This is why Indians are thought to be stupid. They can't think, they don't know anything, they say. But we have hidden our identity because we needed to resist, we wanted to protect what governments have wanted to take away from us.

I would get up in the morning and I would say, "How am I going to bother them today?"

Racism in our countries is a fact in that the indian is not allowed to be a politician or aspire to being head of state. It has reached the point that 99% of the indigenous women have not gone to school. The indigenous are condemned to live in a situation designed to exterminate them. They receive a pittance of a salary, they neither speak nor write the language, politics dictates their situation. Is this slavery? I don't know what it's called. It is not the same as before because we are in modern times.

I think that if one's role doesn't correspond to what one says, if one's life doesn't correspond to what one preaches, if one is not true to one's people, someone else will come as a substitute.

Peace cannot exist without justice, justice cannot exist without fairness, fairness cannot exist without development, development cannot exist without democracy, democracy cannot exist without respect for the identity and worth of cultures and peoples.

For me, to celebrate the twelfth of October is the absolute expression of triumphism, occupation and presumptuousness, and I think that history will remember those that celebrate it.

The people are the only ones capable of transforming society.