Indian people are relics; we do not exist in the present.

If you learn from an experience, that's good - so nothing bad happened to you.

We Indians do not teach that there is only one god. We know that everything has power, including the most inanimate, inconsequential things. Stones have power. A blade of grass has power. Trees and clouds and all our relatives in the insect and animal world have power. We believe we must respect that power by acknowledging it's presence. By honoring the power of the spirits in that way, it becomes our power as well. It protects us.

Being an Indian means living with the land. And the only way we'll be able to do that is to gain our freedom.

So I'd much rather get across the concept of freedom. It's what's important to Indian children. The only way you can be free is to know is that you are worthwhile as a distinct human being. Otherwise you become what the colonizers have designed, and that is a lemming. Get in line, punch all the right keys, and die.

I never knew I was an artist until I did 'Last of the Mohicans'.

I knew at that young age that going to the Bureau of Indian Affairs was useless, absolutely useless. I grew up having no faith in the bureaucracy of government.