Native American Activists

"Throw open the windows, it's spring! All I held in my winter breast turns back into the world, an inverse body, the universe turned inside out singing and breaking through the four red chambers of earth's heart. Everything is alive."

"I am done with weeping. The bones of this body say, dance. Dance the story of life"

"We have stories as old as the great seas breaking through the chest, flying out the mouth, noisy tongues that once were silenced, all the oceans we contain coming to light"

"May all the walls be like those of the jungle, filled with animals singing into the ears of night Let them be made of the mysteries further in in the heart, joined with the lives of all, all bridges of flesh all singing, all covering the wounded land showing again, again that boundaries are all lies."

"Take my hand. This river beside us is singing. It is saying Yes to our touching of hands, this uprising of arms, around one another, the hearts beating on this hemisphere and that."

"In the first light I remember who rewards me for living, not bosses but singing birds and blue sky"

"Beyond walls are lakes and plains, canyons and the universe"

"It was here, in religion, that all their sorrow came out. Moses could hear the Indian preacher speak, "And when the spirit touches us, there won't be any more danger here on earth," said the evangelist. "No mean spirits walking this land, no smallness in people, no heartaches, no sorrow, nor any pain." Moses knew the man's arms were raised up before the sad adults, and he heard the congregation cry out, "Amen," and in that word they were bound together. (p 71)"

""The law is on their side because it's their law." (p111)"

"In spite of the wedding, it was a year of separations. Not only were people turning away from one another, but there were other splittings, mind from heart, body from spirit. Some broke quickly, weeping openly and without shame in public places. In others...the changes were barely visible. (p 170)"

"After the second dinner, [he] blew out a candle. In the darkness, the stars and Milky Way lit up. No one noticed the electricity was turned off. The people all stood in front of the map of the universe, amazed by the lights on the wall. It was something, it really was, everyone thought. It was a fine, strong feeling, being there together with the stars lit up before them. Even if things were going wrong, the bad feelings disappeared in front of those stars. They wanted to touch each other that night and hold hands. (p 176)"

"Love, Lettie thought, it hurts and gladdens us no matter what a woman's age. (p177)"

"[He] held his daughter's hand. They were praying. None of them spoke. No one had to. The silence was stronger than words. (p 202)"

"He thought that even a prophet, even a warrior, could not survive the ways of the Americans, especially the government with rules and words that kept human life at a distance and made it live by their regulations and books. (p219)"

"Uncle Sam was a cold uncle with a mean soul and a cruel spirit. (p219)"

""Are you afraid?" [she] curled up to [him]. "Yes." He held her hand. Such comfort in the flesh. Then he turned toward her, grateful for her presence, and held her, and because the desire for life goes on under all circumstances, they made love. (p230)"

"The next day as he rode on toward the bluffs, Stace Red Hawk felt a renewal of faith, the kind of feeling that comes to a man in silence, when he takes notice that a tree is older than himself, and that it will remain when he is gone. (p 230)"

"Spring was rich and heavy in the air. All the plants were turning over, beginning another journey upward toward the sun. (p 244)"

""I think the Bible is full of mistakes. I thought I would correct them. For instance, where does it say that all living things are equal?" The priest shook his head. 'It doesn't say that. It says man has dominion over the creatures of the earth.' "'Well, that's where it needs to be fixed. That's part of the trouble, don't you see?'" (270)"

"when all of them joined in to sing about lovers and fights and broken-down cars, it was a shared world, between all tribes, all nations. (p 296)"

"he glanced toward them, swallowed, and said quietly, "So sorry...It's not me doing it. It's not even the leasers. It's what is legal." Belle sat down. "Why is it that so many crimes are backed up by your laws?""

"Beekeepers have a saying that honey begins with a drop of sugar, and misery starts with a mote of dust. (p 312)"

"From the hills, the doings of town seemed distant and hazy to Belle. She fell into a new rhythm, more like the rhythm of earth, the cycles of night and day. (p 322)"

""Right or wrong. For us, it is such a simple thing, only a matter of whether a wrong has been done, or someone harmed. But they have books filled with words, with rules about how the story can and cannot be spoken. There is not room enough, nor time, to search for the real story that lies beneath the rest." (p341)"

"They stared ahead, into another future. (p342)"

"She slept on the ground of the cave that night, feeling the land, feeling it move up through her. She saw her own self lying there, a white-haired woman, a strong woman, part of earth's terrain. In the cave she remembered how there was hope in the land, hope and tomorrow living in the veins and stones of earth. She remembered that the river was going to the sea, had been rain clouds and lakes. It had been snow. Now it was on its journey back to the great first waters of life."

"It was a beautiful night, and she thought how wonderful it was to look out without fear (p373)"

"As an Indian woman, I come from a long history of people who have listened to the language of this continent, people who have known that corn grows with the songs and prayers of the people, that it has a story to tell, that the world is alive...This intuitive and common language is what I seek for my writing, work in touch with the mystery and force of life, work that speaks a few of the many voices around us...It is also poetry, this science, and I note how often scientific theories lead to the world of poetry and vision, theories telling us how atoms that were stars have been transformed into our living, breathing bodies. And in these theories, or maybe they should be called stories, we begin to understand how we are each many people, including the stars we once were, and how we are in essence the earth and the universe, how what we do travels clear around the earth and returns. In a single moment of our living, there is our ancestral and personal history, our future, even our deaths planted in us and already growing toward their fulfillment. The corn plants are there, and like all the rest we are forever merging our borders with theirs in the world collective. Our very lives might depend on this listening. In the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the wind told the story that was being suppressed by the people. It gave away the truth. It carried the story of danger to other countries. It was a poet, a prophet, a scientist. Sometimes, like the wind, poetry has its own laws speaking for the life of the planet. It is a language that wants to bring back together what the other words have torn apart. It is the language of life speaking through us about the sacredness of life."

"How we have been pulled from the land! And how poetry has worked hard to set us free, uncage us, keep us from split tongues that mimic the voices of our captors. It returns us to our land. Poetry is a string of words that parades without a permit. It is a lockbox of words to put an ear to as we try to crack the safe of language, listening for the right combination, the treasure inside. It is life resonating. It is sometimes called Prayer, Soothsaying, Complaint, Invocation, Proclamation, Testimony, Witness. Writing is and does all these things. And like that parade, it is illegitimately insistent on going its own way, on being part of the miracle of life, telling the story about what happened when we were cosmic dust, what it means to be stars listening to our human atoms."

"A friend's father, watching the United States stage another revolution in another Third World country, said, "Why doesn't the government just feed people and then let the political chips fall where they may?" He was right. It was easy, obvious, even financially more reasonable to do that, to let democracy be chosen because it feeds hunger."

"When I sit down at the desk, there are other women who are hungry, homeless. I don't want to forget that, that the world of matter is still there to be reckoned with. This writing is a form of freedom most other people do not have. So, when I write, I feel a responsibility, a commitment to other humans and to the animal and plant communities as well."

"writing has changed me. And there is the powerful need we all have to tell a story, each of us with a piece of the whole pattern to complete. As Alice Walker says, We are all telling part of the same story, and as Sharon Olds has said, Every writer is a cell on the body politic of America."

"Writing begins for me with survival, with life and with freeing life, saving life, speaking life. It is work that speaks what can't be easily said. It originates from a compelling desire to live and be alive. For me, it is sometimes the need to speak for other forms of life, to take the side of human life, even our sometimes frivolous living, and our grief-filled living, our joyous living, our violent living, busy living, our peaceful living. It is about possibility. It is based in the world of matter. I am interested in how something small turns into an image that is large and strong with resonance, where the ordinary becomes beautiful. I believe the divine, the magic, is here in the weeds at our feet, unacknowledged. What a world this is. Where else could water rise up to the sky, turn into snow crystals, magnificently brought together, fall from the sky all around us, pile up billions deep, and catch the small sparks of sunlight as they return again to water?"

"live so nothing will be left for death at the end"

"fire flashes from the gun like a flower that blooms madness and is gone."

"these words, these words are proof there is healing"

"beginning and end together the way sunlight on skin is still connected to the fiery storms of its origins"

"She was a faith healer, of sorts. By that, I mean she always held a cure for hopelessness, could lay a hand on misery and make it smile could ever hold."

"Something must hold me this way, and you, and the thin blue tail of the galaxy, to keep us from leaving as life unfolds behind us over long roads and intricate, human waters."

"This is what I know from science: that a grain of dust dwells at the center of every flake of snow, that ice can have its way with land, that wolves live inside a circle of their own beginning. This is what I know from blood: the first language is not our own."

"Sometimes now I hear the voice of my great-grandmother, Agnes. It floats toward me like a soft breeze through an open window. (beginning of Prologue)"

"I was seventeen when I returned to Adam's Rib on Tinselman's Ferry. It was the north country, the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water so that the maps showed places both bound and, if you knew the way in, boundless. The elders said it was where land and water had joined together in an ancient pact, now broken. The waterways on which I arrived had a history. They had been crossed by many before me..."

"Change was in the air. It was palpable, a strong presence in the room. (chapter three, p51)"

"At the first light of morning I sat up in bed. The storm by then was dark green and there was still a rhythmic song of falling water, but a larger noise was behind the rain, a great disturbance of air. I went to the window and looked up. In the first spread of light above us was a cloud, a great cloud of flesh and feather so thick the sky itself appeared to be moving as the wings of tundra swans clattered together, as they pulled themselves south. Their voices seemed to wake the land itself, which at that moment lived only for the great, beautiful birds, the sky full and moving. I wasn't dreaming. I had no need to dream. This world I'd entered, however (chapter four p78)"

""Your mother was a door...Always closed. But sometimes I thought she was a window, instead, because through her I glimpsed scenes of suffering." Even young, I understood this in a way. I understood already from what the women said that my mother was stairs with no destination. She was a burning house, feeding on the air of others. She had no more foundation, no struts, no beams. Always, a person would think she was one step away from collapsing. But she remained standing."

"From my many grandmothers, I learned how I came from a circle of courageous women and strong men who had walls pulled down straight in front of them until the circle closed, the way rabbits are hunted in a narrowing circle, but some lived, some survived this narrowing circle of life. (chapter seven, p107)"

"I looked down, embarrassed, but she said only, "Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing." (p125)"

"What I liked was that land refused to be shaped by the makers of maps. Land had its own will. The cartographers thought if they mapped it, everything would remain the same, but it didn't, and I respected it for that. Change was the one thing not accounted for. (p123)"

"I only knew that I and my many mothers had been lost in sky, water, and the galaxy, as we rested on a planet so small it was invisible to the turnings of other worlds. (p179)"

"I was told Ammah was a silent god and rarely spoke. The reason for this was that all things--birdsongs, the moon, even my own life--grow from rich and splendid silence. (p265)"