Native Americans

"I did not see anything to help my people. I could see that the Wasichus did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation's hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. They had forgotten that the earth was their mother. This could not be better than the old ways of my people."

"Grown men may learn from very little children, for the hearts of little children are pure, and, therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss."

"All the things of the universe are joined with you who smoke the pipe — All send their voices to Wakan-Tanka, the Great Spirit. When you pray with this pipe, you pray for and with everything."

"The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka , and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is known that true peace, which, as I have often said, is within the souls of men."

"The Great Spirit is everywhere; He hears whatever is in our minds and our hearts, and it is not necessary to speak to Him in a loud voice."

"The power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the understanding.'"

"Perhaps you have noticed that even in the slightest breeze you can hear the voice of the cottonwood tree; this we understand is its prayer to the Great Spirit, for not only men, but all things and all beings pray to Him continually in different ways."

"[The Sun Dancers] also put rabbit skins on their arms and legs, for the rabbit represents humility, because he is quiet and soft and not self-asserting — a quality which we must all possess when we go to the center of the world."

"This center which is here, but which we know is really everywhere, is Wakan-Tanka.'"

"It is good to have a reminder of death before us, for it helps us to understand the impermanence of life on this earth, and this understanding may aid us in preparing for our own death. He who is well prepared is he who knows that he is nothing compared with Wakan-Tanka who is everything; then he knows that world which is real."

"Of all the created things or beings in the universe, it is the two-legged men alone, who if they purify and humiliate themselves, may become one with — or may know — Wakan-Tanka."

"Black Elk and Lame Deer were Heyoka which does not mean that you literally say and do things backwards in a humorous manner but whose spirit helpers are the powerful thunderbeings. Lame Deer was the last true Heyoka. If you look at this world most things flow in a clockwise cycle but you also have that small element in life that goes the opposite direction. There are things that Black Elk and Lame Deer did and said things in a way to divert the tensions at that time when the pipe way was under attack."

""I knew — because of my race, and my class, and rural geography ... all these forces that crush all sorts of American kids, crush their hopes and dreams — I knew I had no chance unless I left and went to a better school.”"

"My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room…You always knew they were coming: he was never violent, but short-tempered. It wasn't a violent house, but a violent reservation."

"“…It wasn't just the influence of tribal cultures, it was the assimilation into fundamentalist Christianity, which is even more warrior culture, even more honor culture, and even more suspicious of difference. So I was getting bombarded not only by the more fundamentalist aspects of my tribe, but the more fundamentalist aspects of our assimilation into Christianity. So that was going on all around us, and, in fact, in second grade we had this ex-nun teacher who put us into stress positions as torture.”"

"It was arrogance…I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian. The mess my father was, it broke my heart. I didn't want to break an Indian kid's heart."

"When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer."

"My 2017 is gonna be white liberals shocked about white racism & white conservatives denying white racism exists. Just like every other year."

"Thomas: Hey Victor! I'm sorry 'bout your dad. Victor: How'd you hear about it? Thomas: I heard it on the wind. I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the sunlight. And your mom was just in here cryin'."

"Victor: Get Stoic."

"Thomas: Sometimes it's a good day to die, and sometimes it's a good day to have breakfast."

"Nurse: You guys are like the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Thomas: We're more like Tonto and Tonto."

"Victor: White people won't respect you if you don't look mean. You have to look like a warrior, like you just got back from killing a buffalo. Thomas: But our tribe never hunted buffalo. We were fishermen. Victor: What, you want to look like you just caught a fish? This isn't Dances with Salmon, you know!"

"Randy Peone: It's a good day to be indigenous!"

"He hated to leave, but he loved his work. He was a man, and men needed to work. More sexism! More masculine tunnel vision! More need for gender-sensitivity workshops!"

"He wondered if she would dream about a man who never left her, about some unemployed agoraphobic Indian warrior who liked to wash dishes."

"I don't want long hair, I don't want short hair, I don't want hair at all, and I don't want to be a girl or a boy, I want to be a yellow-orange leaf some little kid picks up and pastes in his scrapbook."

"[Flying into Baltimore after 9/11] I didn't want to see some pacifist, vegan, whole-wheat, free-range, organic, progressive, gray-ponytail, communist, liberal, draft-dodging, NPR-listening wimp! What are they going to do if somebody tries to hijack the plane? Throw a Birkenstock at him? Offer him some pot?...I was hoping for about twenty-five NRA-loving, gun-nut, serial-killing, psychopathic, Ollie North, Norman Schwarzkopf, right-wing, Agent Orange, post-traumatic-stress-disorder, CIA, FBI, automatic-weapon, smart-bomb, laser-sighting bastards!"

"Oh, I'm sorry, sir, if I offended you. I am not anti-Semitic. I love all of my brothers and sisters. Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, even the atheists, I love them all. Like you Americans sing, 'Joy to the world and Jeremiah Bullfrog!"

"William always scanned the airports and airplanes for little brown guys who reeked of fundamentalism. That meant William was equally afraid of Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell wearing the last vestiges of a summer tan. William himself was a little brown guy, so the other travelers were always sniffing around him, but he smelled only of Dove soap, Mennen deoderant, and sarcasm."

"The Northwest is blessed with some of the best writers in the country, such as Charles Johnson, Colleen McElroy, and Sherman Alexie."

"Despite cycling and recycling the same old tropes told in the same voice, [a Sherman Alexie book] has received not one poor review. Is Alexie really such a flawless writer that critics cannot go beyond praise as repetitive as his oeuvre itself? Or are most reviewers seduced by the charming prose of an Indian who eases their guilty consciences? The latter seems much more likely…For both Vine Deloria and Alexie, humor is about survival. The difference however is that Deloria sees survival in asserting tribal Indian identity, Alexie sees it in chuckling distance.”"

"Time slippages in Sherman Alexie's Flight teach that you can outrun the monster of revenge, move beyond the anger that turns righteous justice into senseless violence, and forgive."

"Sherman Alexie's "Distances" directly invokes the Ghost Dance and subsequently mixes a sense of nostalgia with Indian trapdoor humor, suggesting that a bitterly satiric approach is the valid response to the traumatic impact of apocalyptic eschatology on First Nations peoples."

"By my count, there are now over 20 women who are accusing him of harassment"

"Entre los Individuos, como entre Las Naciones, El respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz."

"The government of the republic will fulfill its duty to defend its independence, to repel foreign aggression, and accept the struggle to which it has been provoked, counting on the unanimous spirit of the Mexicans and on the fact that sooner or later the cause of rights and justice will triumph."

"In use of the broad powers with which I have been invested, I have found it proper to declare that 1. Priests of any cult who, abusing their ministry, excite hate or disrespect for our laws, our government, or its rights, will be punished by three years’ imprisonment or deportation. 2. Because of the present crisis all cathedral chapters are suppressed, except for that of Guadalajara because of its patriotic behavior. 3. Priests of all cults are forbidden from wearing their vestments or any other distinguishing garment outside of the churches… All violators will be punished with fines of ten to one hundred pesos or imprisonment from fifteen to sixty days."

"Democracy is the destiny of humanity; freedom its indestructible arm."

"Adversity, Citizen Deputies, discourages none but contemptible peoples; ours has been ennobled by great feats and we are far from being shorn of the immense obstacles, material and moral, which the country will oppose…"

"There is no help but in defense but I can assure you... the Imperial Government will not succeed in subduing the Mexicans, and its armies will not have a single day of peace... we must stop them, not only for our country but for the respect of the sovereignty of the nations."

"Mexicans: let us now pledge all our efforts to obtain and consolidate the benefits of peace. Under its auspices, the protection of the laws and of the authorities will be sufficient for all the inhabitants of the Republic. May the people and the government respect the rights of all. Between individuals, as between nations, peace means respect for the rights of others."

"There is one thing beyond the reach of perversity. The inevitable failure of history, she will judge us"

"The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the Grandmothers' society, the society that was captured in the words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five hundred years ago. It is the same vision repeated over and over by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from François Villon to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, from Benito Juarez to Martin Luther King, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judy Grahn, from Harriet Tubman to Audre Lorde, from Emma Goldman to Bella Abzug, from Malinalli to Cherríe Moraga, and from Iyatiku to me. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits... All are equal and free.""

"This is the beginning of a social movement in fact and not in pronouncements. We seek our basic, God-given rights as human beings. Because we have suffered — and are not afraid to suffer — in order to survive, we are ready to give up everything, even our lives, in our fight for social justice. We shall do it without violence because that is our destiny. To the ranchers, and to all those who opposes, we say, in the words of Benito Juárez: "El respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz." [Respect for another's right is the meaning of peace.]"

"Without realizing it the maids provided me with a version of Benito Juárez; they were all like Benito Juárez. Like him they vindicated themselves: "Dirty foreigners." Like him they defended Mexico, as stubborn as mules. Like him they had no roof of their own and had eaten only poor people's food, and for me, a girl raised on French mashed potatoes, discovering them meant entering into "the other.""

"My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain...There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory."

"At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone."

"Every part of all this soil is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hollowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. The very dust you now stand on responds more willingly to their footsteps than to yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch."

"Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only change of worlds."

"We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy - and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his fathers' graves, and his children’s birthright is forgotten."

"Tribe follows tribe, nations follow nations like the tides of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless."

"Today is fair. Tomorrow may be overcast with clouds. My words are like the stars that never change."

"How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land?"

"Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people."

"The sap which courses through the trees carries the memory of the red man."

"The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man - all belong to the same family. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors."

"If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that the ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells us events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our cannoes, feed our children. If we sell our land, you must learn, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother."

"You must teach the children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves."

"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect."

"The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to Earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."

"What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man."

"In this moment of spiritual triumph we can see why the film (Follow Me Home) begins with a quotation of words by Chief Seattle, when he said that after the last red man was gone the land would still be filled with their spirits: "The white man will never be alone." Is this a promise (as heard by some people of color) or a threat (as heard by some whites) or simply a truth that we should all heed?"

"Just like Chief Seattle talked about being in the web of life, in India we talk about vasudhaiva kutumbkam, which means the earth family. Indian cosmology has never separated the human from the non-human—we are a continuum."

"Interviewer: Many in Bolivia say that you should be president and that you have more support nationally than any other candidate. What do you have to say about the pressure you may receive from the US government if you are elected president? The US ambassador in Bolivia has stated that if you are elected, the US will pull its financial support from Bolivia."

"Morales: After more than 500 years we, the Quechuas and Aymaras [the Indigenous people of Bolivia], are still the rightful owners of this land. We, the Indigenous people, after 500 years of resistance, are retaking power. This retaking of power is oriented towards the recovery of our natural resources, such as the hydrocarbons. This affects the interests of the transnational corporations and the interests of the neoliberal system. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the power of the people is increasing and strengthening. This power is changing presidents, economic models and politics. We are convinced that capitalism is the enemy of the Earth, of humanity and of culture. The US government does not understand our way of life and our philosophy. But we will defend our proposals, our way of life and our demands with the participation of the Bolivian people."

"Friends, we have now won. ...I say to Aymaras, Quechuas, Chiquitaos, and Guaranis: for the first time we [indigenous people] are going to be presidents. And I want to say to businesses, intellectual professionals, and artists: do not abandon us."

"I am sure of the fact that Fidel and Chávez are commanders of the forces of freedom in America, to liberate America and the world."

"SPIEGEL: The Latin American left is fracturing into a moderate, social democratic current, led by Lula and Bachelet, and a radical, populist movement represented by Castro, Chavez and yourself. Isn't Chavez dividing the continent?"

"Morales: There are social democrats and others who are marching more in the direction of equality, whether you call them socialists or communists. But at least Latin America no longer has racist or fascist presidents like it did in the past. Capitalism has only hurt Latin America."

"SPIEGEL: Do you believe that the Indian peoples have developed a better social model than the white, Western democracies?"

"Morales: There was no private property in the past. Everything was communal property. In the Indian community where I was born, everything belonged to the community. This way of life is more equitable. We Indians are Latin America's moral reserve. We act according to a universal law that consists of three basic principles: do not steal, do not lie and do not be idle. This trilogy will also serve as the basis of our new constitution."

"If we want to save the planet earth, to save life and humanity, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system. Unless we put an end to the capitalist system, it is impossible to imagine that there will be equality and justice on this planet earth. This is why I believe that it is important to put an end to the exploitation of human beings and to the pillage of natural resources, to put an end to destructive wars for markets and raw materials, to the plundering of energy, particularly fossil fuels, to the excessive consumption of goods and to the accumulation of waste. The capitalist system only allows us to heap up waste. I would like to propose that the trillions of money earmarked for war should be channelled to make good the damage to the environment, to make reparations to the earth."

"I learned that the political is above the legal, that’s why when my advisors tell me, Evo, what you are doing is illegal, I say, if it is illegal, then do it legal, you have studied for that"

"I want to tell you, companions and union leaders, to all of you, if you are not with the official party (MAS) at this time, you are the opposition. If you are opposition, then you are right wing, of the racist-fascists, of the neo-liberals...it is time for definition either you are with the MAS or you are a fascist (this rhymes in Spanish: Sos MASista o sos facista). There is no middle ground. Define yourselves."

"The conspiracy against my government is headed by the US Ambassador, USA, with funds that came from American taxpayers would think that they're using to help Bolivian people, is using the money in order to campaign against my government and me they met with NGOs and other groups here always with intention of conspiring. They offered the money in condition that they take part in campaign against Evo Morales; the major vacaca city who visit us recently told me that he was offered money by USAID agency to run as an opposition congressman, they even offered to pay for his campaign and the mayor told me that the people work for US agency go from house to house telling people if they've get rid of Evo they would have more money, if you want the document about this, we could, we are going to present to prove this the document to the US Congress."

"Leaders and delegates of the social movements present here at this World Social Forum, I was remembering the many encounters... where we participated to show our resistance to neoliberalism. I want to tell you, sisters and brothers, that I am the product of our common struggle against neoliberalism... these struggles which have been undertaken by the social forces of Bolivia and Latin America. I feel tonight marks the beginning of the permanent encounter between all the anti-neoliberal presidents and the peoples who are fighting against American imperialism."

"The chicken that we eat is chock-full of feminine hormones. So, when men eat these chickens, they deviate from themselves as men."

"Baldness that appears to be normal is a disease in Europe, almost all of them are bald, and that is because of the things they eat; while among the indigenous peoples there are no bald people, because we eat other things""

"Some countries of Europe have to free themselves from the US Empire. They are not going to frighten us because we are a people with dignity and sovereignty."

"Our sin is that we are ideologically anti-imperialist, but this coup won’t make me change ideologically... We are very grateful to the president of Mexico, because he saved my life."

"The OAS made a political decision, not a technical or legal one. This is a report — now I have realized from the recommendations of some leftist brothers and sisters — that the OAS is not in the service of the people of Latin America, less so the social movements. The OAS is at the service of the North American empire."

"Every day, we are reminded of the duty to continue our struggle against imperialism, against capitalism, and against colonialism. We must work together towards a world in which greater respect for the people and for Mother Earth is possible. In order to do this, it is essential for states to intervene so that the needs of the masses and the oppressed are put first. We have the conviction that we are the masses. And that the masses, over time, will win."

"A key recipient of Venezuelan help has been Evo Morales, a charismatic Bolivian legislator who has broad support among his country’s indigenous population. He is an avowed opponent of the capitalist system."

"Bolivia has this long record of giving into the I.M.F. and the World Bank, privatizing their resources, like their power company and their water company. And the people of Bolivia were fed up with this... so Evo Morales ran on this ticket that said, “I’m not going to put up with this anymore.” .. The reason he was elected.. has to do with the extreme frustration and anger of the Bolivian people, of how they’ve been exploited and how the I.M.F. and the World Bank have insisted that they turn their resources over to foreign corporations. And also, you know, part of the World Trade Organization policies is that we insist that countries like Bolivia not subsidize their local industries and products, but that they accept our subsidies of them, and that they not erect any barriers against our goods coming in there, but they accept the barriers that we erect against their goods. And people around the world, Amy, are getting fed up with this. 300 million Latin Americans — South Americans out of 360 million, over 80% have voted for these types of candidates.... people like Evo Morales, really looked to Hugo Chavez as an example of someone who’s had the staying power. He’s been able to stay there, despite the fact that the (G.W. Bush) administration has spoken so strongly against him and is so angry..."

"Well, I have no doubt that he (Evo Morales) has been visited by at least one of these men... they walk into his office and shake his hands and say, “Congratulations, Mr. President. You won. We launched a strong campaign against you, but now you’ve won. And now, I want to tell you the facts of life and make you —”... Morales was very diplomatic about the whole thing, but absolutely stood firm and said, “You know, my people have elected me for a reason, and I intend to honor that.” This is what his initial response was. But what I will say is we can’t imagine the pressure now that’s being exerted on a man like Morales, as is true with all these other presidents. They know what’s happened before their time. And... the pressure will be put on them tighter and tighter and tighter.... And imagine being in that position. Imagine being an integritous person and really wanting to help your country, being elected with a majority — Morales got 54% of the vote, which is unheard of in Bolivia; he was up against many opponents — and then, wanting to implement the policy, and somebody walks into your office and reminds you of what happened to all these other presidents."

"One of those leaders who came to address the U.N. General Assembly was Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia. While the U.S. rarely looks south for leadership, Morales’ example is worth considering. He has restored diplomatic relations with Iran. Against tremendous internal opposition, he nationalized Bolivia’s natural gas fields, transforming the country’s economic stability, and, interestingly, enriching the very elite that originally criticized the move...President Morales told me: “Neither mother earth nor life are commodities. We are talking about a profound change of models and systems.”"

"Moving forward, we must always go with President Evo Morales, not only do we have to speak, but we must all work [in favor of him]"

"State company Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB), established by the government of President Evo Morales in 2008 to exploit lithium in the salt flats, aims to make Bolivia the fourth-largest producer by 2021. Morales, a leftist and former coca farmer, is counting on lithium to serve as the economic engine that lifts his country out of poverty."

"Morales' cancellation of the ACISA deal opened the door to either a renegotiation of the agreement with terms delivering more of the profits to the area's population or the outright nationalization of the Bolivian lithium extraction industry."

"Camacho also hails from a family of corporate elites who have long profited from Bolivia’s plentiful natural gas reserves... his family lost part of its wealth when Morales nationalized the nation’s resources, in order to fund his vast social programs — which cut poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent."

"José Ariel Blanco, the 25-year-old owner of a stationery store two blocks from the legislature, said he was thankful for Mr. Morales’s achievements — chief among them, tackling the racism that the Indigenous had suffered for centuries. “My grandmother couldn’t walk into a bank in her Indigenous clothes until Evo became president,” he said. “Now she can, and that won’t change.”"

"Morales upended politics in this nation long ruled by light-skinned descendants of Europeans by reversing deep-rooted inequality. The economy grew strongly thanks to a boom in prices of commodities and he ushered through a new constitution that created a new Congress with seats reserved for Bolivia’s smaller indigenous groups while also allowing self-rule for all indigenous communities."

"In contrast, we were witnesses to how the highest level of government responded, threatening to surround the cities, cut off food supplies and wage war in the streets. The violence committed almost exclusively by government supporters left many wounded and several dead, but it also served to reveal the true character of the Movement to Socialism (MAS), which is still trying to sow chaos and fear in the population. From its conception and in its ideology, this is a movement to savagery, fueled by the discourse of racism and resentment, and openly rejecting the Church and God himself, as was evidenced by the words of now ex-president Evo Morales: “Should anyone say [salvation] comes down from heaven, No. From heaven comes only the rain, salvation does not come to us from heaven” (Jan 22, 2015). His fall from power demonstrates the opposite."

"Broadly speaking, Evo Morales was a successful leader of Bolivia. A trade unionist with familial roots among the country’s indigenous peoples, he was first elected president in 2005 and was twice returned to office with substantial majorities. Morales is credited by the IMF with achieving a drastic reduction in poverty among farmers and coca growers and a societal revolution that, among other things, transformed the standing of Bolivia’s numerous ethnic minority groups."

"He championed a “plurinational” constitution that guaranteed equal rights and opportunities for all citizens, effectively ending the monopoly on power previously enjoyed by Bolivians of European descent. His time in office also saw a big increase in women’s political participation."

"In the eighteen years since I wrote "The Tribe of Guarayamín," there have been significant changes in in the politics of indigenous identity in the Americas. Most powerful among them is the resurgence of Latin American sovereignty, with a strong core of indigenous leadership, much of it female. Evo Morales, an Aymara man, is president of Bolivia, with a new Constitution that renames it as a plurinational state, in recognition of its indigenous nations. Universities, radio stations, courtrooms carry on their business in indigenous languages, and long idle lands of latifundista families have been reclaimed and distributed to campesinxs, some of whom have become, under the new indigenous autonomy laws, self-governing communities for the first time in five hundred years."

"It's fun leading this offense. I don't think we've hit our peak."

"I really believe this team has a lot of potential — whether it's this year or in years to come, I don't know."

"With each game I play, with each season I play, I'm running out of chances... you're never guaranteed next year. You're never guaranteed the next game. You have to seize the opportunity when it's there in front of you."

"I'm pretty boring really."

"I'd like to think, eight years ago, I was pretty humble and modest. But I think, with each year, you get more modest, more humble, more appreciative. The off the field tragedies put things in better perspective, but life happens to everybody, and I think we all just try to do the best we can."

"Yip cabbage on three!"

"I know I can still play, but it's like I told my wife, I'm just tired mentally. I'm just tired."

"You can call it a miracle or a legend or whatever you want to. I just know that on that day, Brett Favre was larger than life."

"When I go around in America and I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed; they feel powerless... We see the physical genocide that they are attempting to inflict upon our lives, and we understand the psychological genocide that they have already inflicted upon their own people."

"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."

"They are going to become more brutal. They are going to become more oppressive."

"We have to understand who we are and where we fit in the natural order of the world because our oppressor deals in illusions. They tell us that it is power, but it is not power. They may have all the guns and they may have all the racist laws and judges, and they may control all the money, but that is not power. These are imitations of power and they are only ‘power’ because in our minds we allow it to be power."

"This oppressor, this machine that has gone mad and run amok, it is berserk. They keep telling us, "progress.” They keep telling us “face reality.” Well, let’s deal with reality. Reality is the Earth can no longer take this attack. We can no longer allow this Thing to continue when it’s polluting the air, it’s polluting the water, polluting our food. They pollute the air, they pollute the water, they pollute our food, they pollute our minds."

"Our obligations and loyalty should not be to a government that will not take care of our needs. Our obligations and loyalty should not be to a government that has proven time and time again that it is the enemy of the people unless the people are rich in dollars."

"The Earth gives us life, not the American government. The earth gives us life, not the multi-national corporate government. The Earth gives us life. We need to have the Earth. We must have it, otherwise our life will be no more. So we must resist what they do."

"Columbus, I guess it all did start with Columbus. ... To me he was like a virus, a disease. I spent a lot of time protesting, trying to figure out how to deal with this disease. I think we really need to put serious thought into understanding that we're dealing with a disease."

"It's like there's this predator energy on this planet, and this predator energy feeds upon the essence of the spirit, feeds upon the essence of the human being, the spirit. This predator energy can take fossil fuel and other resources out of the Earth, turn it into fuel, to run a machine system. But in order for there to be a need for that system, and in order for that system to work, they have to mine our minds to get at the essence of our spirit. In the same way the external mining takes place, it pollutes—we see now, people understand how it poisons the environment, the water, the air pollution—the mining of the essence, the mining of the spirit, mining our minds ... the pollution from that is all the neurotic, distorted, insecure behavior patterns that we develop. That's the pollution. Because in order for this predatory system, this disease, to work, we must not be able to use our minds in a clear coherent manner. Because if we use our minds in a clear coherent manner, we will not accept the unacceptable."

"Sometimes when it rains, it's not that simple, when the sky has reasons to cry."

"The past is more than a memory."

"Every human being is a raindrop. And when enough of the raindrops become clear and coherent they then become the power of the storm."

"The blacks want what the whites have, which is understandable. They want in. We Indians want out! That is the main difference."

"We did freak out the honkies. We were feared throughout the Dakotas. I could never figure out why this should have been so. We were always the victims. We never maimed or killed. It was we who died or got crippled."

"I could not help noticing the great role women played in Pueblo society. Women owned the houses and actually built them. Children often got their mother's last name, not their father's. Sons joined their mother's clans. It made me a little jealous."

"To me, women's lib was mainly a white, upper-middle class affair of little use to a reservation Indian woman."

"I would like to shake hands with the white men, but I am afraid they do not want peace with us."

"It will be a very hard thing to leave the country that God gave us. Our friends are buried there, and we hate to leave these grounds.... There is something strong for us — that fool band of soldiers that cleared out our lodges and killed our women and children. This is hard on us. There at Sand Creek — White Antelope and many other chiefs lie there; our women and children lie there. Our lodges were destroyed there, and our horses were taken from us there, and I do not feel disposed to go right off to a new country and leave them."

"Chief Little Raven was a warrior, diplomat, orator and a leader who had tried to achieve peace with the pale face newcomers. However, his best intentions were destined to fail. The Fort Wise Treaty of 1861 which many Arapaho refused to sign, pushed them out of their homeland in the Cherry Creek and South Platte valleys. Three years later, the Colorado Volunteers, led by John Milton Chivington, massacred many Arapaho at Sand Creek. Chief Little Raven and his followers survived the Sand Creek Massacre because he was clever enough to camp away from the army designated site. Chief Little Raven also signed the Little Arkansas Treaty of 1865 and the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 establishing the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservations in the Oklahoma Indian Territory. In recognition of his efforts to keep the peace, President U. S. Grant awarded Chief Little Raven a peace medal. As he traveled to Washington, D.C. to accept the medal, he said that he wasn’t trying to make peace because he had never been at war. Chief Little Raven died in 1889 spending the last years of his life trying to help his people adjust to reservation life. A street near the South Platte River in lower downtown Denver bears his name and commemorates the Southern Arapaho encampment that once existed there."

"This is a great day for the Yakamas -- to get the land returned back for access to our fishing right areas. The younger generation will continue to exercise their Creator-given right to our very important salmon. The U.S. government promised us with their honorable word to uphold their trust responsibility. All Yakamas will benefit with this accomplishment by the current Tribal Council officials."

"Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money."

"The Lakota also use an eagle bone whistle during the Sun Dance."

"The sacral power of the eagle is also represented by the eagle-bone whistle."

"The eagle-bone whistle is a traditional vehicle for prayer in [some] Sun Dance."

"The whistle signifies that the eagle knows no evil on this earth, and the Indian ... passes his prayer through that while he is blowing to the Almighty; and there isn't supposed to be any evil in that while he is blowing his whistle."

"There is no time or need here to wallow in distinctions between a feather-and-bone raptor and a bone whistle avian mysticism; one would no doubt end in dichotomous Western readings thereof, an ideological spectrum ranging from sheer superstition to pure embodiment of the One."

"Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent. Today with an information "superhighway" now looming on the horizon, we are told that a lack of access to information will doom people to a life of meaninglessness — and poverty. As we look around and observe modern industrial society, however, there is no question that information, in and of itself, is useless and that as more data is generated, ethical and moral decisions are taking on a fantasy dimension in which a "lack of evidence to indict" is the moral equivalent of the good deed."

"All but one person I met who claimed Indian blood claimed it on their grandmother's side. I once did a projection backward and discovered that evidently most tribes were entirely female for the first three hundred years of white occupation. No one, it seemed, wanted to claim a male Indian as a forebear.It doesn't take much insight into racial attitudes to understand the real meaning of the Indian-grandmother complex that plagues certain whites. A male ancestor has too much of the aura of the savage warrior, the unknown primitive, the instinctive animal, to make him a respectable member of the family tree. But a young Indian princess? Ah, there was royalty for the taking."

"When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, "Ours.""

"When ecologists find a predictable life-span of a generation separating us from total extinction, it would seem that we have a duty to search for another interpretation of mankind’s life story."

"Who will find peace with the lands? The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things. Who will listen to the trees, the animals and birds, the voices of the places of the land? As the long forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meaning of the lands of their ancestors. That is when the invaders of the North American continent will finally discover that for this land, God is red."

"Before any final solution to American history can occur, a reconciliation must be effected between the spiritual owner of the land – American Indians – and the political owner of the land – American Whites. Guilt and accusations cannot continue to revolve in a vacuum without some effort at reaching a solution."

"The idea that religion was conceived as originally designed for a particular people relating to a specific god falls well within the experiences of the rest of humankind and may conceivably be considered a basic factor in the existence of religion."

"The breakup of Christianity during the Reformation into national churches and the proliferation of denominations today would seem to indicate that a religious universality cannot be successfully maintained across racial and ethnic lines. ... Ethnicity will almost always triumph."

"Most tribal religions make no pretense as to their universality."

"The very conception of a Chosen People implies a lost religious ethnicity. Most likely religions do not in fact cross national and ethnic lines without losing their power and identity. It is probably more in the nature of things to have different groups with different religions"

"Besides the importance of land and religion, the existence of a specific religion among a distinct group of people is probably a fundamental element of human experience."

"Religion is for people who’re afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who’ve already been there."

"The authors who really touched my heart, of course, are authors like Vine Deloria and Scott Momaday...I think what drew me to [Vine and Vine's work] was his real ability to analyze history, to analyze events, and to analyze the law."

"Vine Deloria in particular was a great influence to me. He was an intellectual and a writer that was, at times polemic, but he asked important questions of non-Indians. By reading Vine’s work, Custer Died For Your Sins, American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century, God Is Red, especially these early works, I learned about my own questions that I wanted to ask in my work. He also gave me courage to perform and write."

"Native scholars argue that the difference between Indigenous conceptions of the sacred and Western conceptions are their different orientations to time and space. Vine Deloria Jr., in particular, first articulated these ideas in his pioneering book God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (1973), and later built upon them in his theoretically dense The Metaphysics of Modern Existence (1979). In both works Deloria presents fundamental challenges to the Newtonian-Cartesian view of a mechanistic, linear universe."

"everybody takes for granted that equality under the State is what everybody wants. For Native people, that has never been their goal. Vine Deloria in 1969 said in his book, Custer Died for Your Sins, that “what we need is a national leave-us-alone policy.” He wrote his book in the middle of the Civil Rights, Black Panthers, and Black Power era, and he was very clear that what we want is not what you want. We don’t want equality, we want our treaties to be honored and our territories to be protected."

"We have lost our ability to dream our new selves and a new world into existence. We have mistakenly accepted the resolution to our problems that is designed by people who would have us move out of our rusty old colonial cages and right back into a shiny new prison of coping defined by managed fears and deadened emotional capacities."

"What better terrain than the field of sf to "engage colonial power in the spirit of a struggle for survival," the warrior ethic that Taiaiake Alfred (Kanien'kehaka) urges Natives to embrace as "thinkers, teachers, writers, and artists"? What better mindscape from which to "look at traditions in a critical way, not trying to take them down, but to test them and to make sure they're still strong"?"

"Brother, the Great Spirit has made us all, but He has made a great difference between His white and His red children. He has given us different complexions and different customs. To you He has given the arts. To these He has not opened our eyes. We know these things to be true. Since He has made so great a difference between us in other things, why may we not conclude that He has given us a different religion according to our understanding? The Great Spirit does right. He knows what is best for His children; we are satisfied. Brother, we do not wish to destroy your religion or take it from you. We only want to enjoy our own. ... Brother, we are told that you have been preaching to the white people in this place. These people are our neighbors. We are acquainted with them. We will wait a little while and see what effect your preaching has upon them. If we find it does them good, makes them honest, and less disposed to cheat Indians, we will then consider again of what you have said. Brother, you have now heard our answer to your talk, and this is all we have to say at present. As we are going to part, we will come and take you by the hand, and hope the Great Spirit will protect you on your journey and return you safe to your friends."

"There was no religious ceremony connected with marriage among us, while on the other hand the relation between man and woman was regarded as in itself mysterious and holy."

"Love between a man and a woman is founded on the mating instinct and is not free from desire and self-seeking. But to have a friend and to be true under any and all trials is the mark of a man."

"Nearness to nature ... keeps the spirit sensitive to impressions not commonly felt and in touch with the unseen powers."

"The elements and majestic forces in nature, Lightning, Wind, Water, Fire, and Frost, were regarded with awe as spiritual powers, but always secondary and intermediate in character."

"The American Indian was an individualist in religion as in war. He had neither a national army nor an organized church. There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature. He sees no need for setting apart one day in seven as a holy day, since to him all days are God's."

"In every religion there is an element of the supernatural, varying with the influence of pure reason over its devotees."

"The true Indian sets no price upon either his property or his labor. His generosity is limited only by his strength and ability."

"Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new sweet earth, and the Great Silence alone! What is Silence? It is the Great Mystery! The Holy Silence is His voice!"

"The clan is nothing more than a larger family, with its patriarchal chief as the natural head, and the union of several clans by intermarriage and voluntary connection constitutes the tribe."

"Friendship is held to be the severest test of character. It is easy, we think, to be loyal to a family and clan, whose blood is in your own veins."

"The Wise Man believes profoundly in silence - the sign of a perfect equilibrium. Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind and spirit. The man who preserves his selfhood ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence - not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree, not a ripple upon the surface of the shinning pool - his, in the mind of the unlettered sage, is the ideal attitude and conduct of life. Silence is the cornerstone of character."

"The surveyors of the Union Pacific were laying out the proposed road through the heart of the southern buffalo country [~1862] ... some of the smaller and weaker tribes were inclined to welcome the new order of things, recognizing that it was the policy of the government to put an end to tribal warfare."

"Red Cloud’s position was uncompromisingly against submission... “Friends,” said Red Cloud, “it has been our misfortune to welcome the white man. We have been deceived. He brought with him some shining things that pleased our eyes; he brought weapons more effective than our own: above all, he brought the spirit water that makes one forget for a time old age, weakness, and sorrow. But I wish to say to you that if you would possess these things for yourselves, you must begin anew and put away the wisdom of your fathers. You must lay up food, and forget the hungry. When your house is built, your storeroom filled, then look around for a neighbor whom you can take at a disadvantage, and seize all that he has! My countrymen, shall the glittering trinkets of this rich man, his deceitful drink that overcomes the mind, shall these things tempt us to give up our homes, our hunting grounds, and the honorable teaching of our old men? Shall we permit ourselves to be driven to and fro—to be herded like the cattle of the white man?”"

"The famous treaty of 1868.... Red Cloud was the last to sign, having refused to do so until all of the forts within their territory should be vacated. All of his demands were acceded to, the new road abandoned, the garrisons withdrawn, and in the new treaty it was distinctly stated that the Black Hills and the Big Horn were Indian country, set apart for their perpetual occupancy, and that no white man should enter that region without the consent of the Sioux."

"Scarcely was this treaty signed, however, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills, and the popular cry was: “Remove the Indians!” This was easier said than done. That very territory had just been solemnly guaranteed to them forever...The government, at first, entered some small protest, just enough to “save its face”... but there was no serious attempt to prevent the wholesale violation of the treaty. It was this... that led to the last great speech made by Red Cloud...It is brief, and touches upon the hopelessness of their future as a race...."

"“We are told,” said he, “that Spotted Tail has consented to be the Beggars’ Chief. Those Indians who go over to the white man can be nothing but beggars, for he respects only riches, and how can an Indian be a rich man? He cannot without ceasing to be an Indian. As for me, I have listened patiently to the promises of the Great Father, but his memory is short. I am now done with him. This is all I have to say.”"

"It is not easy to characterize Sitting Bull, of all Sioux chiefs most generally known to the American people. ... The man was an enigma at best. He was not impulsive, nor was he phlegmatic. He was most serious when he seemed to be jocose. He was gifted with the power of sarcasm, and few have used it more artfully than he."

"It was said of him in a joking way that his legs were bowed like the ribs of the ponies that he rode constantly from childhood. ... It is told that after a buffalo hunt the boys were enjoying a mimic hunt with the calves that had been left behind. A large calf turned viciously on Sitting Bull, whose pony had thrown him, but the alert youth got hold of both ears and struggled until the calf was pushed back into a buffalo wallow in a sitting posture. The boys shouted: "He has subdued the buffalo calf! He made it sit down!" And from this incident was derived his familiar name of Sitting Bull."

"It is a mistake to suppose that Sitting Bull, or any other Indian warrior, was of a murderous disposition. It is true that savage warfare had grown more and more harsh and cruel since the coming of white traders among them, bringing guns, knives, and whisky. ... It was the degree of risk which brought honor, rather than the number slain, and a brave must mourn thirty days, with blackened face and loosened hair, for the enemy whose life he had taken. While the spoils of war were allowed, this did not extend to territorial aggrandizement, nor was there any wish to overthrow another nation and enslave its people. It was a point of honor in the old days to treat a captive with kindness. The common impression that the Indian is naturally cruel and revengeful is entirely opposed to his philosophy and training."

"As he talked he seemed to take hold of his hearers more and more. He was bull-headed; quick to grasp a situation, and not readily induced to change his mind. He was not suspicious until he was forced to be so. All his meaner traits were inevitably developed by the events of his later career."

"[His] history has been written many times by newspaper men and army officers, but I find no account of him which is entirely correct. I met him personally in 1884, and since his death I have gone thoroughly into the details of his life with his relatives and contemporaries..."

"When Sitting Bull was a boy, there was no thought of trouble with the whites. He was acquainted with many of the early traders...and liked them, as did most of his people in those days. All the early records show this friendly attitude of the Sioux, and the great fur companies for a century and a half depended upon them for the bulk of their trade. It was not until the middle of the last century."

"They [Sitting Bull's people] would not have anything of the white man except his hatchet, gun, and knife. They utterly refused to cede their lands; and as for the rest, they were willing to let him alone as long as he did not interfere with their life and customs, which was not long."

"Sitting Bull joined in the attack on Fort Phil Kearny and in the subsequent hostilities; but he accepted in good faith the treaty of 1868, and soon after it was signed he visited Washington. ... [He] hoped [for] close adherence to the terms of this treaty to preserve the Big Horn and Black Hills country for a permanent hunting ground. When gold was discovered and the irrepressible gold seekers made their historic dash across the plains into this forbidden paradise, then his faith in the white man's honor was gone forever."

"In the Sioux story of creation, the great Mysterious One is not brought directly upon the scene or conceived in anthropomorphic fashion, but remains sublimely in the background. The Sun and the Earth, representing the male and female principles, are the main elements in his creation, the other planets being subsidiary. The enkindling warmth of the Sun entered into the bosom of our mother, the Earth, and forthwith she conceived and brought forth life, both vegetable and animal."

"The worship of the “Great Mystery” was silent, solitary, free from all self-seeking. It was silent, because all speech is of necessity feeble and imperfect; therefore the souls of my ancestors ascended to God in wordless adoration. It was solitary, because they believed that He is nearer to us in solitude, and there were no priests authorized to come between a man and his Maker. None might exhort or confess or in any way meddle with the religious experience of another. Among us all men were created sons of God and stood erect, as conscious of their divinity. Our faith might not be formulated in creeds, nor forced upon any who were unwilling to receive it; hence there was no preaching, proselyting, nor persecution, neither were there any scoffers or atheists."

"The first bambeday, or religious retreat, marked an epoch in the life of the youth... Having first prepared himself by means of the purifying vapor-bath, and cast off as far as possible all human or fleshly influences, the young man sought out the noblest height, the most commanding summit in all the surrounding region. Knowing that God sets no value upon material things, he took with him no offerings or sacrifices other than symbolic objects, such as paints and tobacco. Wishing to appear before Him in all humility, he wore no clothing save his moccasins and breech-clout. At the solemn hour of sunrise or sunset he took up his position, overlooking the glories of earth and facing the “Great Mystery,” and there he remained, naked, erect, silent, and motionless, exposed to the elements and forces of His arming, for a night and a day to two days and nights, but rarely longer. *Sometimes he would chant a hymn without words, or offer the ceremonial “filled pipe.” In this holy trance or ecstasy the Indian mystic found his highest happiness and the motive power of his existence."

"When he returned to the camp, he must remain at a distance until he had again entered the vapor-bath and prepared himself for intercourse with his fellows. Of the vision or sign vouchsafed to him he did not speak, unless it had included some commission which must be publicly fulfilled. Sometimes an old man, standing upon the brink of eternity, might reveal to a chosen few the oracle of his long-past youth."

"The native American has been generally despised by his white conquerors for his poverty and simplicity. They forget, perhaps, that his religion forbade the accumulation of wealth and the enjoyment of luxury. To him, as to other single-minded men in every age and race, from Diogenes to the brothers of Saint Francis, from the Montanists to the Shakers, the love of possessions has appeared a snare, and the burdens of a complex society a source of needless peril and temptation. Furthermore, it was the rule of his life to share the fruits of his skill and success with his less fortunate brothers. Thus he kept his spirit free from the clog of pride, cupidity, or envy, and carried out, as he believed, the divine decree—a matter profoundly important to him."

"To keep the young men and young women strictly to their honor, there were observed among us, within my own recollection, certain annual ceremonies of a semi-religious nature. One of the most impressive of these was the sacred “Feast of Virgins,” which, when given for the first time, was equivalent to the public announcement of a young girl’s arrival at a marriageable age. The herald ... “Pretty Weasel-woman, the daughter of Brave Bear, will kindle her first maidens’ fire to-morrow! All ye who have never yielded to the pleading of man, who have not destroyed your innocence, you alone are invited, to proclaim anew before the Sun and the Earth, before your companions and in the sight of the Great Mystery, the chastity and purity of your maidenhood. Come ye, all who have not known man!” ... Any man among the spectators might approach and challenge any young woman whom he knew to be unworthy; but if the accuser failed to prove his charge, the warriors were accustomed to punish him severely."

"Each girl in turn approached the sacred rock and laid her hand upon it with all solemnity. This was her religious declaration of her virginity, her vow to remain pure until her marriage. If she should ever violate the maidens’ oath... Our maidens were ambitious to attend a number of these feasts before marriage, and it sometimes happened that a girl was compelled to give one, on account of gossip about her conduct. Then it was in the nature of a challenge to the scandal-mongers to prove their words! A similar feast was sometimes made by the young men, for whom the rules were even more strict, since no young man might attend this feast who had so much as spoken of love to a maiden."

"At the age of about eight years, if he is a boy, she turns him over to his father for more Spartan training. If a girl, she is from this time much under the guardianship of her grandmother, who is considered the most dignified protector for the maiden. Indeed, the distinctive work of both grandparents is that of acquainting the youth with the national traditions and beliefs. It is reserved for them to repeat the time-hallowed tales with dignity and authority, so as to lead him into his inheritance in the stored-up wisdom and experience of the race. The old are dedicated to the service of the young, as their teachers and advisers, and the young in turn regard them with love and reverence."

"Our old age was in some respects the happiest period of life. Advancing years brought with them much freedom, not only from the burden of laborious and dangerous tasks, but from those restrictions of custom and etiquette which were religiously observed by all others. No one who is at all acquainted with the Indian in his home can deny that we are a polite people. As a rule, the warrior who inspired the greatest terror in the hearts of his enemies was a man of the most exemplary gentleness, and almost feminine refinement, among his family and friends. A soft, low voice was considered an excellent thing in man, as well as in woman! Indeed, the enforced intimacy of tent life would soon become intolerable, were it not for these instinctive reserves and delicacies, this unfailing respect for the established place and possessions of every other member of the family circle, this habitual quiet, order, and decorum."

"The household proper consisted of a man with one or more wives and their children, all of whom dwelt amicably together, often under one roof, although some men of rank and position provided a separate lodge for each wife. There were, indeed, few plural marriages except among the older and leading men, and plural wives were usually, though not necessarily, sisters. A marriage might honorably be dissolved for cause, but there was very little infidelity or immorality, either open or secret."

"In them [our women] was vested our standard of morals and the purity of our blood. The wife did not take the name of her husband nor enter his clan, and the children belonged to the clan of the mother. All of the family property was held by her, descent was traced in the maternal line, and the honor of the house was in her hands. Modesty was her chief adornment; hence the younger women were usually silent and retiring."

"Thus she ruled undisputed within her own domain, and was to us a tower of moral and spiritual strength, until the coming of the border white man, the soldier and trader, who with strong drink overthrew the honor of the man, and through his power over a worthless husband purchased the virtue of his wife or his daughter. When she fell, the whole race fell with her."

"Before this calamity came upon us, you could not find anywhere a happier home than that created by the Indian woman. There was nothing of the artificial about her person, and very little disingenuousness in her character. Her early and consistent training, the definiteness of her vocation, and, above all, her profoundly religious attitude gave her a strength and poise that could not be overcome by any ordinary misfortune."

"Certainly the Indian never doubted the immortal nature of the spirit or soul of man, but neither did he care to speculate upon its probable state or condition in a future life."

"Many of the Indians believed that one may be born more than once, and there were some who claimed to have full knowledge of a former incarnation."

"Recently I read a book by Charles Eastman, one of the first Native American physicians in Dakota, about going to Dartmouth. He described exactly how I felt: like I was being torn away. And yet, I wanted to go, I wanted to get away."

"I hope that pretty soon an American literature class will just automatically include someone like Scott Momaday-and some of the other people: Charles Eastman, you know, the other writers in our history."

"Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow."

"Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life."

"In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls. (p381)"

"We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see. (p384)"

"Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass. (p400)"

"Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice—for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions. (p463)"

"When we're young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. ("Revival Road")"

"Earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers. There is no definition and no union for sure. ("The Antelope Wife")"

"He also found that white people are good witnesses to have on your side since they have names, addresses, social security numbers, and work phones. But they are terrible witnesses to have against you, almost as bad as having Indians witness for you. ("Scales")"

"There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there. (p203)"

"When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape. (p268)"

"We never talked about the future anymore — she refused to, and I had to accept that. The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history. (p282)"

"When we’re young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. (p15)"

"It is difficult for a woman to admit that she gets along with her own mother — somehow it seems a form of betrayal, at least, it used to among other women in my generation. To join the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mother's indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetotal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity. It isn't enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both. No. She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses the rest of her life. It is alright to feel kinship with your father, to forgive. We all know that. But your mother is held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles. She simply must be to blame. (p20)"

"The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history. (p29)"

"There is very little said about how repetitious grief is. (p64)"

"They are patient with the gravity of their intent. Of their means of survival they've made these elegant webs, their beauty a by-product of their purpose. Which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world? (p77)"

"That's what the drum is about - it gathers people in and holds them. It looks after them. But like a person, things can go wrong in spite of all the best care. And this drum had its own history and sorrow. (p180)"

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. And living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could. (p274)"

"Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. It’s hard to swim against the current. Onrushing, inevitable, carried like a leaf, Fleur fooled herself in thinking she could choose her direction. But time is an element no human has mastered, and Fleur was bound to go where she was sent. Maybe in those long nights as she watched the crack of light beneath the door, she had an inkling. She thought revenge was behind that door, and satisfaction. Maybe she began to realize that she was wrong. There was only time. For what is a man, what are we all, but bits of time caught for a moment in a tangle of blood, bones, skin, and brain? She was time. Mauser was time. I am a sorry bit of time myself. We are time’s containers. Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny. (p28)"

"And that was where the whiskey got hold of her. As it has with so many of us, even myself, the liquor sneaked up and grabbed her, got into her mind and talked to her, fooled her into thinking she was thinking for herself when really it was the whiskey thinking whiskey thoughts. (p75)"

"once a person drops the scales of prejudiced certainty and doubts appear, there is no telling how far a heart can open. (p98)"

"A man finds happiness so fleetingly, like the petals melting off a prairie rose. Even as you touch that feeling it dries up, leaving only the dust of that emotion, a powder of hope. (chapter 9, p99)"

"To love Nanapush, to love at all, is like trying to remember the tune and words to a song that the spirits have given you in your sleep. Some days, I knew exactly how the song went and some days I couldn’t even hum the first line. (p182)"

"Spent, she thought that there was no place as unknown as grief. (p38)"

""I have never seen the truth...without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy." (p135)"

"It was this immense resignation to the shape of his life that opened him every day to the experience of joy. (p140)"

"...comfort is not security and money in the hand disappears. He could have told her that only the land matters and never to let go of the papers, the titles, the tracks of the words, all those things that his ancestors never understood how the vital relationship to the dirt and grass under their feet. (p171)"

"Slowly and inevitably, she fell in love with each person in the family, only she didn’t know what to call it. She simply found herself related. (p184)"

"For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought. Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery. Hers was hardly the most sinful, tragic, or bizarre. (p199)"

""What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given—children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps—we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes—those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?...If I am loved, it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace." (p227)"

"Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth. (p327)"

""To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human." (p331)"

"The only person left alive on the island was a baby girl. (first line)"

"If there is no laughter, the soul dies. (p186)"

"Although spring, with all the force of its poised new growth, called to her, although the tender new buds, opening magically, touched her heart, there would always be a shadow to her laughter, a corner of sadness in her smile. (p221)"

"Effortless. Easy. The lack of trying is what makes them lovely. We all try too hard. Striving wears down our edges, dulls the best of us. (p23)"

"I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about. (p28)"

"All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. (p59)"

"[He] was a slim and handsome boy when he left, but his look when he returned was reeling and deathly. His face was puffed up and his eyes, they were like pits in his face. He had a thousand-year-old stare. (p131)"

"A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life. (p190)"

"...the world of grass was never meant to be shortened to a carpet so that the outdoors is like one big wall-to-wall room. (p225)"

"We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential, personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one's fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike before that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence. (p4)"

"The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby's needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children's faces. (p4)"

"Organized Christian religion is more often about denying the body when what we profoundly need are rituals that regard the blood, the shock, the heat, the shit, the anguish, the glory, the earnestness of the female body. (p47)"

"Life seems to flood by, taking our loves quickly in its flow. In the growth of children, in the aging of beloved parents, time's chart is magnified, shown in its particularity, focused, so that with each celebration of maturity there is also a pang of loss. This is our human problem, one common to parents, sons and daughters, too - how to let go while holding tight, how to simultaneously cherish the closeness and intricacy of the bond while at the same time letting out the raveling string, the red yarn that ties our hearts. (p69)"

"Laughter is our consolation prize for consciousness. (p81)"

"Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortunate who feels witnessed as a person, outside relationships with parent, by another adult." (p162)"

"What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul? (p182)"

"When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left. (p190)"

"Each life is one short word slowly uttered. (p191)"

"We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try. (p6)"

"You may be one kind of fool who never gets enough or another who gets too much. (p18)"

"[She] was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself. It worked — a plume of spent fuel trailed her days, headlong in concentration, and her nights were black. (p25)"

"We'll get to the truth quicker if we don't worry about logic. (p111)"

"Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don't know why. It lives, and we harbor its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion. (p199)"

"So that's how I came to Argus. I was the girl in the stiff coat. (first line)"

""Everything that ever happened to him in his life," she said, "all the things we said and did. Where did it go?" I didn't have an answer, so I just drove. Once I had caused a miracle by smashing my face on ice, but now I was an ordinary person. In the few miles we had left I could not help drawing out [her] strange idea in my mind. In my line of work I've seen thousands of brains that belonged to sheep, pork, steers. They were all gray lumps like ours. Where did everything go? What was really inside? The flat fields unfolded, the shallow ditches ran beside the road. I felt the live thoughts hum inside of me, and I pictured tiny bees, insects made of blue electricity, in a colony so fragile that it would scatter at the slightest touch. I imagined a blow, like a mallet to the sheep, or a stroke, and I saw the whole swarm vibrating out. Who could stop them? Who could catch them in their hands? (p203-4)"

"But then as time passed, I learned the lesson that parents do early on. You fail sometimes. No matter how much you love your children, there are times you slip. There are moments you can't give, stutter, lose your temper, or simply lose face with the world, and you can't explain this to a child. (p236)"

"All that held him together now was the crowd, and when the parade was finally over and they drew apart he would disperse, too, in so many pieces that not even the work of his own clever hands could shape him back the way he was. (p315)"

"The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide. (p40)"

"...I let my thoughts run out like water from a dam. (p66)"

"Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away. It was happening already. (p94)"

"You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where. (p190)"

"I had gotten humble in the past week, not just losing the touch but getting jolted into the understanding that would prey on me from here on out. Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after -- lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again. Also, you have the feeling someone wore it before you and someone will after. I can't explain that, not yet, but I'm putting my mind to it. (p213)"

"And so when they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don't ever forget this: I loved what I saw. And yes, it is true that I've done all the things they say. That's not what gets them. What aggravates them is I've never shed one solitary tear. I'm not sorry. (p217)"

"All through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in. (p221)"

""...Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can." (p263)"

"So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first. To be a son of a father was like that. In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt the stars. I felt them roosting on my shoulders with his hand. The moon came up red and warm. (p271)"

"(Did you feel you weren't finding yourself in the books you read?) LE: Perhaps that's why I was drawn to science fiction. If you don't see yourself reflected, you can travel to another world. I suppose that was probably what drew me to the captivity narrative. This idea that this was telling me something about my family."

"I started Future Home of the Living God sometime after the 2000 U.S. election. I was furious and worried. I saw the results of electing George W. Bush as a disaster for reproductive rights. Sure enough, he began by reinstating the global gag rule, which cuts international funding for contraceptives if abortion is mentioned. This, when we face overpopulation."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) Reading about an ordinary person who behaves with integrity in a terrifying situation. (2016)"

"Nothing. I was a model child. It was the teacher’s mistake I am sure. The box was drawn on the blackboard and the names of misbehaving children were written in it. As I adored my teacher, Miss Smith, I was destroyed to see my name appear. This was just the first of the many humiliations of my youth that I’ve tried to revenge through my writing. I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes."

"These treaties had been made since the beginning of our country on a nation-to-nation basis with every tribe. And they all contain these words, as long as the grass grows, as long as the rivers flow."

"I'm a very mixed person. And yet, being a citizen of a nation within our nation gives one a certain sense of - it changes your life. It means that I care deeply about my people, my mother's people."

"The reasoning behind the best schools being far away was to assimilate native children, to train them to live in a culture that was very different from their parents. So that when they came home, often children couldn't speak the language that their parents were speaking. I have to say right here that boarding schools are often characterized in sort of a lump definition, but they were all very different. And the government had secular boarding schools which underwent a real sea change in the 1930s and became much more supportive of native culture, while many of the boarding schools which were run by religious groups did not and remained hostile to native religion and native culture."

"I've been asked by people, well, why wasn't that great? Why didn't people just want to move away from their reservation and become like everybody else? You know, I've been asked that question. It's a fair question. And the answer is because native people aren't like everybody else, and native people want to stay who we are, right? And that's because the government made a very firm decision not to put money into the infrastructure on reservations, not to keep the treaties. The treaties stated that they would provide for health, education and the general welfare of native people as they struggled into this new form of existence. And that was basically rent for all that the rest of the country enjoys; all of the lands, all of the rivers, all of the places that no longer belonged to Native Americans."

"Now there is a lot more awareness about missing and murdered Indigenous women. And it hasn't - of course, it hasn't stopped. It's probably gotten worse."

"If you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book (The Night Watchman) erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart."

"I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes."

"The Ojibwe say that each word has a spirit."

"English is a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures—its cruelty is its vitality."

"I’ve come to love the traditional Ojibwe ceremonies, and some rituals, but I hate religious rules. They are usually about controlling women. On Sundays when other people go to wood-and-stone churches, I like to take my daughters into the woods. Or at least work in the garden and be outside. Any god we have is out there. I’d hate to be certain that there was nothing. When it comes to God, I cherish doubt."

"People assume there is just one sort of Native experience. No."

"It didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That’s how one has to write anyway—in secret."

"I suppose one develops a number of personas and hides them away, then they pop up during writing. The exertion of control comes later. I take great pleasure in writing when I get a real voice going and I’m able to follow the voice and the character. It’s like being in a trance state. Once that had happened a few times, I knew I needed to write for the rest of my life. I began to crave the trance state. I would be able to return to the story anytime, and it would play out in front of me, almost effortlessly."

"All of the books will be connected somehow—by history and blood and by something I have no control over, which is the writing itself. The writing is going to connect where it wants to, and I will have to try and follow along."

"By having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. I hate to ­pigeonhole myself as a writer, but being a female and a mother and a Native American are important aspects of my work, and even more than being mixed blood or Native, it’s difficult to be a mother and a writer...It’s because you’re ­always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time ­because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way. You are alerted to any danger to your child, and by extension you become afraid of anybody getting hurt. This becomes the most powerful thing to you; it’s instinctual. Either you end up writing about terrible things happening to children—as if you could ward them off simply by writing about them—or you tie things up in easily opened packages, or you pull your punches as a writer. All deadfalls to watch for...having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I’d have written with less fervor; I wouldn’t understand life in the same way. I’d write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I’d probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I’d have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I’ve made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor."

"Bits of narrative always cling to a title, like magnetism."

"I have always kept notebooks—I have an obsessive devotion to them—and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas."

"(A journalist once asked you what advice you would give someone trying to write a novel. You said, “Don’t take the project too seriously.” Is that what you would say today?) LE: I think I meant that grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret. I’d be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how good I think a book is on one day, I know now that a time will come when I will look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are a writer, that will be true. Writing has saved my life...I needed a way to go at life. I needed meaning. I might have chosen something more self-destructive had I not found writing."

"If I am writing a novel, it casts an aura around me and I get ideas for it, descriptions, words, phrases, at all times. I’m always jotting in notebooks I keep with me. That delight of immersion in a book is as good as a trance. For a while, the book is so powerful that I can follow the thread even through my chaotic daily existence, with children at all hours, school, dinner, long calls to my daughters, my ever-demanding house, barking dogs, and the bookstore."

"Any good business is about its people."

"People need bookstores and need other readers. We need the intimate communication with others who love books. We don’t really think we do, because of the ease that the Internet has introduced, but we still need the physical world more than we know."

"There’s something very wrong in our country—and not just in the book business. We now see what barely fettered capitalism looks like. We are killing the small and the intimate. We all feel it and we don’t know quite why everything is beginning to look the same. The central cores of large cities can still sustain interesting places. But all across our country we are intent on developing chain after chain with no character and employees who work for barely livable wages. We are losing our individuality. Killing the soul of our landscape. Yet we’re supposed to be the most individualistic of countries. I feel the sadness of it every time I go through cities like Fargo and Minneapolis and walk the wonderful old Main Streets and then go out to the edges and wander through acres of concrete boxes. Our country is starting to look like Legoland."

"(Is writing a lonely life for you?) LE: Strangely, I think it is. I am surrounded by an abundance of family and friends, and yet I am alone with the writing. And that is perfect."

"When I moved to Minnesota, I found there was a thriving and determined movement, a grassroots movement, to revitalize the Ojibwe language. And I’ve never come to be a competent speaker, I have to say that right now. But even learning the amount of Ojibwe that one can at my age is a life-altering experience. (BM: How so?) LE: You see the world in a different way. And to be told that you’re working in a language in which there is a spirit behind this language. I think it has to do with this being one of the indigenous languages of this continent. In which, as you look around, you see the forms of things that were named long, long ago. And you see the forms of things that have been named relatively recently. You know, this is…"

"(BM: Your cultures, plural, keep competing within your imagination, don’t they?...Where do your ideas come from, if you have this constant interplay between these many cultures?) LE: You know, I live on the margin of just about everything. I’m a marginal person, and I think that is where I’ve become comfortable. I’m marginally there in my native life. I can do as much as I can, but I’m always German too, you know, and I’m always a mother. That’s my first identity, but I’m always a writer too. I have to write. I have to be an artist. You know, I have a very fractured inner life, I think."

"…we rationalize ourselves out of shame. We can rationalize anything away as we get older and older, but a child hasn’t that capacity yet. And so when the shame hits, it’s being knocked over. And it’s the truth of shame. And it’s what comes back to us. Sometimes when we are—and it—this is what happens to everybody. There’s going to be a time, no matter who we are, that we participate in the very oldest of human sorrows. We are at one with other people in our loss, in our shame, and we come to the very limit of who we are as people. We face that part of ourselves that we never wanted to look at. And then we experience shame the way a child experiences it…It’s pure. It’s pure and that moment and other moments like it link us with other human beings, I think."

"a mother is a frayed net, you know. We stretch ourselves over everything we can. But there’s holes all over the place where things get through and we do everything we can and fathers and—you know, as parents, we try so hard. But we can’t do it all. We can’t completely protect. I think in a very odd sense, I want things to be in ordinary for my children, routine. I want things to be simple, you know, for them to cope with. But that’s not what the world is like. And that’s not even what they want. They want to grow. They want to grow in every way that they possibly can and that’s going to involve pain."

"(BM: do you have an assured faith now?) LE: I go through a continual questioning. And I think that is my assurance that if I was to let go of my doubt, that I would somehow have surrendered my faith. My job is to address the mystery. My job is to doubt. My job is to keep searching, keep looking. When I think about my version of what a God is and I keep changing it, right now I think of this creator as a great artist, we don’t understand works of art when we see them. They’re—the greatest works of art are—we see them through a glass darkly. We don’t understand them. They’re very difficult for us to understand. So with this great work of art in which we’re all participating, this great artist has made beauty and terror and death and cruelty and humor and mystery part of who we are and commerce. And health care reform. Everything is part of this mystery."

"(Q: Were there any established writers whom you knew and were important to your writing career during or after your apprenticeship period?) A: Mark Vinz, Cynthia MacDonald, Richard Howard, Charles Newman, Edmund White, M. L. Rosenthal, and then, although Love Medicine went out with absolutely no expectations or any prepublication notes or hype, none at all, Toni Morrison, Kay Boyle, Philip Roth, Peter Matthiessen, Anne Tyler, and Rosellen Brown read an unknown manuscript and responded with those quotes and marks of approval that appear on book jackets. These were completely unsolicited and I still find it remarkable that these writers, overwhelmed with pleas and manuscripts, picked up Love Medicine and responded. There were a great number of people kind along the way. One hears much more about the egomania and posturing of writers than one does about the devotion that writers have for one another's work. (1993)"

"(Q: Who are the writers who influenced your work or served as models?) A: Michael Dorris, of course: believer, critic, beloved, and the person I most admire. Other than Michael, it is hard to pick out lasting influences. I'm a browser, prey to temporary enthusiasms. In my reading life, I usually have a number of books "going" at once. Last year I read nature essays. This year, women's politics and Henry James. My favorites over the years include Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Angela Carter, Gabrel Garcia Marquez, Marguerite Duras, Robert Stone, Jane Smiley, Robb Forman Dew, Jean Rhys, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Rene Char, Larry Woiwode, Christina Stead, Katherine Anne Porter, Willa Cather, Jim Harrison, the poets Louise Gluck, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds and Donald Hall. I read Madame Bovary and Jane Austen and George Eliot over and over. (1993 interview)"

"(Q: Are you concerned that being labelled a "Native American writer" or a "woman writer" might result in your being marginalized? Do you object to those labels?) Erdrich: I think they originate in course descriptions and that there is some use in them. If the work survives, perhaps they'll fall away. If not, there isn't much I can do about it. After all, I don't think we read George Eliot, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, or Flannery O'Connor as "women writers" anymore, but as vital voices of their time. I know that, for instance, Toni Morrison will be read in this fashion. She is already. The point we're striving for is one at which the criteria for the work is its worth to readers, its excellence, the qualities that shine out and endure. (1993)"

"(Wasn't it Pete Seeger who once said that any time you assemble a group of people, for whatever purpose, you have the body politic?) LE: That's what people on reservations say. You know, everything's political. Getting your teeth fixed is political. There's no way around it. I just don't want to become polemical. That's the big difference. (1991)"

"when you love someone you try to listen to them. Their voice then comes through. (1987)"

"The recent abundance of Native American writers follows the course of Native American fortunes in general. Things got better for Native Americans in education, in health, in many areas. I'm one who has benefited from Bureau of Indian Affairs money and education. The program at Dartmouth really stresses the importance of keeping your heritage. All of these things really work together. If things continue as they are now under the Reagan administration, we can expect to see a corresponding absence of younger Native American writers as well as Native American doctors, lawyers, everything-who don't have the educational advantages. These things are linked to a national governmental attitude toward keeping those promises of providing education and tribal assistance. (1986)"

"there's such a sense of humor and irony in Native American life, in tribal life. I mean, that's one of the things that does not get portrayed often enough-that there's such an irony and humor. (1986)"

"Today, great writers from minority groups in the U.S. are finding their voice in the wonderful, rich imagery of magic realism. Writers such as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Amy Tan all have a unique, rich way of writing that can be described as magic realism. These women are among those who have broken away from the style of writing that defines most of the fiction coming from industrialized countries: that pragmatic, minimalist style and way of facing reality in which the only things one dares talk about are those things one can control."

"Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver. They write, as you say, from the margins: a subversive novel, with an anti-WASP tone that I love."

"Anishinaabe Louise Erdrich’s novel Future Home of the Living God (2017) is a really interesting take on decolonizing the Anthropocene."

"A further measure of the importance of the feminism of women of color was the tremendous efflorescence in their fiction. The writings of Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan, and Louise Erdrich, among others, played a major role in bringing the feminist message and perspective to the masses of American women."

"Philip Roth has declared her "greatly gifted" and found in her work "originality, authority, tenderness, and a pitiless and wild wit," and Toni Morrison has written that "the beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being devastated by its power.""

"Louise Edrich's book Love Medicine gave me a new way of understanding how fiction could work with values and commercial values - I think her book is really important in that respect, because it's a new direction for Indian writers. I think also how radical writers have tried very hard to do what she did - intending, for herself, just to write fiction - that is, telling the plain stories of people and their lives without pity, judgment, opinion, or romanticization."

"Louise Erdrich, who recently won the Nelson Algren short fiction award, writes of survival in a tone that has quiet strength. Roles reverse. The hunted and the hunter merge, become one. The poems contain a mystery and depth that charge them with meaning and intensity."

"Like two of her favorite contemporary writers, Marilynne Robinson and Joan Chase, Erdrich is committed to evoking the spirit of place."

"I read Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine,” with its strong multiple voices. The stories were bound by community and mutual loss. That later became a model for the structure of “The Joy Luck Club.”"

"Love Medicine has received all kinds of acclaim. Like many others, Ursula Le Guin is unrestrained in her praise of Love Medicine which she calls "a work of really startling beauty and power" and of you, Louise, whom she refers to as "a true artist and probably a major one" [SAIL, Winter 1985]."

"We are story gatherers. That's what we humans do."

"The traditional ways and rituals of all of Earth's peoples are kept in containers of poetry, song, and story. It is how we know who we are, where we are coming from and who we are becoming."

"In my community, we are taught that leadership qualities include humility, compassion, a sense of fairness, the ability to listen, preparation and carry-through, a love for the people, and a strong spiritual center that begins with a connection to Earth."

"When she broke on Earth, the light in her was not broken. We cannot break light, nor can we destroy it."

"Poetry (and other forms of writing) can be useful as a tool for finding the way into or through the dark. Or a device with which to admire the complexity of the stories in which we have become entangled. Sometimes the only way out is by voice, following the music into the impossible."

"The most powerful poetry is birthed through cracks in history, through what is broken and unseen."

"It was all connected, this poetics of listening, word making, and dancing. There was power to transform, to lighten the heaviness of the burden of being human. That's how I came to understand the power of poetry and music. It was a tool, but more than a tool. Words and music evoked a state of mind that lifted us up when racial and historical despair threatened."

"Emerging from a story, a poem, the Earth, a time in history, or from the body of our mothers is sometimes explosive, chaotic, frightening, yet always awe-inspiring and humbling. We can use the energy to create fresh structures, or we can destroy or be destroyed. The energy can have power over us or empower us, and even what is destructive might clear the debris so that fresh life can emerge from embers or ashes."

"We must take care to feed the minds, hearts, and spirits of those coming up behind us--to offer songs, poems, and stories that will break open that which is hardened, expose that which is evil-minded or would harm, and remind us how we are constructed to bring forth beauty of thought and beingness."

"Even a lost place within yourself is a place, albeit liminal, a kind of border town. You can make a temporary home if you need to from found materials and shreds of forgotten dreams, and you can even dress to appear somewhat ordinary as you run away, a refugee from yourself. I rolled up the map of my known world and set it aside for some kind of strange autonomy. (Part Four: Diamond Light, p187)"

"Our physical living is held together by plant sacrifice. We eat, wear, and are sheltered by plants and plant material. Nearly all of our medicines are plant-derived. We need to take time with them, get to know them. (Part Six: Sunset, p287)"

"You were born of a generation that promised to help remember. (p23)"

"A family is essentially a field of stories, each intricately connected. Death does not sever the connection; rather, the story expands as it continues unwinding inter-dimensionally. (p30)"

"We are all here to serve each other. At some point we have to understand that we do not need to carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story, which is mental; feel the story, which is physical; let the story go, which is emotional; then forgive the story, which is spiritual, after which we use the materials of it to build a house of knowledge. (p32)"

"In the short-root mind, a kind of mind of a people whose children don't even know the names of their great-grandparents, there is no past. Everything is right now. This kind of mind has its roots in the material culture, in what can be accumulated. My great-grandfather reminds me that we need to keep within the long-rooted mind. Because of the longer roots we have a larger structure of knowing from which to take on understanding. (p78)"

"I marked myself once with a knife. I was disappearing into the adolescent sea of rage and destruction. The mark of pain assured me of my own reality. The cut could speak. It had a voice that cried out when I could not make a sound in my defense. I never made such a mark again. Instead I chose to slash art onto canvas, pencil marks onto paper, and when I could no longer carry the burden of history, I found other openings. I found stories. (North, p91)"

"When Sun leaves at dusk, it makes a doorway. We have access to ancestors, to eternity. Breathe out. Ask for forgiveness. Let all hurts and failures go. Let them go. (p171)"

"European and American settlers soon took over the lands that were established for settlement of eastern tribes in what became known as Indian Territory. The Christian god gave them authority. Yet everyone wanted the same thing: land, peace, a place to make a home, cook, fall in love, make children and music. (p19)"

"Every soul has a distinct song. (p19)"

"In the end, we must each tend to our own gulfs of sadness, though others can assist us with kindness, food, good words, and music. Our human tendency is to fill these holes with distractions like shopping and fast romance, or with drugs and alcohol. (p23)"

"Those of fire move about the earth with inspiration and purpose. They are creative, and can consume and be consumed by their desires (p25)"

"A story matrix connects all of us. (p28)"

"...I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul. (p135)"

"I believe that if you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned. (p135)"

"No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams. This legacy either will give those who follow us joy on their road or will give them sorrow. (p149)"

"In the American mainstream imagination, warriors were always male and military, and when they were Indian warriors they were usually Plains Indian males with headdresses. What of contemporary warriors? And what of the wives, mothers, and daughters whose small daily acts of sacrifice and bravery were usually unrecognized or unrewarded? These acts were just as crucial to the safety and well-being of the people...For the true warriors of the world, fighting is the last resort to solving a conflict. Every effort is made to avoid bloodshed. (p150)"

"These fathers, boyfriends, and husbands were all men we loved, and were worthy of love. As peoples we had been broken. We were still in the bloody aftermath of a violent takeover of our lands. Within a few generations we had gone from being nearly one hundred percent of the population of this continent to less than one-half of one percent. (p158)"

"There are many of us and we're not just poets. We're teachers. We're dancers. Essentially, we're human beings. And you would think that at this time we would not have to say that. But we still are in the position, strangely enough, that we still have to remind people and the public that: We're still here, we're still active. We have active, living cultures and we are human beings and we write poetry. (2020)"

"We talk about needing food, clothing and shelter, but ... that's bodily. But we also need to feed our spirits, and we need to feed our souls, and maybe we even feed history and grow it one way or the other. (2020)"

"I think it’s easier to honor the male in our culture because it’s much more accepted. There are almost no truly powerful and sustained images of female power. None. Look at Marilyn Monroe? The Virgin Mary? And what images exist for Indian women? The big question is, How do we describe ourselves as women in this culture? It’s unclear."

"I've come to realize that what has motivated my art-making is really a strong need for justice, for "people" to be treated [with respect.] And then when I say people, I also mean animals and insects and the birds and the earth and the earth person that we are all part of — that there's a key element and that's respect. And my work has always been motivated by that need for respect."

"President Andrew Jackson went against Congress to remove Southeastern Native peoples from the lands there into Indian territory, or what became known as Oklahoma. Of course, we did not go willingly. There were several scuffles and fights and even massacres against this illegal removal. But we were force-marched from our homelands. I think a lot of America thinks it was only the Cherokee — or the so-called "five civilized tribes," that included the Muscogee (Creek) — but these kind of removals or forced migration or marches happened all over the country."

"I think a lot of America, when they think back in history and see Natives, we were hiding out in the woods, wearing rags and so on, but we had huge societies. I have a great, great, great uncle who had the largest horse-racing establishment on the Eastern Seaboard, a Muscogee (Creek) man and half Irish. And they wanted that, they wanted what we had."

"I remember at one point going out to do a story, just after the [1979] Church Rock uranium spill, and there were children out playing in the water and in the livestock and the Navajo speakers were saying, "We need a word." How do we come up with a word that will tell the people that even though you can't see it, there is something dangerous here that can harm you and you can't use these waters, when it was the only source of water for their livestock?"

"when I went to first grade, when we started to learn how to read, I was so thrilled about what happened with symbols and that suddenly it opened up a world to me. I read all of the books in the first grade classroom and was sent into the second grade, and it became like a hunger for me. I liked the sounds, of course, I like the sound that words make. I like the percussion, the percussive elements and the images and so on. Just like the same kind of thing I heard in my mother's song-making. But the more I read and the more the ability grew, the deeper I could read, the more stories and I could be transported in — much the same way that I could be in that kind of visionary dream world when I was younger. And when we get to about 7 — and I think this happens to a lot of us — we forsake those realms of knowing and understanding, and reading helped give that back."

"I’ll be in a car or a bus or a van or whatever, looking at the houses and the windows and all the storefronts, and thinking about all the different realms, all the different story realms, and how many — every place, every window, every doorway is an opening to a life — a whole different life, a whole series of stories. And it’s multiplied hundreds and thousands of times. And some don’t overlap at all. Some are in their very private universes; other universes are more expansive."

"I’m a great-grandmother now. I was a grandmother in my 30s and a teenage mother. And what that’s given me is a kind of a broader sense of the story field."

"we don’t live in a society, generally, that supports dreams as knowledge. And we’re not living in a place like that."

"think about it — about half of our lives, we’re out gathering information that we may not bring forth consciously, and for some of us, it’s like it’s a library that we go to when we need to know something. It works in that way."

"what happens in this country is that Natives are — our stories, our presence has basically been disappeared from the American story because if it’s true — if it’s true that we’re still here, and if it’s true that what did happen was, you know, was grand theft and massacre — then there’s something inherently broken with the story that needs to be repaired. The other thing, too, is that we are here. And yet, people expect us to be in our traditional outfits, if we’re recognized. They don’t recognize us unless we’re mascots or we’re wearing our traditional outfits."

"I’ve been around Natives all over the — all over the world, but there’s something about Oklahoma Natives, you know, something about a Southern kind of openness, which makes more holes for laughter to go through, or for the ironic to live."

"It’s important that, I think, that everyone realizes that they have a connection with the natural world; it’s not something that just belongs to the Indigenous peoples. We might be closer, because we’ve been here longer, to particular elements of it, but, you know, this is something that is inherently part of the legacy of human beings."

"it was that discipline of art which gave — you know, visioning is one way that — and the ability to vision and having tools for visioning — helps any of us out of almost impossible situations."

"Our class and our generation really shifted Native art, in the contemporary world art scene."

"I think of poetry as a kind of lyricism. I think of poetry as a place beyond words, that we — you know, the paradox is, we use words to get there."

"A poem can be like a pocket that can hold anything, almost anything. You can hold different kinds of time. It can hold grief, it can hold history, and it is often — a poem has come to me or through me, and it’s taught me what I needed to know."

"when you’re writing, and I think when you’re creating, too, it’s a large part of that act of writing or — whether it’s music or stories or poetry or drawing, or any of the — it’s — a large part of it is listening."

"Poetry and living — they’re often the same thing."

"I would think that everyone wants a place for their children to live, and to live peaceably, but why aren’t we included in — as human? You know, we’re still being excluded, and we’re still — it’s still there. Those same people that moved us are still there. The same people that signed off and drove us and forced us out of the South, into the — Tulsa, they’re still there."

"I have grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and children, and in the original teachings, we’re told that they’re all our children. And how can I — I have to think of them, and they’re the rudder of hope. I mean, that’s where we’re going, with them."

"Everything is about — I think even — all the teachings, ultimately, wind up — the stories, everything — wind up at a point of harmony. And when you wind up at that point, everything will be reckoned with."

"A lot of images [of Native Americans] are based on fairy tales or Wild West shows. We are human beings, not just people who have been created for people’s fantasy worlds. There’s not just one Native American. We’re diverse by community, by land, by language, by culture. In fact, we go by our tribal names, and there are 573 tribal nations."

"It’s about learning to listen, much like in music. You can train your ears to history. You can train your ears to the earth. You can train your ears to the wind. It’s important to listen and then to study the world, like astronomy or geology or the names of birds. A lot of poets can be semihistorians. Poetry is very mathematical. There’s a lot in the theoretical parts that is similar. Quantum physicists remind me of mystics. They are aware of what happens in timelessness, though they speak of it through theories and equations."

"I can remind people that they use poetry, go to poetry, frequently, and may not even know they are. A lot of song lyrics are poetry. They go to poetry for a transformational moment, to speak when there are no words to speak."

"I always play or perform music with my poetry. When poetry came into the world, it did not arrive by itself, but it came with music and dance."

"Audiences for poetry are growing because of the turmoil in our country–political shifts, climate shifts. When there’s uncertainty, when you’re looking for meaning beyond this world–that takes people to poetry. We need something to counter the hate speech, the divisiveness, and it’s possible with poetry."

"Every poem has so many poetry ancestors. How can we construct a poetry ancestor map of America that would include and start off with poetry of indigenous nations? Those strands would continue into the present with the wonderful young Native poets we have right now. I guess what strikes me is the diversity—the diversity of Native poetry, which was here and is here and is still growing, and the diversity of American poetry, which has roots all over the world—and I’ve always wanted to show that, ultimately, there’s a root system that’s connected all over the Americas, which is one body and all over the world. A healthy ecosystem is a system of diversity. That’s the same thing in poetry, different poetry streams. It’s the same thing with peoples in a country."

"America has always been multicultural, before the term became ubiquitous, before colonization, and it will be after."

"We must know the mythic structures that define us."

"There were no Native names in the American book of poetry when I began writing poetry, though there are many."

"Each of us is descended from poetry ancestors. It’s the same for any art, any occupation. There is a lineage of style, knowledge and culture passed from generation to generation, one artist to another. Ultimately all poetry is related in the family tree of poetry…"

"Poetry is the art that is closest to music, standing between music and narrative orality (which can be speechmaking, sermon or theater). Poetry is the voice of what can’t be spoken, the mode of truth-telling when meaning needs to rise above or skim below everyday language in shapes not discernible by the ordinary mind. It trumps the rhetoric of politicians. Poetry is prophetic by nature and not bound by time. Because of these qualities poetry carries grief, heartache, ecstasy, celebration, despair, or searing truth more directly than any other literary art form. It is ceremonial in nature. Poetry is a tool for disruption and creation and is necessary for generations of humans to know who they are and who they are becoming in the wave map of history. Without poetry, we lose our way."

"We're all putting energy out whatever we're doing... we're in a constant stream of energy, and we're either singing or making noise. (2009)"

"We are all born within a familial stream of connection. It grows us and in turn we feed it. We live in give and take. That's basic human law, and many indigenous cultures still consciously practice it. (2009)"

"Children are considered the continuance of life. They are spirits who have come to share the world with us. We have a responsibility to nurture their gifts, to teach them. A ceremony or gathering cements the relationship and responsibilities. The over-culture has infantilized children and the experience of children. And the over-culture keeps us as children so we do not question consumption and the needs of our souls. (Over-culture is a term I created to name the false culture that traps us economically, whose products do not feed our souls with filling cultural song-story-art food.) (2009)"

"For me, dancing has always meant the ability to move about in the world without question. (2009)"

"(What advice do you have for minority writers who are fighting to be heard or who are struggling for legitimacy in American literature?) Remember that you are born with gifts that need to planted and grown. This "American" culture is young and rootless. It is adolescent with an adolescent sense of time and place that is "here and now," with no reference or power rooted in the earth, ancestors, or historical and mythical sense. Value your community and what that has to offer and continue to reach out beyond what you know to grow fresh ideas, meetings between borders, new roots. (2008)"

"(What thoughts do you have for young and new writers coming up?) Those who write are assisting in constructing the next world, the next consciousness. Be open, aware, and study. Study with all parts of your being, not just your intellect. Some of your knowledge may come from books, most of it from other sources. Always allow yourself to be surprised. And, write. (2008)"

"Yes, we're still struggling to have a place here, though, ironically, we have a place. It's the fearful ones who try and keep us out who are still looking for a place. (2008)"

"Earth is larger than humans in size and consciousness. We're guests on this earth. Humans are just part of a larger creation. If it so happens we were given dominion, or males were-and I don't believe this at all and it's one reason I walked away from the church at thirteen-then we certainly won't have it next time around. We've done nothing but rape the earth of its resources and don't even turn around. We forget to say thank you. (2005)"

"(What do you believe/feel/know lies at the heart of your body of work?) JH: Compassion. Joy. (2003)"

"Really, all poetry is a prayer, you have to go to the center place, inside you, to write poetry. (1994"

"...it is what we are made of, the stories that we carry with us. Stories create us. We create ourselves with stories. Stories that our parents tell us, that our grandparents tell us, or that our great-grandparents told us, stories that reverberate through the web. (1994)"

"In the middle of all the tension and destruction, there is a laughter of absolute sanity that might sound like someone insane. Maybe laughter is the voice of sense. I always tell my students that you cannot take everything too seriously because at will kill you. If you carry bitterness and hatred around, it gives you arthritis, rheumatism, cancer. Certainly, I have to be aware of everything that is happening, but I can't let it kill me. (1994)"

"Alcoholism is an epidemic in native people, and I write about it. I was criticized for bringing it up, because some people want to present a certain image of themselves. But again, it comes back to what I was saying: part of the process of healing is to address what is evil. Evil causes disease, when something isn't settled. The very process of the healing is talking about it and recognizing it. Alcoholism is hiding, it comes out of an inability to speak. (1994)"

"...you pick up the saxophone again, I suppose it's like writing poetry, you are picking up the history of that. Playing saxophone is like honoring a succession of myths. I never thought of this before but: the myth of saxophone and here comes Billie Holiday and there's Coltrane. I love his work dearly, especially "A Love Supreme." That song has fed me. And all of that becomes. When you play you're a part of that, you have to recognize those people. (1993)"

"(In the dedication to In Mad Love and War you affirm that "the erotic belongs in the poetry, as in the self." Can you elaborate?) It has taken me years to divest myself of Christian guilt, the Puritan cloud that provides the base for culture in this country... or at least to recognize the twists and turns of that illogic in my own sensibility. In that framework the body is seen as an evil thing and is separate from spirit. The body and spirit are not separate. Nor is that construct any different in the place from which I write poetry. There is no separation. (1993)"

"I'm already tired of hearing about this madman Columbus and discovery. Yet, this quincentenary is important because crucial attention is being paid to the indigenous peoples of this america. I say there never was an "encounter." To have an encounter would be quite a groundbreaking event! That would require Euro-Americans and Europeans to meet native peoples with respect. I don't know that it's ever been done. There was always a hidden agenda, a hierarchy in which the lives of native peoples were counted as worthless, as were the cultures. What a tremendous loss for everyone! (1992)"

"I truly feel there is a new language coming about-look at the work of Meridel LeSueur, Sharon Doubiago, Linda Hogan, Alice Walker - it's coming from the women. Something has to be turned around. (1990)"

"I want to have some effect in the world; I want my poetry to be useful in a native context as it traditionally has been. In a native context art was not just something beautiful to put up on the wall and look at; it was created in the context of its usefulness for the people. (what do you hope your poems do?) JH: I hope that on some level they can transform hatred into love. Maybe that's being too idealistic; but I know that language is alive and living, so I hope that in some small way my poems can transform hatred into love."

"Poetry has given me a voice, a way to speak, and it has certainly enriched my vision so that I can see more clearly."

"Many people assume that all Indian people lived a long time ago in a certain in a certain way and wore certain clothes, so if you don't look like that now, you're not really Indian people; but all cultures change. In our case, the change has certainly been abrupt and shocking, and we have had to a struggle to maintain the heritage within that terrible upheaval...Maybe all artists now must struggle to understand the connections between the world of heritage and the present world. Those worlds certainly do converge and maybe poems are points of convergence or, in some sense, paintings of that convergence. Maybe the artist has always worked to find those connections, but I think the struggle is especially important in these difficult times when the illusion of separation among peoples has become so clear...*For me the illusion is that we're separate. That's the illusion."

"I think the natural movement of love is an opening, a place that makes connections...You have to be open in that way to write a poem that really works, and I think there's always love involved in the act of creation."

"There's an incredible relationship of guilt between native people and white Americans. It's an odd relationship. Many white Americans think native people have special spiritual knowledge or know certain tricks. Certainly there are some people who are more in touch with those things than others, but we all have prayer. Prayer was not just designated to native people, and there are no special spiritual qualities designated for native people. Of course, at one point we were all tribal people. Europeans were tribal people; all around the world the roots of all human beings were tribal."

"In the beginning when I was writing poetry, a poem had definite limits--I started out knowing definitely what I wanted to begin and end with, or one particular image that I wanted to stay with. Now I feel that my poems have become travels into that other space."

"I don't see time as linear. I don't see things as beginning and ending. A lot of people have a hard time understanding native people and native patience-they wonder why we aren't out marching to accomplish something. There is no question that we have had an incredible history, but I think to understand Indian people and the native mind you have to understand that we experience the world very differently. For us, there is not just this world, there's also a layering of others. Time is not divided by minutes and hours, and of everything has presence and meaning within this landscape of timelessness."

"People often forget that everything they say, everything they do, think, feel, dream, has effect, which to me is being Indian, knowing that. That's part of what I call "being Indian" or "tribal consciousness.""

"I realize writing can help change the world. I'm aware of the power of language which isn't meaningless words.... Sound is an extension of all, and sound is spirit, motion...Everything, anything that anybody says, it does go out and makes change in the world."

"The world is not disconnected or separate but whole. All persons are still their own entity but not separate from everything else-something that I don't think is necessarily just Native American, on this particular continent, or only on this planet. All people are originally tribal, but Europeans seem to feel separated from that, or they've forgotten it. If European people look into their own history, their own people were tribal societies to begin with and they got away from it. That's called "civilization."

"It seems es that the Native American experience has often been bitter. Horrible things have happened over and over. I like to think that bitter experience can be used to move the world, and if we can see that and work toward that instead of killing each other and hurting each other through all the ways that we have done it. (The world, not just Indian people, but the world.) JH: Sure, because we're not separate. We're all in this together. It's a realization I came to after dealing with the whole half-breed question. I realized that I'm not separate from myself either, and neither are Indian people separate from the rest of the world."

"It's like this, living is like a diamond or how they cut really fine stones. There are not just two sides but there are so many and they all make up a whole."

"Political means great movers. To me, you can define political in a number of ways. But I would hope it was in the sense that it does help move and change consciousness in terms of how different peoples and cultures are seen, evolve."

"Joy Harjo is one of the more powerful voices among the second generation of the so-called Native American Renaissance, the movement that arose in the late 1960s with N. Scott Momaday, James Welch]], and Leslie Marmon Silko. Through these works, extraordinarily innovative in content but also in form, these Indian writers for the first time bore witness directly to their native world, interpreting it from within and freeing it from the portrayals by white writers that had been at best ambivalent, if not thoroughly distorted. The arduous, agonizing reconstruction of the tribal past, the dramatic confrontation with white civilization, the existential and artistic itinerary through present-day America, the shady liminal area inhabited by mixed-bloods-such are the major themes of a literary corpus that has now grown to considerable proportions, one that within a span of thirty years has been acclaimed by critics and readers alike for its vitality and its prodigious variety of voices and styles."

"Joy Harjo has always been one of my favorite writers."

"The poems of Joy Harjo incorporate the aspects of identity, "children born, half-breed, blue eyes..." with the vision of spiritual life beneath the daily realities which face Indian women. She writes of earth, of change, and of the psychological genocide that is often so subtle we do not realize it exists. And she writes of the strength it takes to escape that destruction which often becomes destruction of the self."

"(Q: Who, other than yourself, are the important Native American writers?) NSM: Jim Welch...Louise Erdrich. Leslie Silko...Simon Ortiz and Joy Harjo are very good poets."

"It is my conviction that currently in the United States, more women than men are writing good and vital poetry, although there are fine male poets. This is our renaissance, our Elizabethan plenty. We have giants like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Diane di Prima and Maxine Kumin, we have rising powers like Joy Harjo and Celia Gilbert and Sharon Olds, and we have dozens and dozens of individual voices sharply flavored and yet of our time, our flesh, our troubles."

"Joy Harjo is one of the real poets of our mixed, fermenting, end-of-century imagination.""

"She's generous in her poetry, opening her sacred spaces and music to all, yet never naive or forgetful about hostility and hatred, as in "Transformations"... This is not forgiveness, turning the cheek. It's a claiming of power, the power of the poetic act, the courage and grace and knowledge it takes to reach, through "the right words, the right meaning” into that place in the other where "the most precious animals leave." It's about "tough belief," no sentimental gesturing. You hear it in the rhythms of Harjo's music, catching it in the bladed outlines of her images."

"Poets pledge allegiance to a country I don't believe in."

"The fundamental violence of colonialism, then, is perhaps the inculcated sense, a sensation that bubbles up most acutely by way of the physiological, that your body is not yours to keep, that it is never solely yours to maintain sovereign control over."

"Everything I did in the book that’s related to modern technology and contemporary behavior had to do with revisiting the idea of the historical monolithic Native American that everyone thinks of, and that ... the only real way to be a real Native American is to be historical or have a headdress or look this one way. It’s deeply damaging to a people to not have a dynamic range of ways to be that are still acceptable as Native. One of the common experiences of being a Native is to be questioned, like: Are you enough? So I wanted it to feel very contemporary and now."

"The initial impulse was just liking it in other books. … Also, coming from a community that felt voiceless in the larger scheme of things—as far as movies and literature, as far as representation goes—it felt like the right decision to have a whole bunch of voices come out, as opposed to one or two."

"I wanted to write characters that felt true and real, and there’s a lot of harrowing detail about the lives of Native people. You can just look at the health statistics and they’re pretty staggering. I wanted the characters to be working-class, because so often the characters in novels that I’ve read are white and upper-middle-class with white, upper-middle-class problems…"

"In Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, she talks about how someone was asking her what it’s like to come back to her childhood home in Oakland, where I also come from, and she says, “There is no there there.” She was talking about how it had been developed over and was unrecognisable. I was using that as a parallel to Native experience and the “there there” of the land before it was colonised, developed over and bordered."

"We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls. We know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even frybread. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere."

"They tore unborn babies out of bellies, took what we were intended to be, our children before they were children, babies before they were babies."

"Some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like we’ve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are something wrong … We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. But we punish ourselves with it."

"Our heads are on flags, jerseys, and coins. Our heads were on the penny first, of course, the Indian cent, and then on the buffalo nickel, both before we could even vote as a people — which, like the truth of what happened in history all over the world, and like all that spilled blood from slaughter, are now out of circulation."

"You were white, you were brown, you were red, you were dust. You were both and neither. When you took baths, you’d stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together in the same body."

"There are some extraordinary people working right now and there are scenes in literary fiction being published that I know wouldn’t have been published five years ago. But they probably would have 45 years ago. Tommy Orange, Torrey Peters, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Maisy Card are all extraordinary."

"There is nothing so beautiful as the free forest. To catch a fish when you are hungry, cut the boughs of a tree, make a fire to roast it, and eat it in the open air, is the greatest of all luxuries. I would not stay a week pent up in cities, if it were not for my passion for art."

"Some praise me because I am a colored girl, and I don’t want that kind of praise…I had rather you would point out my defects, for that will teach me something."

"I have strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered."

"I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art-culture, and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color. The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor."

"You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stones! Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men, but how dare I cut my mother's hair? I want my people to stay with me here. All the dead men will come to life again. Their spirits will come to their bodies again. We must wait here in the homes of our fathers and be ready to meet them in the bosom of our mother."

"Time matters. God will hold us accountable for the way we use it. All of us who call ourselves Christians share the same vocation to love God first and above all things; and to love our neighbor as ourselves. We’re citizens of heaven first; but we have obligations here. We’re Catholics and Christians first. And if we live that way — zealously and selflessly in our public lives — our country will be the better for it; and God will use us to help make the world new."

"When they laid down their arms, we murdered them. We lied to them. We cheated them out of their lands. We starved them into signing fraudulent agreements that we called treaties which we never kept. We turned them into beggars on a continent that gave life for as long as life can remember. And by any interpretation of history, however twisted, we did not do right. We were not lawful nor were we just in what we did. For them, we do not have to restore these people, we do not have to live up to some agreements, because it is given to us by virtue of our power to attack the rights of others, to take their property, to take their lives when they are trying to defend their land and liberty, and to make their virtues a crime and our own vices virtues. But there is one thing which is beyond the reach of this perversity and that is the tremendous verdict of history. And history will surely judge us. But do we care? What kind of moral schizophrenia is it that allows us to shout at the top of our national voice for all the world to hear that we live up to our commitment when every page of history and when all the thirsty, starving, humiliating days and nights of the last 100 years in the lives of the American Indian contradict that voice?"

"[T]he motion picture community has been as responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing his as savage, hostile and evil. It's hard enough for children to grow up in this world. When Indian children watch television, and they watch films, and when they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds be-come injured in ways we can never know."

"“If tribes can balance all the potential social issues, it could be a really huge opportunity,” Broadman said. But those social issues are monumental. “Indian tribes have been decimated by drug use,” Broadman said. “Tribal regulations of pot are going to have to dovetail with tribal values, making sure marijuana isn’t a scourge like alcohol or tobacco.”"

"In the 150 years or so leading up to the establishment of Brothertown, Northeastern tribes had developed a complex web of relationships with the British Crown. Sometimes diplomacy was a matter of straightforward treaty-making, sovereign to sovereign. Occasionally, tribes affirmed allegiance to Great Britain, but this was almost always done provisionally: “upon condition of His Majesties’ royal protection, and righting us of what wrong[s] us, or may be done unto us,” as one Narragansett declaration from 1643 put it. The advantage of acknowledging the jurisdiction of a distant monarch was that it gave the tribes legal standing equal to (or better than) that of colonists. Being “subjects unto the same King” in the years before the American Revolution, as the historian Jenny Hale Pulsipher has shown, was typically better than squaring off directly against colonial greed and malice. From this point of view, the Revolution was a disaster for Native people, because it deprived them of one of their most effective legal strategies. Even so, the tribes of the Northeastern Seaboard expressed little nostalgia for the British after their defeat. Although Brothertown’s parent tribes sometimes benefited from the protection of the British sovereign, they never aspired to full participation in the commonwealth. Nor did they see themselves as bound by “social contracts” of the kind theorized by European philosophers. Among tribal nations, political allegiances were fluid. A sachem (an Algonquian term for “chief”) who betrayed the interest of his tribe could easily find himself rejected by his people."

"Historians are finally beginning to confront the hard fact that the U.S. Constitution rules over Native nations as a kind of imperial law. This is ironic, given the “anti-colonial” ambitions of the U.S. rebels against British rule. Arguably, however, the “constitution of American colonialism” (to borrow a phrase from the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk) has more in common with the imperial law of ancient Rome than that of early modern Britain. Like Roman imperial law, U.S. law since the 1970s has allowed for the flourishing of multiple “sub-political groups,” each with its own national culture, under its sovereign jurisdiction. Like Rome, too, the U.S. has turned the determination of Native nationhood into a question of imperial administration. Today, the BIA, a division of the Department of the Interior within the executive branch, gets to decide which Native tribes are “sovereign” from the perspective of federal law—regardless, in many cases, of what tribes say about themselves."

"The evil, Sir, is enormous; the inevitable suffering incalculable. Do not stain the fair fame of the country. . . . Nations of dependent Indians, against their will, under color of law, are driven from their homes into the wilderness. You cannot explain it; you cannot reason it away. . . . Our friends will view this measure with sorrow, and our enemies alone with joy. And we ourselves, Sir, when the interests and passions of the day are past, shall look back upon it, I fear, with self-reproach, and a regret as bitter as unavailing.""

"After the Ghost Dance spread across the Rockies to the Plains tribes it ran amok. ...The fervor attacked the Plains tribes virulently, particularly the Sioux, who were at that time the largest and the most intransigent of them all. The Sioux had been forced to submit to a series of land grabs and to indignities that are almost unbelievable when read about today. ...they were being systematically starved into submission—by the White Bureaucracy—on the little that was left of their reservation in South Dakota. ...From Rosebud, the Ghost Dance spread like prairie fire to the Pine Ridge Sioux and finally to Sitting Bull's people at Standing Rock. The Sioux rebelled; the result was the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre of the Indians (despite their ghost shirts) at Wounded Knee in 1890."

"To aid in identifying Tribal name changes and corrections, the Tribe’s previously listed or former name is included in parentheses after the correct current Tribal name. We will continue to list the Tribe’s former or previously listed name for several years before dropping the former or previously listed name from the list. The listed Indian entities are acknowledged to have the immunities and privileges available to federally recognized Indian Tribes by virtue of their government-to-government relationship with the United States as well as the responsibilities, powers, limitations, and obligations of such Tribes. We have continued the practice of listing the Alaska Native entities separately for the purpose of facilitating identification of them."

"I think it's hard to make the case, which implicitly the left makes, that somehow the world would have been better off if the Europeans had stayed home. It certainly doesn't work for north America, that's for sure. I mean, I'm sure the Apache and the Navajo had all sorts of admirable traits. In the absence of literacy we don't know what they were because they didn't write them down. We do know they killed a hell of a lot of bison. But had they been left to their own devices, I don't think we'd have anything remotely resembling the civilisation we've had in north America."

"Article XI. A perpetual alliance offensive and defensive is to be entered into as soon as may be with the Six Nations; their Limits to be ascertained and secured to them; their Land not to be encroached on, nor any private or Colony Purchases made of them hereafter to be held good, nor any Contract for Lands to be made but between the Great Council of the Indians at Onondaga and the General Congress. The Boundaries and Lands of all the other Indians shall also be ascertained and secured to them in the same manner; and Persons appointed to reside among them in proper Districts, who shall take care to prevent Injustice in the Trade with them, and be enabled at our general Expense by occasional small Supplies, to relieve their personal Wants and Distresses. And all Purchases from them shall be by the Congress for the General Advantage and Benefit of the United Colonies."

"I remember watching 7th and 8th grade kids improve in reading. Their "lives" depended on it. The reaction of the faculty at the school was not so positive. I heard from Paul that we needed to eliminate any negative references to Native Americans. Since my generation had grown up on TV cowboy shows, my first reaction was that we were denying a piece of our own history. But upon reconsidering, I realized how powerful this game was in terms of immersing students into history. If any students of Native American ancestry played the game (and I'm sure there were plenty), they would be put in the position of constantly battling themselves. So we replaced "Indians ahead" with "riders ahead." Also, we replaced "tomahawked" with "knifed.""

"I will follow the white man's trail. I will make him my friend, but I will not bend my back to his burdens. I will be cunning as a coyote. I will ask him to help me understand his ways, then I will prepare the way for my children, and their children. The Great Spirit has shown me—a day will come when they will outrun the white man in his own shoes."

"Would the people of Maine permit the Penobscot tribe to erect an independent government within their state? And unless they did would it not be the duty of the general government to support them in resisting such a measure? Would the people of New York permit each remnant of the six nations within her borders to declare itself an independent people under the protection of the United States? Could the Indians establish a separate republic on each of their reservations in Ohio? And if they were so disposed would it be the duty of this government to protect them in the attempt? If the principle involved in the obvious answer to these questions be abandoned, it will follow that the objects of this government are reversed, and that it has become a part of its duty to aid in destroying the states which it was established to protect."

"Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for a while their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the states does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity. It is too late to inquire whether it was just in the United States to include them and their territory within the bounds of new states, whose limits they could control. That step can not be retraced. A state can not be dismembered by Congress or restricted in the exercise of her constitutional power. But the people of those states and of every state, actuated by feelings of justice and a regard for our national honor, submit to you the interesting question whether something can not be done, consistently with the rights of the states, to preserve this much-injured race."

"The emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience as individuals they will without doubt be protected in the enjoyment of those possessions which they have improved by their industry. But it seems to me visionary to suppose that in this state of things claims can be allowed on tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountain or passed them in the chase. Submitting to the laws of the states, and receiving, like other citizens, protection in their persons and property, they will ere long become merged in the mass of our population."

"It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community."

"Toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people. I have endeavored to impress upon them my own solemn convictions of the duties and powers of the general government in relation to the state authorities. For the justice of the laws passed by the states within the scope of their reserved powers they are not responsible to this government. As individuals we may entertain and express our opinions of their acts, but as a government we have as little right to control them as we have to prescribe laws for other nations."

"Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country and philanthropy has long been busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth... But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another... In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes… Philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?"

"The present policy of the Government is but a continuation of the same progressive change by a milder process. The tribes which occupied the countries now constituting the Eastern States were annihilated or have melted away to make room for the whites. The waves of population and civilization are rolling to the westward, and we now propose to acquire the countries occupied by the red men of the South and West by a fair exchange, and, at the expense of the United States, to send them to land where their existence may be prolonged and perhaps made perpetual. Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers; but what do they more than our ancestors did or than our children are now doing?"

"And is it supposed that the wandering savage has a stronger attachment to his home than the settled, civilized Christian? Is it more afflicting to him to leave the graves of his fathers than it is to our brothers and children? Rightly considered, the policy of the General Government toward the red man is not only liberal, but generous. He is unwilling to submit to the laws of the States and mingle with their population. To save him from this alternative, or perhaps utter annihilation, the General Government kindly offers him a new home, and proposes to pay the whole expense of his removal and settlement."

"Our system is to live in perpetual peace with the Indians, to cultivate an affectionate attachment from them, by everything just and liberal which we can do for them within the bounds of reason, and by giving them effectual protection against wrongs from our own people. The decrease of game rendering their subsistence by hunting insufficient, we wish to draw them to agriculture, to spinning and weaving. The latter branches they take up with great readiness, because they fall to women, who gain by quitting the labors of the field for those which are exercised within doors. When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for necessaries for their farms and families. To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. At our trading houses, too, we mean to sell so low as merely to repay us cost and charges, so as neither to lessen or enlarge our capital. This is what private traders cannot do, for they must gain; they will consequently retire from the competition, and we shall thus get clear of this pest without giving offence or umbrage to the Indians. In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation."

"With our Indian neighbors the public peace has been steadily maintained ... And, generally, from a conviction that we consider them as part of ourselves, and cherish with sincerity their rights and interests, the attachment of the Indian tribes is gaining strength daily... and will amply requite us for the justice and friendship practiced towards them ... [O]ne of the two great divisions of the Cherokee nation have now under consideration to solicit the citizenship of the United States, and to be identified with us in-laws and government, in such progressive manner as we shall think best."

"Scholars have exposed how the discourse of the vanishing Indian was an ideology that made declining Indigenous American populations seem to be an inevitable consequence of natural processes and so allowed Americans to evade moral responsibility for their destructive choices."

"A singular focus on Jackson obscures the fact that he did not invent the idea of removal…Months after the passage of the Removal Act, Jackson described the legislation as the 'happy consummation' of a policy 'pursued for nearly 30 years'"

"These people were of all races, colors, and creeds. French were in the north and in the Carolinas. Dutch had built the town on Manhattan island, and their patroons' estates in the Hudson valley; now they were building their own cabins in the Mohawk Indian country that is now New York State. Germans had settled in the Jerseys and in the far west, beyond Philadelphia. Germans and Scotch-Irish were climbing the Carolina mountains; Swedes were in Delaware, English and French and Dutch and Irish were settled in Massachusetts, the New Hampshire Grants, Connecticut, and Virginia. Mingled with all these were Italians, Portuguese, Finns, Arabs, Armenians, Russians, Greeks, and Africans from a dozen very different African peoples and cultures. Black, brown, yellow and white, all these peoples were some of them free and some of them slaves. Also they were intermarried with the American Indians."

""People were making money off of that racism of the Hollywood Indian. Of course, they're going to boo. They don't want their evening interrupted." Littlefeather said she was escorted offstage at the Oscars by a team of security guards. She said that for years Hollywood boycotted her, calling it being red listed."

"Being deeply impressed with the opinion that the removal of the Indian tribes from the lands which they now occupy within the limits of the several states and Territories . . . is of very high importance to our Union, and may be accomplished on conditions and in a manner to promote the interest and happiness of those tribes, the attention of the Government has been long drawn with great solicitude to the object. For the removal of the tribes within the limits of the State of Georgia the motive has been peculiarly strong, arising from the compact with that State whereby the United States are bound to extinguish the Indian title to the lands within it whenever it may be done peaceably and on reasonable conditions. . . . The removal of the tribes from the territory which they now inhabit . . . would not only shield them from impending ruin, but promote their welfare and happiness. Experience has clearly demonstrated that in their present state it is impossible to incorporate them in such masses, in any form whatever, into our system. It has also demonstrated with equal certainty that without a timely anticipation of and provision against the dangers to which they are exposed, under causes which it will be difficult, if not impossible to control, their degradation and extermination will be inevitable."

"It’s estimated that four out of five Native women experience some form of violence in their lifetime. Native women also face murder rates more than 10 times the national average. Despite efforts to raise awareness, of the 5,712 cases of MMIWG in the United States, only 116 were included in the Department of Justice database."

"After millennia of Native history, and centuries of displacement and dispossession, acknowledging original Indigenous inhabitants is complex. Many places in the Americas have been home to different Native Nations over time, and many Indigenous people no longer live on lands to which they have ancestral ties. Even so, Native Nations, communities, families, and individuals today sustain their sense of belonging to ancestral homelands and protect these connections through Indigenous languages, oral traditions, ceremonies, and other forms of cultural expression."

"Many Native Americans do not live on the tribal lands or reservations (only 22%) and many frequent a lifestyle of transience between tribal and state lands. This presents a variety of crucial issues involving reporting policies, jurisdictional complications, and communication and coordination problems between agencies. Native Americans residing in urban areas have few resources linked to their culture and tribal community. Many Urban Indians, people living in cities, fall into a “pipeline of vulnerability”: people of color, people experiencing poverty, people coming out of the foster care system, people lacking resources or family, people isolated emotionally, physically or psychologically. According to Janeen Comenote, executive director of the National Urban Indian Family Coalition, “poverty remains one of the most challenging aspects to contemporary urban Indian life. While I do recognize that a sizable chunk of our population[s] is solidly middle class, every Native person I know has either experienced poverty or has a family member who is. Housing and homelessness remain at the top-of-the-list of challenges."

"Native Americans today face some extraordinary challenges. These statistics from the Urban Indian Health Institute were compiled from a survey of 71 U.S. cities in 2016. The numbers speak for themselves: Native American women make up a significant portion of the missing and murdered cases. Not only is the murder rate ten times higher than the national average for women living on reservations but murder is the third leading cause of death for Native women."

"Abortion was frequently practiced in North America during the period from 1600 to 1900. Many tribal societies knew how to induce abortions..."

"When reading old accounts Rawitsch was surprised by just how often Native tribes intervened to offer assistance to travelers that were struggling along the trail. This was something he hoped he could insert into the game to combat the negative stereotypes that were prevalent at the time in other media. “We were very concerned about the way Native Americans were portrayed, because the schools that we taught in had significant populations of Native American students. In the diaries I read I probably should admit to being surprised by how often people wrote about the help they received from Native Americans who helped them understand where the trail was, where it went, what kind of food along the way was edible and which would make you ill.” This manifested itself in the game as a new event that could occur when players were struggling. Native Americans would approach the party and offer help by sharing food or supplies with the settlers."

"When the white man landed on the shores of the New World, an eclipse, blacker than any that ever darkened the sun, blighted the hopes and happiness of the native people, races then living in tranquility upon their own soil."

"While growing up on an Indian reservation in the Midwestern United States, I observed that fellow Indians loved western movies and paperbacks. Subsequently, I observed this phenomenon on Indian reservations in Oregon and North Dakota, as well as among Indians who lived off the reservations."

"I hardly sustain myself beneath the weight of white men's blood that I have shed. The whites provoked the war; their injustices, their indignities to our families, the cruel, unheard of and wholly unprovoked massacre at Fort Lyon … shook all the veins which bind and support me. I rose, tomahawk in hand, and I have done all the hurt to the whites that I could."

"Because I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit. It is not necessary, that eagles should be crows."

"The whites have driven us from the sea to the lakes. We can go no further... unless every tribe unanimously combines to give a check to the ambition and avarice of the whites they will soon conquer us apart and disunited and we will be driven from our native country and scattered as autumn leaves before the wind."

"The white men aren't friends to the Indians... At first they only asked for land sufficient for a wigwam; now, nothing will satisfy them but the whole of our hunting grounds from the rising to the setting sun."

"The fate of North American Indian tribes frequently resembled that of the Australian Aborigines. European settlers arrived on their native territories and claimed the land for their own. When the Indians resisted, the settlers, supported by their colonial governments, or their national, state, and local governments, were quick to drive out or kill the Indians and their families or to force them onto reservations to live out their lives in alien surroundings. As in the case of the Aborigines, children were taken from Indian families, women were kidnapped and raped, promises of peace were made and broken, and claims of racial and civilizational superiority were used by the settlers to justify their land grabbing and their killing. North American native peoples, like the Aborigines, were highly susceptible to the diseases brought to their homelands by the settlers and prone to the abuse of alcohol, which the settlers purposely employed to undermine their ability to resist. Those settlers who raised livestock, primarily cows and sheep, tended to have the sharpest conlicts with the Indians, provoking massacres and outright warfare between Indian tribes and government and militia formations. The tendency of the North American settlers to see the Indians as hopelessly primitive and incapable of marshaling the resources of the land gave them “reason” to deprive those Indians of the most desirable lands and territories."

"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

"In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance."

"I cannot dismiss the subject of Indian affairs without again recommending to your consideration the expediency of more adequate provision for giving energy to the laws throughout our interior frontier, and for restraining the commission of outrages upon the Indians; without which all pacific plans must prove nugatory. To enable, by competent rewards, the employment of qualified and trusty persons to reside among them, as agents, would also contribute to the preservation of peace and good neighbourhood. If, in addition to these expedients, an eligible plan could be devised for promoting civilization among the friendly tribes, and for carrying on trade with them, upon a scale equal to their wants, and under regulations calculated to protect them from imposition and extortion, its influence in cementing their interests with our's could not but be considerable."

"Almost the entire area of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, and also that of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and other western states, were the scenes of numerous individual combats with the Indians by Boone, Kenton, Weitzel, Poe, Zane, and others, now known as middle state pioneers, whose names ornament history, and who long preceded Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Beekwrth, Meek, Slim Jennings, and other noted hunters, scouts, and Indian fighters to the west of the Mississippi river. It has been estimated that since 1775 more than 5,000 white men, women and children have been killed in individual affairs with Indians, and more than 8,500 Indians. History, in general, notes but few of these combats. The Indian wars under the government of the United States have been more than 40 in number. They have cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women and children, including those killed in individual combats, and the lives of about 30,000 Indians. The actual number of killed and wounded Indians must be very much higher than the number given, as they conceal, where possible, their actual loss in battle, and carry their killed and wounded off and secrete them. The number given above is of those found by the whites. Fifty per cent additional would be a safe estimate to add to the numbers given."

"Since the advent of the European in the present United States there have been almost constant wars between whites and Indians, outbreaks, or massacres, beginning on the Pacific side in in 1539 and on the Atlantic side after 1600. The wars and outbreaks arose from various causes: from resistance by the Indian to the white man’s occupation of his land; from the white man’s murder of Indians; from the Indian’s murderous disposition; from national neglect and failure to keep treaties and solemn promises; from starvation, and so on. Within the past 100 years the Indians’ chief complaint was against the acts of individuals; when the reservation system became general the complaints changes from charges against settlers to charges of breach of faith against the United States, many of which in the past 20 years have been confirmed by investigation. The authorities as to these wars are numerous and much scattered; so much so that it would require years to collect the data to make a history of Indian wars. No such history has been written, and probably none will be. Prior to the organization of the government of the United States in 1789 individual companies of adventurers, various European governments, and the colonies were engaged in almost constant bloodshed with the Indians. War seems to have been a normal condition of a great portion of the American race; whether for good or conquest, it matters not. By their owns statements made to Europeans at their first coming war was one of the occupations of the Indians, if not their chief occupation. Indian tribal wars must have been bloody, as they seldom took prisoners; at least this was the rule in several nations."

"Indian tribal wars in the United States continued up to 1808. The efforts of the early Europeans were directed toward the stopping of these tribal wars, although European governments, when at war within the United States, did not hesitate to employ Indians against the whites."

"In the many Indian wars the causes an provocations have not always come from the Indian. While the nation at times supplied the Indian with firearms, ammunition, and scalping knives, it did not employ him against white foes, except in the War of the rebellion, when Indians were enlisted as soldiers on both sides. Indian soldiers and scouts have been employed against Indians, but never, with the exception noted, against whites. The amount expended in Indian wars from 1776 to June 30, 1890, can only be estimated. The several Indian wars after 1776; including the war of 1812, in the west and the northwest, the Creek, Black Hawk, and Seminole wars, up to 1860 were bloody and costly. Except when engaged in war with great Britain, Mexico, or during the rebellion (1861-1865), the United States army was almost entirely used for the Indian service, and stationed largely in the Indian country or among the frontier. In 1890, 70 per cent of the army was stationed west of the Missouri river, 66 per cent being in the Indian country. It will be fair to estimate, taking out the years of foreign wars with England, namely, 1812-1815, $66,614,912.34, and with Mexico, 1846-1848, $73,941,735.12, and the rebellion, 1861-1865, and reconstruction, 1865-1870, $3,374,359,360.02, that at least, three-fourths of the total expense of the army is chargeable, directly or indirectly, to the Indians. During our foreign wars and the War of the Rebellion many of the Indian tribes were at war with the United States, and others were a constant danger, a large force being necessary to hold them in subjection; but expense on this account is dropped from the eshuate. The total expense of the army of the United States from March 4, 1789, to June 30, 1890, was $4,725,521,495; deducting $3,514,911,007.48 for foreign wars and the War of the Rebellion, the remainder is $1,210,610,4487.52. Two-thirds of this sum, it is estimated, was expended for Indian wars and for army services incidental to the Indians, namely, $807,073,658.34 (cost of fortifications, posts, and stations being deducted). Adding the expense of the civil administration $259,944,082.34, we have an estimated cost of the Indians to the United States from July 4, 1776 to June 30, 1890, of $1,067,017,740.68 aside from the amount reimbursed to states for their expenses in war with Indians and aside from pensions."

"By keeping Native Americans far from towns and cities, the U.S. hoped to maintain the distinct identities of tribes as sovereign nations – and ensure Native peoples remained non-Americans. As U.S. ambitions for expansion drove the new nation to push farther west, however, the nation began working to assimilate Native people into American society. The U.S. wanted more land, including in the Indian Territory. In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, abrogating treaties that had guaranteed tribes and their citizens reserved lands in perpetuity. It broke up reservation lands into individual family allotments for tribal citizens and allowed non-Natives to buy land in the Indian Territory that remained unallocated. The aim was to push Native peoples into becoming agrarian farmers. By encouraging them to abandon their traditional lives, lawmakers hoped to integrate Native Americans into the non-Native societies that were surrounding them."

"Native Americans were not Americans in the eyes of the U.S. government. They could not vote in U.S. elections, freely sell their land or control their children’s education. They were, however, eligible to serve in America’s wars. After an estimated 12,000 Native American solders fought in World War I, President Calvin Coolidge, inspired by their service, signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law. Congress had crafted the legislation over the objections of many tribes. They recognized this unilateral imposition of U.S. citizenship as an infringement on their sovereignty over their citizens."

"Most Americans, in addition to their national citizenship, are citizens of a state, a county and a city. Native Americans have all that plus another national citizenship – that of their tribe, which has its own laws and civic responsibilities. Tribal citizenship is not about race or ethnicity. It confers a political status, one of citizenship in a tribe. Unlike U.S. citizens, tribal citizens can lose their status. As sovereign nations, tribes have the right to disenroll members, and they regularly do. About 80 tribes have removed approximately 11,000 tribal citizens from their rolls over the past 25 years over lineage questions, dual enrollment and other disqualifying factors."

"The federal government can also terminate tribal membership by terminating tribes. From 1953 to 1970, in what became known as the Termination Era, the U.S. ended its government-to-government relationships with many tribes by withdrawing their federal recognition as sovereign nations. Officially, this policy ended the tribes’ “status as wards of the United States” in order “to grant them all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship.” Effectively, it nullified the existence of thousands of Native Americans. President Richard Nixon ended the Termination Era in 1970, leaving tribes and individuals to seek re-recognition in the courts or via congressional legislation. To date, 29 tribes have gotten their federal recognition restored."

"U.S. Census Bureau data shows the median income for Native Americans on reservations is $23,000 a year – 61% below the U.S. average. One in three reservation residents live in poverty, three times higher than the general population. In 2020, Native American students constituted less than 1% of college and university enrollment nationwide."

"Can we talk of integration until there is social integration? Unless there is integration in hearts and minds, you only have a physical presence and the walls are as high as the mountain tops."

"I knew my people when they lived the old way. I knew them when there was still a dignity in our lives, and a feeling of worth in our outlook. I knew them when there was unspoken confidence in the home, a certain knowledge of the path we walked upon. But we were living on the dying energy of a dying culture—a culture which was slowly losing its forward thrust. I think it was the suddenness of it all that hurt us so. We did not have time to adjust to the startling upheaval around us. We seemed to have lost what we had without a replacement of it. We did not have time to take this 20th-century progress and eat it little by little and digest it. It was forced feeding from the start, and our stomach turned sick."

"We paid, we paid, and we paid until we became a beaten race, poverty stricken and conquered. But you have been kind to listen to me, and I know that in your hearts you wish you could help. I wonder if there is much you can do, and yet there is a lot you can do. When you meet my children in your classrooms, respect each one for what he is: a child of our Father in heaven and your brother."

"And today, when you celebrate your hundred years, oh Canada, I am sad for all the Indian people throughout the land. For I have known you when your forests were mine; when they gave me my meat and my clothing. But in the long hundred years since the white man came, I have seen my freedom disappear like the salmon going mysteriously out to sea. The white man's strange customs, which I could not understand, pressed down upon me until I could no longer breathe."

"When I fought to protect my land and my home, I was called a savage. When I neither understood nor welcomed his way of life, I was called lazy. When I tried to rule my people, I was stripped of my authority... Oh God! Like the thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments of the white man's success — his education, his skills — and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society."

"My nation was ignored in your history textbooks – they were little more important in the history of Canada than the buffalo that ranged the plains. I was ridiculed in your plays and motion pictures, and when I drank your fire-water, I got drunk – very, very drunk. And I forgot...Oh Canada, how can I celebrate with you this centenary, this hundred years? Shall I thank you for the reserves that are left to me of my beautiful forests? For the canned fish of my rivers? For the loss of my pride and authority, even among my own people? For the lack of my will to fight back? No! I must forget what’s past and gone... Oh God in heaven! Give me back the courage of the olden chiefs. Let me wrestle with my surroundings. Let me again, as in the days of old, dominate my environment. Let me humbly accept this new culture and through it rise up and go on... I shall see our young braves and our chiefs sitting in the houses of law and government, ruling and being ruled by the knowledge and freedoms of our great land. So shall we shatter the barriers of our isolation. So shall the next hundred years be the greatest in the proud history of our tribes and nations."

"Chief Dan George of the Burrard tribe, who was best known for his role in the 1970 movie Little Big Man, died today in his sleep at Lions Gate Hospital. He was 82 years old. Besides his successful acting career, Chief Dan George was also known as an eloquent spokesman for native rights and the environment... He said he was impressed by the progress that Indians had made in his lifetime, noting that he himself, as an old man, had become more forward and bold... Some of our people stand and wait and don't talk for themselves, he said, but this is becoming a thing of the past. The younger Indians consider themselves equal to the white man. ... He said he was proud to see Indians who saw that film walk out of the theater and walk up to a white man and shake him by the hand. That's what they've got to do, you know - believe in themselves and try to fit in."

"I look forward to hearing Chief Dan George's Lament for Confederation read again and again during 2017. Let's revisit this honest and accurate piece of writing penned by an Indigenous leader who all of Canada proudly recognized and embraced. His uncompromising response to the centenary is an indication of the integrity of his character and resolve in who he was."

"It was 1967...The speech forcefully critiques colonization and calls on Indigenous people to “grab the white man’s instruments of success” to rise again. “Dad and the whole family were very nervous... To stand up and tell the truth in such a profound way, he had no idea how the public would take that.”... After his father finished speaking, there were a few seconds of stunned silence. Then the audience rose to their feet and filled the stadium with about 10 minutes of deafening applause. “He began to cry because he was so touched." He helped bring shameful parts of Canada’s history out of the shadows and inspired young Indigenous leaders... George’s address was so revolutionary, his daughter Amy George recalls, she feared he would be killed for delivering it.,, “Some people did get very angry, too. When we were walking off the field at the stadium, some people were saying ‘You’re nuts!’ and they were throwing bottles and empty cups at us,” she says. There hasn’t been much improvement in how Canada treats First Nations since George’s speech, says his grandson Rueben George."

"Englishman, although you have conquered the French you have not yet conquered us! We are not your slaves. These lakes, these woods and mountains, were left to us by our ancestors. They are our inheritance; and we will part with them to none. Your nation supposes that we, like the white people, cannot live without bread, and pork and beef! But, you ought to know, that He, the Great Spirit and Master of Life, has provided food for us, in these spacious lakes, and on these woody mountains."

"Leading a simple life, Kateri remained faithful to her love for Jesus, to prayer and to daily Mass. Her greatest wish was to know and to do what pleased God. She lived a life radiant with faith and purity. Kateri impresses us by the action of grace in her life in spite of the absence of external help and by the courage of her vocation, so unusual in her culture. In her, faith and culture enrich each other! May her example help us to live where we are, loving Jesus without denying who we are. Saint Kateri, Protectress of Canada and the first native American saint, we entrust to you the renewal of the faith in the first nations and in all of North America! May God bless the first nations!"

"The responsibility we have to Indian Country is a true federal obligation. it is no different than us having to pay our national debt or the interest on it, because it is a treaty we have signed with these tribes."

"As I said in my opening statement, I want to protect the homeland, I want to bring peace of mind, I want to bring confidence back to the agency. I’m not going to be the smartest guy in any room I walk into, but I know how to get talent and I know how to bring those people together."

"I don’t care what color your state is. I don’t care if you’re red or you’re blue. At the end of the day, my job is to be Secretary of Homeland Security and to protect everybody. (March 24, 2026)"

"I do spank. I have no problem with that."

"I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force?"

"Tell it to my face, tell the world why you believe I deserved to be assaulted from behind, have six ribs broken and a damaged lung. And while you’re at it, explain to the American public why they should trust a man with anger issues to lead DHS."

"“Our ways as Indigenous people go hand in hand with this land, because we are the land. All of us are the land.”"

"“It’s great to finally have representation of our Indigenous people. We don’t look one way; we’re diverse. Having that representation is going to echo out our voices to be heard in spaces that they're usually not heard. I hope that inspires creativity within our community, and also confidence—a sense of confidence to be strong and to hold our head high.”"

"“Long hair to me is a symbol of pride. A pride that has been marketed as shameful by Western belief systems. Back in the day, Indigenous children across the Americas were forced into boarding schools, and the idea was to kill the Indian, save the man. They would cut off our hair and would physically and mentally abuse us to forget our cultural ways and language and to forcefully take on someone else’s. I wear my hair long to honor my ancestors and the sacrifice they made, because they didn’t have a choice. I have the option to grow it long. So I hold my hair with pride.”"

"“You can’t run from your reflection… you can try to lighten your skin, change your hair, but the one thing you can’t run from is yourself. I want to influence people of color to be proud of where they come from and to reconnect with their roots.”"

"Bringing these items back home to Siksika is a historic event. Many items left Siksika and other Nations and were scattered across the globe. Now the tides are turning and these items are finding their way back home. Crowfoot’s entire essence is in and around Blackfoot territory and this is where his belongings should be housed. We are building strong relationships with curators at several museums as well as private collectors in an effort to bring items such as the ones coming home back to their rightful place. There are many more Blackfoot items still in need of being claimed and repatriated back to their rightful homeland. To me, it is not as important how these items left Siksika, but what is important is how we bring them back home."

"You stay. I go."

"The Sheriff handed me a pair of handcuffs and told me to put them on him, and to hang on to him. Ishi made no attempt to run or resist the handcuffs but seemed very pleased. At no time did he seem to be real scared but he did a lot of smiling. He did not try to run away or get excited. The Sheriff put him in the buggy, accompanied by Constable John Toland and took him to the county jail."

"Contrary to commonly-held belief, Ishi was not the last of his kind. In carrying out the repatriation process, we learned that as a Yahi–Yana Indian his closest living descendants are the Yana people of northern California."

"As a child at a mission boarding school in the 1960s, I was forced to learn English. Nowhere in our lessons was there any mention of Native history. But at night, after lights out, we girls gathered in the dark to tell stories and sing Navajo songs, quietly, so as to not wake the housemother. We were taught that if we broke the rules, we would go to hell, a place we could not conceive of—there is no Navajo analogy. As I learned to read, I discovered in books a way to assuage my longing for my parents, my siblings, my home. So in this way my schooling was a mixed experience, a fact that was true for many Native children."

"In Navajo, they say the sacred begins at the tip of my tongue. So there’s very much sacredness or a holiness that’s associated with creativity. Whatever a person creates and brings into this world is sacred. And it adds to the beauty of the world. We all benefit when people create something new."

"In Navajo, the idea of words or language is really our origin. We were created by words, and we survived by words. Everything that comprises a Navajo person is based on words — your clan, where you come from, how the world was created."

"There are a lot of stories like that, about how words have power that can create and heal. Also destroy. After something is said, the people who heard it will always remember it. You have to think about the words you say."

"people use words, words that aren’t really mine, that are from our language, from our history. It is not even really me, you know — it is everything that people over the generations and over the centuries have deemed beautiful. And beautiful has a different connotation than aesthetics."

"It’s important to do as much as I can to publicize the ideas of language, the importance of family, the importance of history, and also the importance of changes that have happened, that are happening now. Always political issues come up, issues of the environment, issues of education, of poverty, drug use, alcoholism. All of those things are a part of it, too."

"The idea of poetry in our Navajo world, speaking — Ya’ jił’tí’i’gí’ — Diníbizaad — is related to the whole — one’s whole life, the whole community. It’s not separated the way poetry is in Western society."

"I try to accept as many invitations as I can with the idea that probably people have not met another Navajo before. They don’t really have any idea except maybe the stereotypical kinds of ideas of American Indians. For whoever comes behind me in the next two years, I want to establish what the position entails, and that is a challenge."

"Poetry is an overlooked and underrated kind of art."

"For more than a century, tens of thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their communities and forced into boarding schools run by the U.S. government, specifically the Department of the Interior, and religious institutions. … When my maternal grandparents were only 8 years old, they were stolen from their parents’ culture and communities and forced to live in boarding schools until the age of 13. Many children like them never made it back to their homes. … The federal policies that attempted to wipe out Native identity, language and culture continue to manifest in the pain tribal communities face today, including cycles of violence and abuse, disappearance of Indigenous people, premature deaths, poverty and loss of wealth, mental health disorders and substance abuse. Recognizing the impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system cannot just be a historical reckoning. We must also chart a path forward to deal with these legacy issues. …The fact that I am standing here today as the first Indigenous cabinet secretary is testament to the strength and determination of Native people. I am here because my ancestors persevered. I stand on the shoulders of my grandmother and my mother. And the work we will do with the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative will have a transformational impact on the generations who follow."

"Seventy years ago, Native Americans right here in New Mexico couldn’t vote. Can you believe that? Growing up in my mother’s Pueblo household and as a 35th-generation New Mexican, I never imagined a world where I would be represented by someone who looks like me. Tonight, New Mexico, you are sending one of the very first Native American women to Congress!"

"There is too much inequity in our country, in our world. And I think it’s time for the big corporations to make right with workers."

"I came here to fight for working families, and that’s what I’m doing"

"It is so unfair that the big executives can make that much money when there are people that can’t afford to buy groceries. It is fundamentally unfair. It isn’t right. They don’t have a conscience. And they need to pay up."

"At last, we do have Native women representation in Congress."

"Our country has a trust responsibility to Indian tribes, and it seems like their voice has been lacking in so many conversations that we’ve had in this country. And so, I’d like to make sure that tribal leaders have that seat at the table."

"New Mexico has over 310 days of sun per year. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be a global leader in renewable energy right now."

"we weren’t citizens until 1924 here in New Mexico. They couldn’t—Indians couldn’t vote until 1948, when a member of the Isleta Pueblo sued the state of New Mexico after he came back from World War II and couldn’t vote."

"it seems like any opportunity the Republicans have to oppress voters, they do that."

"I think it’s important to point out that Deb Haaland is — I think she’s been in this position for just over a year now. And one year, you know, in the face of a century and a half of genocidal Indian policy, isn’t that much, when we think about how history unfolds."

"I have confidence that she is the right person for the job. She is from New Mexico. She has shown deep commitments to protecting Chaco Canyon from further exploitation, and as we know the Southwest has been considered a sacrifice zone. There is a lot of uranium contamination still there, and they want to open it back up for uranium mining and oil and gas extraction. She has been very, very staunchly against it. I think she is the right person for that position to protect lands, but it remains to be seen how much the structure and the political system will hamper her ability to work collaboratively across the aisle as someone in a Cabinet-level position."

"Deb Haaland campaigned on progressive issues, including climate change, renewable energy, universal healthcare and a $15 minimum wage."

"One way that they [Kachinas] can be thought of is if you think of the entire earth as being one being and we as small beings living on that large being like fleas on a cat."

"I think it's impossible to be governed with any sense of integrity when you don't recognize each other and have no obligation to each other."

"What a lot of people don't realize is there were a number of revolts against the Spanish mission by the Indians. But they don't tell you this in the museums. In fact, the museum right here in Oakland paints a ridiculous picture of the missions with the happy little natives making baskets in the shade of the adobe with the benevolent padres walking around rattling their rosaries. That just is not the way that the missions were."

"the way I think of it-now I don't really know where the poems or where the art comes from, I don't know where the images come from-but however they come or wherever they come from is like communicating with a person. It's a whole person. That person shows you things and has a certain appearance but also tells you things. So as you receive images, they are either received through the ear or through the eye or through the tongue and that's just the way it feels."

"We are parts of the earth that walk around and have individual consciousness for awhile and then go back."

"This is a plural society and all of us have to work at it a little bit to get the full flavor of the society."

"I would much rather be respected by the Indian community through my writing than to have my books reviewed in the New York Times."

"if Indians are left out of every other class on the university campus, even where they are pertinent-for example, leaving Scott Momaday out of a class on twentieth-century American literature, something like that somewhere else there has to be a balance. There has to be someone somewhere else who is going to emphasize Scott Momaday to the exclusion of the ones who are emphasized in the other class. I hope that at some point that will become balanced. I hope that pretty soon an American literature class will just automatically include someone like Scott Momaday-and some of the other people: Charles Eastman, you know, the other writers in our history."

"(Could you describe your writing process?) Well, I explained it one time, on radio, as the sensation of being sick in your stomach, in that you suddenly have to throw up, suddenly, you have to vomit. There is no way you can stop it. It has to happen. It's a bodily process in which the material is expelling itself from your body. That's what it feels like to me in a mental or emotional way. Suddenly it's there and it has to be expelled. It's going to come out whether I want it to or not. If I don't have something to write on, it comes out of my mouth. It's got to come out one way or another."

"anywhere in America, if you take a university-level course on American history or American literature, particularly in literature and the arts, it only has the literature and the arts that are produced by Americans of European heritage, even then largely Northern European. We are left out of the books. Black people are left out; brown people are left out; Indian people are left out. So you get the impression, going through the American education system, that the only people here are white people. It's not just a cultural matter, but it's a political matter. There is a reason for a society to be that way, that has the literary capacity and the technological capacity that America has; there's no excuse for the people being so blind, for the people to be wearing a blindfold that way. The only possible reason it could happen is because it's not an accident; that it's planned. Somebody is benefiting by having Americans ignorant about what non-European Americans are doing and what they have done; what European Americans have done to them. Somebody is benefiting by keeping people ignorant."

"Wendy is an intensely serious person-though not slow to laughter-and her well-informed anger showed in both the poem she chose to read and in the directness of her responses."

"Native American writers have always been a major influence on me, like Wendy Rose, Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Paula Gunn Allen, just to name a few."

"Over the years, she has gained a solid reputation as a poet. She is also an accomplished painter. One of her favorite subjects, the centaur, reflects what she calls "my hybrid status...like the centaur, I have always felt misunderstood and isolated-whether with Indians or with non-Indians.""

"Environmental racism is not broad or deep enough to understand the history of genocide or land theft in this country, which of course is the original environmental injustice for Native people."

"we have this concept of privilege that we understand through the lens of race, which again is also highly inadequate because the settler-colonial project was not about racism. It includes it, it involves it, but land theft and genocide was for acquiring land for the sake of land itself, not for the exploitation of bodies in the same way that chattel slavery was. So, these are really two big, different animals, and the problem is that they get conflated. When we talk about subsuming Native issues of justice under this umbrella of race, it is in a way that does harm and disservice to Native people and makes illegible Indigenous struggles for decolonization and justice."

"that is what settler colonialism does: it works really hard to hide itself, because its goal is to constantly disappear Indigenous people, and that doesn’t square with democracy and justice. That’s why we have this whole matrix of mythologies and lies about the foundation of this country that doesn’t get to the genocide and land theft, and that is the elephant in the living room in the U.S."

"everybody takes for granted that equality under the State is what everybody wants. For Native people, that has never been their goal. Vine Deloria in 1969 said in his book, Custer Died for Your Sins, that “what we need is a national leave-us-alone policy.” He wrote his book in the middle of the Civil Rights, Black Panthers, and Black Power era, and he was very clear that what we want is not what you want. We don’t want equality, we want our treaties to be honored and our territories to be protected."

"for us as Native people, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is not what we are working towards. It has to be anti-colonial. Any diversity and equity or anti-racist work that doesn’t include an anti-colonial commitment just perpetuates further erasure. We need to have the language for that."

"I think if you are looking at decolonization as the framework for correcting these historical wrongs, giving land back is really the bottom line. But I also think it’s more than giving the land back: I think you have to restructure the legal system too."

"White liberal environmentalists are who I write to. They are ultimately my audience because they need to understand historical context, and then once they do, this context can re-shape their projects and how they work."

"I am very skeptical about Native people’s ability to find justice in the settler system because it is a system created not by us and not for us, ultimately to disappear us. I think some good can come from working within that system, but it remains to be seen what large-scale positive impact it can have."

"This concept of “indigenizing” environmental justice acknowledges that the way we understand environmental justice is far too narrow to fit for Native Americans. Environmental justice is about the fair and equal distribution of environmental risks and harms that disproportionately expose communities of color. But that depends on understanding all communities as equal as ethnic minority communities. And this just does not fit for American Indian people and communities because American Indians are not ethnic minorities. American Indians are nations with territories, sovereignty, and jurisdiction and entirely different histories that go back millennia on the land as well as histories of colonization, which is not true for any other population on this continent."

"Most people don’t realize that Native Americans are the only people who didn’t have religious freedom in this country. Our religions were outright banned beginning around 1883."

"for Native people, we are people who are surviving genocide. To be Native today is to have survived a 95 percent genocide. Maybe that’s something to take heart in. I don’t know how else to think about it. I think the reason that we survived is because of our unending resistance. We just kept going. And so here we are. Now we are at the point that we are leading the resistance movement — the environmental resistance movement, the climate justice movement. Native people are the forefront of it. Maybe it’s because of the fact that we have survived this total devastation."

"What is it going to take to build a system that affirms life for everyone that’s not built on the death of other people and the death of the environment and other species? This is what’s being asked of us and it means we all have to look at whatever privilege we have and who sacrificed for that."

"Europeans brought with them a worldview that was built on the domination of the natural world. We find ourselves, as a result, in the middle of a sixth mass extinction event. And so how do we shift that? This is where indigenous knowledge is so important. Native people understand the world in a whole different way. We understand ourselves as related and part of this web of life. We have to change our relationship to the natural world. And this is where Native people and Indigenous knowledge have so much power to effect that change. Part of indigenizing environmental justice is infusing environmental justice with this indigenous worldview, with traditional ecological knowledge so that we can create these changes."

"From an American Indian perspective, we're all on the reservation now. In the past few decades it has become crystal clear that, as "the people," our common enemy is the entrenched corporate power of Big Oil and other toxic industries that buy political influence to protect their own corrupt interests in collusion with government, all in the name of democracy. This has come at the expense of countless marginalized people world-wide. In the US, that has always meant Indigenous people, other people of color, and those having low incomes."

"One of the least known and studied aspects of US history involves the centuries-long trade in Indian slaves. Only in the last decade or two have scholars begun in earnest to piece together and analyze the trade in Indigenous bodies introduced by Christopher Columbus from his first voyage to the New World in 1492."

"Since 2008, the rights of nature (RON) approach has helped activists in Ecuador, Bolivia, India, and New Zealand imbue nature with legal rights in much the same way American courts have given rights to corporations. These laws have been instrumental in protecting ecosystems inherent in natural landscapes like mountains and rivers. Ecuador in 2008 and Bolivia in 2009 went so far as to rewrite their national constitutions to include RON in their legal frameworks. This new language is based on Indigenous worldviews rooted in right relationship with nature and buenvivir, the good life. New Zealand (known as Aotearoa to the Maori, who are the Indigenous people of New Zealand) did not amend their constitution but instituted other legal mechanisms to grant personhood to the Whanganui River and Te Urewera National Parks in 2013. Following the In a neoliberal, market-fundamentalist world, a federal government controlled by conservatives has historically meant deregulation and the prioritization of industry over the protection of the environment."

"Although federal law acknowledges the inherent sovereignty of Native nations through centuries of treaty relationships and often works in partnership with them through shared power, it is nonetheless a restricted form of sovereignty animated by imperialist legal foundations: the doctrine of discovery, domestic dependent nationhood, and the plenary power doctrine. These doctrines control Native peoples' lives and resources via intense regulation by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, meaning that Native people are more legally managed than all other people in the country, and arguably unconstitutionally contrary to the original treaty-based relationships. These are all constituent parts of what constructs the US domination-based legal paradigm."

"The imperialist roots of federal Indian law present daunting obstacles to justice for American Indians. If American Indians are to experience real environmental justice-which means not only ending the poisoning of their environments but also regaining access to and protection of their sacred sites and ancient territories-it means confronting a "state built on the pillars of capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy." The confrontation must occur at all levels, from the individual to the institutional, and ultimately dismantle the legal, social, and policy frameworks that uphold an ongoing system of domination. Indigenizing environmental justice in these ways goes beyond a distributive model of justice."

"As its history with American Indians has shown, the US complies with laws it makes or agrees to only haphazardly at best, and often not at all. Indians have always had to fight to defend their lives, lands, and treaties. Resistance became a way of life a long time ago; only the tactics change. The federal government has never relinquished power over Native people without a fight, and the degree to which it has is directly attributable to work initiated by Native people themselves. In other words, more than any "granting" of rights by the United States, it is their bold assertions of self-determination, aided at times by powerful allies, that accounts for progress Native people have made in their relationships with the United States over the last century. Indigenous peoples have learned that no one is coming to save them, just as environmentalists have learned that their American legal system is a rigged game against the environment and their own communities. This is a pattern engrained by the forces of white settler colonialism and domination paradigms, but the growing sophistication in using education, law, and politics to advance tribal self-determination will continue to build a wall of defense against environmentally destructive corporate and government encroachments. There is no denying that the fossil fuel industry as we once knew it is dying. Even as its government puppets desperately grasp to hold on to power as the final drops of oil and gas are sucked from the Earth, the last chunks of coal are wrenched from the ground, and the nuclear industry continues to perpetuate the lie of its comparable cleanness, effective partnerships with allies in the environmental movement will provide the best defense for the collective well-being of the environment and future generations of all Americans, Native and non-Native alike. In the long run, environmental justice for American Indians is environmental justice for everyone... and for the Earth herself."

"For Native nations and activists, the Green New Deal holds promise. Its commitment to principles of environmental justice is highly relevant to us, but can only work if articulated in a way that addresses our specific concerns. We might think of this as “Indigenizing” environmental justice and see the Green New Deal as decolonizing work."

"We need to imagine new frameworks for law and policy that articulate with specificity what Native people envision as a more just system, one that accurately represents our interests. This can best be accomplished by reinforcing the inherent sovereignty of tribal governments — recognizing our nationhood and political relationship with the U.S."

"Given the habitual whitewashing of history and dismissal of tribal nationhood, Indigenous peoples are not adequately acknowledged in environmental justice policy and the law. Maintaining a measured separateness helps avoid historical erasure and the tendency to conflate Indigenous peoples with other settler and immigrant populations. It also moves lawmakers and the public toward a better understanding of environmental justice and tribal self-determination."

"The more we can distinguish our political existence from a race-based one, the better."

"New frameworks of justice can be realized as we speak into existence a habitable future for life on this planet."

"Climate change’s growing urgency demands nothing less than our seat at the table — for the sake of our children and the seven generations to come."

"How do you restore Indigenous authority to their ancestral places? By considering all kinds of possibilities and alternative land arrangements, including shared governance."

"We have to talk about policy and specifics as we look at the big picture of Indigenous liberation, because ultimately we have to engage with the hegemonic powers. Thereʼs no getting around that. Plus, how are you going to implement all these great ideas without tribal governments?"

"It begins with settler institutions (including science-based institutions) engaging Indigenous people in all their conversations, and the recognition of cultural and political sovereignty. Itʼs a simple matter of respect. And given that we have some tangible knowledge about how to effectively manage lands, draw on that. Just stop bypassing Native people as if we donʼt exist or as if we have nothing of value to contribute. I call it un-erasing Indigenous people. Of course the erasure is everywhere, but some places are more intense than others. California is one of the places where erasure is the most intense."

"wherever, whatever kind of project that youʼre talking about, you must include Native voices and governments when appropriate. If we start there, then we create patterns of un-erasure and take meaningful steps in accordance with respect to Native people."

"On the national level, the Green New Deal is a step in the right direction toward building environmental justice into climate change policy. And as Iʼve written about elsewhere, there are steps that can be taken to “Indigenize” it, thus making it more responsive to Indigenous issues. This would include explicit recognition of Indigenous nationhood and political relationships to the US (not based on race), and the affirming of TEK as a methodology for tackling climate change. The GND is modeled after FDRʼs New Deal, which is always celebrated as progressive action that lifted the US out of economic depression through infrastructure development projects like dams and extractive industries that put people to work. Whatʼs far less acknowledged, however, is how much environmental and cultural death and destruction all that development wreaked on Indian country. We see a similar pattern occurring globally in the realm of “sustainable” development, which has given rise to a modern global land rush that impacts Indigenous communities the most. Ultimately, unchecked capitalism is the problem and we need to heed the research that connects cultural diversity with biodiversity if we are to avoid the worst impacts of climate change."

"I really don’t worry about labels. Writers worry about syntax, voice, setting or landscape, plot, and the arch of the story. We worry about craft, the art of the writing."

"Writing is a form of activism. Again, let’s not separate into small boxes, ‘activism’ versus writing. Native people, I think, prefer to think in more holistic terms. A story is active and a story changes the world. A story is changing the world as I write this."

"We are still a ‘vacant map’ as Native writers of Native literature. But, a story chooses a writer, not the other way around. So I believe we write, perform, because we must. Nothing else is of importance. Native writers will grow and develop as the stories search them out. That’s exciting and the stories will change the world."

"Humor defuses pain. Humor gives the narrators in my stories agency to tilt at the ever-whirling windmills of colonization. Humor opens a window on historic pain and trauma that American Indians dealt with at the hands of the federal government. Loss of land, loss of dignity, loss of identity, and of course the loss of a brother or sister, parent—which in my great grandmother’s era was a common event."

"Working in all kinds of situations helps a writer make sense of the world. At least it did for me. But fewer and fewer writers haven’t worked outside of a university or college environment."

"I do think that reading aloud, or performing one’s own work is very helpful to the writing process. You can hear the voices you are creating, see the scenes you’ve created, and where the text falters."

"I think most really good teachers, or professors, prepare for their classes as any writer/performer does. You write and then learn your lines, you draw your students into the performance or lecture just as any performer does, and you write a conclusion to the day’s performance or lesson just as any performer does."

"Learning is supposed to be fun, (or funny) dramatic, and full of irony. A performance."

"I think the way I come at a story has always been from thinking about the past, (American Indian history, my family’s history, my tribe’s history) and how the present and future are shaped by the past. Put another way, I am certain that we humans live in past, present, and future all at the same time."

"If it seems like a contradiction, it is. But that is the basis for all stories."

"Scattered in the wind Earthboy calls me from my dreams: Dirt is where the dreams must end."

"(Do you remember the first Native writers you read?) LE: Yes. James Welch's Winter in the Blood came out in 1972...Winter in the Blood blew me away. That book told me about myself and my life. The portrait of his grandmother was unforgettable. I could never forget his description of her hands. Like the claws of a tiny crow. The writing was spare, bleak, comical. My world."

"I took to James Welch's poetry and novels to find the wryest of humor to counter dread and loss."

"We are of the soil and the soil is of us."

"In thinking about the ethics of accountability in research (whose lives, lands, and bodies are inquired into and what do they get out of it?), the goal of “giving back” to research subjects seems to target a key symptom of a major disease in knowledge production, but not the crippling disease itself. That is the binary between researcher and researched—between knowing inquirer and who or what are considered to be the resources or grounds for knowledge production. This is a fundamental condition of our academic body politic that has only recently been pathologized, and still not by everyone. If what we want is democratic knowledge production that serves not only those who inquire and their institutions, but also those who are inquired upon (and appeals to “knowledge for the good of all” do not cut it), we must soften that boundary erected long ago between those who know versus those from whom the raw materials of knowledge production are extracted."

"A researcher who is willing to learn how to “stand with” a community of subjects is willing to be altered, to revise her stakes in the knowledge to be produced."

"I purposely and intentionally use the term Indigenous to refer directly to Indigenous American peoples because the term is neutral; its meaning is based on Indigenous American peoples being native and/or aboriginal to the lands of their origin...Along with an insistence upon our own terminology, there is a necessary awareness or consciousness that has to do with our Indigeneity, and that has very direct bearing upon the land, culture, and community of Indigenous America. Ultimately, this consciousness is at the core of ourselves who are from and of the land, culture, and community of the Indigenous Americas. There is no going around this fact either: the knowledge of land, culture, and community as known, experienced, ascertained, evolved, created by Indigenous peoples is basic and primary. This was apparent to the first Europeans who experienced first landfall in the Americas; Europeans knew very little or next to nothing about the Indigenous lands of the continents and adjacent islands; they relied, in fact, practically and necessarily, upon Indigenous native peoples. In other words, Europeans from the very beginning depended upon Indigenous land, culture, and community for knowledge they needed to survive and thrive. And today, this is still the case. All knowledge-consciousness comes first from a basic and primary source: the land, culture, and community of the Indigenous Americas."

"Indigenous literature is Indigenous knowledge; Indigenous writers and poets are the instigators of that knowledge."

"We are not separate from one another; we differ ethnically; sometimes we speak our own distinct languages; our cultures are not the same and we have our own life goals. Yet at the same time we share the same world which is all around us. In some ways, we are not separate from one another at all; we are all part of the same general world and the same general human condition. Critical thinking — deep thoughts and ideas about ourselves and our relationship to others, to me that’s what critical thinking is — is crucial to the human condition now more than ever. As a human society and culture, we need to think about the condition of the world more than ever before. Indigenous peoples of the Americas who were and are the original human culture and society of this part of the world are deeply concerned. To me, this is the source of contemporary Indigenous literary criticism; it is concerned with addressing the condition of human society and culture."

"Indigenous literary intellectuals are committed to being a part of the discourse of aesthetic sustainability — if not the leaders of it — articulating they have a role and task in healing the human condition — society and culture — so they, as living and thriving beings, shall always be regenerative rather than degenerative!"

"Continual diminishment and loss of Indigenous languages is a constant concern and issue. Diminishment and loss add to the burden of Indigenous colonization because “the problem” may seem insurmountable. Valiant efforts are constantly ongoing in grassroots ways, namely self-generated tribal community projects to revitalize Indigenous languages. Personal and family dynamics result in positive gains — younger people are learning Indigenous languages to some degree. What’s really missing is an activistic, vibrant, spirited, and culturally and socially engaging Indigenous consciousness movement that can energize, inspire, and vitalize more than anything else."

"Feeling, thinking, and being absolutely aware of our role as communal human beings within a holistic universe will do wonders for us and all of creation because that will make us be aware of sustainability as a principle of continuance. Indigenous storytellers, writers, poets have a vital role in this dynamic of continuance"

"In the words of Acoma poet Simon Ortiz: "The future will not be mad with loss and waste though the/memory will/Be there: eyes will become kind and deep, and the bones of/this nation/Will mend after the revolution.""

"For the rest of her life, she never quit her quest to help others."

"At a time when minorities, including Native Americans, were subjected to considerable economic and social discrimination, Anderson’s determination to attend college and return the benefits of her education to her community was notable. Her role as educator, legislator, and public health reform leader aided the Native American community as well as the whole of society."

"She also championed the fight to recognize Native American fishing rights on Huron Bay."

"Thus Dakota education was promoted: informally, through their ceaseless practice in human relations within the kinship circle; formally, in the teachings of the ceremonies, as well as in legends. Manual education - how to do this or do that-was the least of it. That simply came in the doing. Children were generally not given menial tasks to discourage them at the outset. They were given new materials to start on, so as to sustain their interest. Normal skill thus came in the actual doing. (7: Education)"

"All human beings learn from each other, we have been saying. The Indians, belonging to the great human family, have the same innate powers, inborn intelligence, and potentialities as the rest of mankind. They have imagination and inventiveness. They can copy what they see and adapt it to their own special needs. These are all common human traits."

"imagination and inventiveness are common human potentialities. All people invent."

"All progress depends on contacts and the resulting exchange of new ideas."

"All human progress was slow at the beginning, but at least it was cumulative as long as peoples could occasionally get in touch with each other."

"there certainly have been excellent storytellers and writers within anthropology. That’s one of the reasons I co-edited the book Women Writing Culture (1996) because I was really interested in finding the canon of women writers within anthropology who had written well. Anthropologists like Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, and Barbara Myerhoff, among others, have been amazing writers."

"The dedication that is apparent in Ella Deloria's lifelong quest to preserve traditional Sioux language and culture was deeply rooted in her concern for the future of her people. She articulated this concern in relation to her own work in a letter written December 2, 1952, to H. E. Beebe, who provided her with funds to have the manuscript on social life typed for publication: "This may sound a little naïve, Mr. Beebe, but I actually feel that I have a mission: To make the Dakota people understandable, as human beings, to the white people who have to deal with them. I feel that one of the reasons for the lagging advancement of the Dakotas has been that those who came out among them to teach and preach, went on the assumption that the Dakotas had nothing, no rules of life, no social organization, no ideals. And so they tried to pour white culture into, as it were, a vacuum, and when that did not work out, because it was not a vacuum after all, they concluded that the Indians were impossible to change and train. What they should have done first, before daring to start their program, was to study everything possible of Dakota life, and see what made it go, in the old days, and what was still so deeply rooted that it could not be rudely displaced without some hurt. . I feel that I have this work cut out for me and if I do not make all I know available before I die, I will have failed by so much. But I am not morbid about it; quite cheerful in fact.""

"Waterlily forms a valuable part of Deloria's legacy, the treasure trove of material preserving the Sioux past that she has bequeathed to us all, Indian and non-Indian alike. Today, fifty years after most of her interviews were recorded, we realize how irreplaceable those records are, and how fortunate we are that Ella Deloria devoted her life to their collection and translation. As more of her writings become published at long last, we can appreciate how splendidly she achieved her life's mission. For above all, Ella Deloria's work of transcription, translation, and cultural interpretation has provided the data and insight from which we can come to understand the Sioux people of the last century in the way that she intended, as fellow human beings."

"Mendoza was a little man; puny, you might say. But that was not the reason he took two Dilantin every day. Nor was it the reason that he carried with him quantities of multivitamins, which he ate like candy throughout the tedious days and sleepless nights. The puniness may have been the effect, rather than the cause. In any case, you noticed the smallness of the man right away. What you didn't notice at first was the other thing...the indefinable thing that made you forget about him as soon as he passed out of your field of vision. It was as though you saw him but that he wasn't really there amidst the bus passengers when you looked away, and it wasn't your eyes fell upon him later that he became real. That thing, whatever it was, Mendoza knew. And he tolerated it."

"At the time when descendants of Goethe had begun their massive, secret march through Belgium, in those years before the United States entered World War I, there lived near Fort Pierre, South Dakota, one Joseph Shields, a fifty-year-old Sioux Indian who in his own way knew something of the rise of brutal doctrines, something of the destruction of ancient civilizations, something of a change of worlds."

"I like to use language to try to explain who I am and what I think of the world...That's the purpose of writing, to find out what you know in order to think."

"Anthropology has always been the handmaiden of colonialism all over the world. Not just here. Not just in Indian Country. Everywhere."

"the truth is democracy has failed. In Indian Country, we've known it a long time. America hasn't come to that conclusion yet. But I'm not talking about the kind of democracy that has been imposed on Indian nations, which in itself is fairly criminal. When you put democracy in a broader sense, capitalist democracy is not going to proceed as it has in its exploitative way because it is not sustainable."

"I had this grandmother who said this to me earlier, "You don't even own your own life, my dear. You're only taking care of it for the next generation." That's fairly profound when you think about it. It is really what the Dakotas think about themselves and the world. It has, on the one hand, been their weakness because it's been exploited. But on the other hand, it is also their strength. It is what will make them, in the end, the winners in this conflagration. We're not protesting so much as we are saying: we have the right to our place in this universe. Maybe I'm the last generation of people who talks like that. The young people ought to think about it once in a while."

"...myth, mythology, is the body of knowledge a people possess. That's not a very satisfactory explanation. But a myth is not a story. Mythology is the body of knowledge. It's usually expressed in symbols. One of the most important ones is language. Our mythology is embedded in our language. Okay? The way we express it, however, is kind of a literary thing. We express it through ceremony. We express it through, which is the way you say, "I am a Lakota." Or, "I am a Dakota." Or we express it in ritual, which is the way you talk to God. Or you express it in storytelling. Or you express it in dance, art, and music, and so on."

"One of things you have to have, if you're going to be a voice in this dilemma, is you have to have a core of knowledge, I guess, or a core of something. And my core is, historically speaking, there are no two sides to this history of the United States and its relationship to people who have lived here for thousands of years. There are no two sides to that story. You have no right to displace people, to steal their resources, and steal their lives. No human right, no human being has the right to do that to another human being. That's my core resistance. I don't do that to you or to you or to you. I very often go back to that. What directs a lot of my writing is: there are no two sides to this story. That's not very scholarly. It's not acceptable because there are two sides to everything, maybe this and maybe that. Part of the empirical evidence that history tells you is that for a while this was true and now that's true, and so on. That's the empirical evidence. That's not the evidence that I use. I say, there are no two sides to this story. What America has done is criminal. And they're still doing it. Sooner or later, a capitalistic democracy is going to be seen for what it is. It's simply not going to be sustainable."

"words are sacred"

"Mother, I am gay. I have AIDS." The telephone call that it almost killed him to make. The silence. Then, "Come home to us."

"The old women are gathered in the Longhouse. First, the ritual kissing on the cheeks, the eyes, the lips, the top of the head; that spot where the hair parts in the middle like a wild river through a canyon. (beginning of "Native Origin")"

"It has been two days since they came and took the children away. My body is greatly chilled. All our blankets have been used to bring me warmth. The women keep the fire blazing. The men sit. They talk among themselves. We are frightened by this sudden child-stealing. We signed papers, the agent said. This gave them rights to take our babies. It is good for them, the agent said. It will make them civilized, the agent said. I do not know civilized. (from "A Long Story")"

"Two-Spirit writers are merging the selves that colonialism splits apart."

"Homophobia is the eldest son of racism; they work in concert with each other, whether externally or internally. Native lesbian writing names those twin evils that would cause destruction to us."

"I look on Native women's writing as a gift, a give-away of the truest meaning. Our spirit, our sweat, our tears, our laughter, our love, our anger, our bodies are distilled into words that we bead together to make power. Not power over anything. Power. Power that speaks to hearts as well as to minds."

"I am tired of hearing Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson held up as the matriarchs of feminist and/or women's literature. Woolf was a racist, Dickinson was a woman of privilege who never left her house, nor had to deal with issues beyond which white dress to wear on a given day. Race and class have yet to be addressed, or if they are discussed, it is on their terms not ours"

"Oral tradition requires a telling and a listening that is intense, and intentional. Giving, receiving, giving-it makes a complete circle of Indigenous truth. First Nations writing utilizes the power and gift of story, like oral tradition, to convey history, lessons, culture and spirit. And perhaps the overwhelming instinct in our spirit is to love. I would say that Native writing gives the gift of love. And love is a word that is abused and made empty by the dominant culture. In fact, the letters l-o-v-e have become just that, blank cyphers used frivolously to cover up deep places of the spirit."

"Beth Brant gave us Indigenous feminism and Indigenous queer theory even before we had a name for these practices, all wrapped up in the most beautiful storywork."

"Beth saw her writing as an enacting of responsibility-the responsibility to help bring us all to the knowledge of how to live with integrity, as good human beings: in balance, centered in the heart's knowledge, hopeful, not vengeful, not small, but with generosity. Whether she achieved this in her own life to her own satisfaction, I don't know, and it is not mine to say. But in my view, that is where her writing is meant to take us: to ignite the imagination, to provide it with a kind of knowledge about how to care about those who suffer, and about how to walk in one's full posture, in a sacred way, looking at the world with vision."

"Her life was too short, like so many of our people. Colonial poverty and oppression took away some of our best sons and daughters. Beth left early, but she had accomplished so much. She inspired a generation of two-spirited authors who followed her to publication. There would be not have been a Johnny Appleseed without there first being a Beth Brant. There would have been no Connie Fife without Beth Brant. There would be no I Am Woman without Beth Brant. We were feminists when everyone objected. Feminism is a white thing, they said. Beth's response, so is patriarchy, and then she told us about the friendship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and an Iroquoian woman that sparked the suffragettes - made sense to me."

"Beth had an understanding of the road to freedom, the path to love, and the story we would have to create to get there. The pearls in her stories lie in a shell of words that need only to be opened; read Beth's work and we can all come together, transgendered, heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, fluid gendered, disabled, and abled, white, and non-white. We do not have to be stuck where corporate colonialism consigned us. There was room for everyone in Beth's heart. We can reach out and resist. The world is ours; we just need to go get it. This was Beth's philosophy."

"Beth Brant is a writer of great depth and brilliant talent."

"For the Native, queer, feminist, literary world: Beth is a home, reminding us that we are not alone in our movements towards liberation."

"The purpose of ritual, ceremony, and prayer is to open ourselves to that power, to bring into our everyday, existence the knowledge and memory of that time, to reinvoke it and reparticipate in it. And the gate through which we enter the dream world, the world of time immemorial; the place of inception, conception, and perception, is language. For without language, there are no stories; there is no speaking and singing the world into existence."

"I would suggest that any time a group of people participates in an antilinear thinking, any time a group of people practices customs and beliefs, contrary to the norm, any time a group of people begins to speak negatively and unflatteringly of God and the state, any time a group of people organizes itself into a cohesive whole with a language that tells the truth as it knows it and experiences it-and calls that language art, poetry, song, sculpture, work, study, lovemaking, child-rearing, or what have you then the powers that be order in the troops. And the troops stand guard, infiltrate, imprison, and in various ways attempt to control all of those who would subvert the "natural" order of things, the construction of the world as we know it today: patriarchal and imperious, bloated on its own self-importance, pompous, cruel, and dominating."

"Lesbian images and language, especially the images and language of lesbians of color-because we have lost more than many others may be some of the most subversive texts being written today. It isn't just the challenge to the state's notions of normalcy as represented by someone like Jesse Helms. Our challenge to authority does not come alone in the area of reimagining and reconstituting our sexuality. For years now we have reconstituted on some level the family, the community, the schools, and perhaps even the military. The meaning and value of these institutions have come under scrutiny and reevaluation and change by those of us who have functioned in and survived them. We lesbian writers have taken it as our responsibility to articulate our survivals and transformations in this war on our integrity. We represent a challenge to the Western way of thinking at a primal level. The more we tap into those tribal roots and quench our thirst on the milk and honey of our mother tongue, the more we can withstand the shock of living in this deadly and soul-annihilating system. We have to scramble their messages and learn to read the code we devise out of it. We have to go into the place of the great solitary vision of our own being - a being intimately attached to and integrated with the net of all being and beings - and humble ourselves and ask for a song, a vision, a dream, a language that promotes and heals, that nurtures and provides. We have to humble ourselves, perhaps before the little bug that causes the mirage or before the northern flight of birds, on whose shiny backs we may find the words that ensure our survival and the survival of those who come after us."

"When you have documentaries about the Trail of Tears, you don’t see these Black people carrying all the loads."

"You don’t hear about these Black people, how many of them died. How many of the Black babies that died because there wasn’t any milk for them, after their mother had nursed the other babies."

"I say that Freedmen descendants must continue to use all legal avenues to pull down the barriers of racism, apartheid and second-class tribal membership."

"If having access to instruments impacts other students as it did me, kids would have more opportunities to engage with a broader group of people and to gain greater understanding of the world."

"Reach out to teachers and school counselors who can connect you to science and engineering camps."

"I spent my formative years on the Choctaw Indian reservation in Philadelphia, Mississpi, and in Missoula, Montana, where I loved playing outdoors, watching farm animals, and observing everything around me. I believe living in these settings motivated me to explore and respect nature."

"I’m in a position where I don’t have to be labeled… I don’t have to call myself an Indian artist to sell my work, and I decided that it was more to my advantage not to label myself as a particular kind of artist, based solely on my genealogy… now I know that I can be part of something, part of that lineage, without being defined by it."

"I liked the way they looked. They were easy to work with my hands. The drawings turned into these magical things."

"I don’t like to feel like I have to stay within a certain style. I like to see things progress and turn into other things. I’m all about adventure."

"I had this internal need to be a healer. My mom was ill a lot when I was a kid. When she got cancer, I became interested in the progression of the disease and how she was being treated,"

"“I want my children to be happy. I want them to find their own purpose in life rather than fall into a life that’s already set up for them"

"My grandmother, my mother, and me, each one of us progressed into our own work, “I take a great deal of pride in being different from my family. Yet I know my mother would absolutely love my work. As a woman, I think she’d be very proud that I’ve chosen to do things in my own style.”"