John Trudell

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.