Even as a young man, John Trudell carried such power when he spoke that the FBI began keeping a file on him. One of the memos reported: “He’s extremely eloquent, therefore extremely dangerous.”  

As the 60s turned into the 70s and 80s, his FBI file grew to be 17,000 pages long, making him one of the most closely watched Native American activists of his generation. 

He was a member of the American Indian Movement, an organizer of the Indigenous take-over of Alcatraz Island, and a truth-sayer whose words warned us of the industrial ruler class and the great lie about civilization. 

Native American activist and spoken word artist John Trudell died at the age of 69 on this day ten years ago. I fear not enough people, especially non-Native people, know who he is, or how his speeches today feel more urgent than decades ago. Once I started digging through old YouTube videos, I found an amazing legacy. Here are a few quotes:

“We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off.”

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As human beings we’re living in a reality of industrial madness.”

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“We’re faced with a very serious situation in this generation. There are insane people who wish to rule the world. They wish to continue to rule the world on violence and repression, and we are all the victims of that violence and repression. We as the indigenous people of the Western hemisphere have been resisting this oppression for 500 years. We know that the black people have been resisting it for at least that long. And we know that the white people have had to endure it thousands of years.”

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“Protect your spirit, because you are in the place where spirits get eaten.”

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"The great lie is that it is civilization. It's not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That's the great lie—is that it represents civilization. Or if it does represent civilization, and that is truly what civilization is, then the Great Lie is that civilization is good for us."

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

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“When I go around in America and I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed; they feel powerless…and we understand the psychological genocide that they have already inflicted upon their own people.” 

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“I think we live in an industrial dimensional reality where we’re programmed to believe what we’re told. We’re programmed to believe them. We’re programmed to believe what that ruling class want us to believe.”

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"When Columbus got off the boat, he asked us who we were. We said we’re the Human Beings, we’re the People. Conceptually the Europeans didn’t understand that, it was beyond their conceptual reality. They didn’t see us. They couldn’t see who we were.

***

Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. It’s five hundred years later and they still can’t see us. We are still invisible.”

Notes:

John Trudell was also an amazing spoken word artist and songwriter. You can listen to some of his music here. 

Many of his speeches were never professionally recorded, so the sound is sometimes poor. Still worth listening to. Here’s one of my favorites. 

Watch “Trudell,” a documentary on his life and words.