John Trudell

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Life is all about the spirit.

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.

From activist stage, I just spoke and said whatever I had to say. When the writing started, I would just read it. Then I had the interest into going into musical aspects. When that happened in '86, I liked the result of work we did in the studio.

Because we are all of an oral tradition in our beginning histories, the voice of the poet in this particular society will be heard.

I'm a member of the American Indian Movement, and I'm from the indigenous nations of the Western Hemisphere.

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 don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything.

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.

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.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

I'm basically a starving artist.

In a personal context, I'm not in the ground, and I'm not in an institution. So I guess I'm doing pretty good.

The average human being in America is going through some sort of hard times - physical, emotional, psychological. Everybody's carrying a bit of bone days in them.

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.