be what they call 'assimilated,' bringing the Indians into the mainstream and destroying our own way of life and our own cultural patterns. They believe we should be contented like those whose concept of happiness is materialistic and greedy, which is very different from our way."
John Woodenlegs, Cheyenne

"No State can achieve proper culture, civilization and progress…as long as Indians are permitted to remain."
U.S. President Martin Van Buren

"I remember one evening when we were all lined up in a room and one of the boys said something in Indian to another boy. The man in charge caught him by the shirt and threw him across the room. Later we found out that his collar bone was broken. The boy's father, an old warrior, came to the school. He told the instructor that among his people, children were never punished by striking them."
Lone Wolf, Blackfeet

"The only chance of saving any of this race, will be by taking their children, at a very early age, and educating them in our habits, in a situation removed from the contagion of Indian pursuits."
William Tudor in Letters on the Eastern States

"We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught at those colleges, and that the Maintenance of our young Men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced, that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But you, who are wise must know that different Nations have different Conceptions of things and you will therefore not take it amiss, if our Ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some Experience of it…

"We are, however, not the less oblig'd by your kind Offer, tho' we decline accepting it; and, to show our grateful Sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them."
Canasatego, Iroquois, on turning down an the offer of the commissioners of Maryland and Virginia to educate Iroquois young men at William and Mary in 1744.

"You certainly must discover that the United States do not wish to injure you, but, on the contrary, that they wish to make you a people like themselves."
U.S. Commissioner on Indian Affairs, American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Vol.VII

"How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right."
Black Hawk, Sauk

"I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other."
Mark Twain, 1867

"They told us that Indian ways were bad. They said we must get civilized. I remember that word too. It means 'be like the white man…'We all wore white man's clothes and ate white man's food and went to white man's churches and spoke white man's talk. And so after a while we also began to say Indians were bad. We laughed at our own people and their blankets and cooking pots and sacred societies and dances…"
Sun Elk, Taos

"American Indian and Alaska Native students are considered the most at-risk for failing to complete high school and college…Whatever the reasons for leaving school, dropout rates are symptomatic of the failure of an educational system that refuses to accept cultural differences as a strength rather than a weakness."

Mc Dowell Report, 2001

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Learn more about the intellectual genius of Indigenous people throughout the pre-contact Americas. The Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Invention and Innovation, details over 450 examples from the Abacus to Zucchini. It is co-authored by Emory Dean Keoke, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and Kay Marie Porterfield, a former instructor at Oglala Lakota College.