Playwrights From The United States

"Simon Ortiz says, "It's fiction and you'd better believe it." I always loved that line. Another way to say it is that fiction is a vertical descent; it's a drop into an event or into history or into the depths of some kind of meaning in order to understand humans, and to somehow decipher what history speaks, the story beneath the story."

"I think it's easier for a non-Indian to write a book about Indian people and get it published than it is for us. Our own experiences and our own lives don't fit the stereotypes."

"(about humor) It's a survival technique, too. People who are in poverty, people who are in very difficult situations and in pain, have to develop humor or die of despair."

""Why don't you go out more?" her mother always wanted to know. But she was out, just in another way. Out in the world. Out in the spray of ocean, the garden of heaven. Perhaps she was timid, but she preferred the world this way. There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn't for herself. It was for what had hap¬ pened in the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean. (p65)"

"I teach in American Indian studies at the university and I find that many of the non-Indian students are desperately searching for spirits, for their own souls, that something in the contemporary world has left many Euro-Americans and Europeans without a source, has left them with a longing for something they believe existed in earlier times or in tribal people. What they want is their own life, their own love for the earth, but when they speak their own words about it, they don't believe them, so they look to Indians, forgetting that enlightenment can't be found in a weekend workshop, forgetting that most Indian people are living the crisis of American life, the toxins of chemical waste, the pain of what is repressed in white Americans. There is not such a thing as becoming an instant shaman, an instant healer, an instantly spiritualized person."

"People who write about wilderness and the environment are going away from themselves to do it. They don't look at the inner wilderness and what motivates people to be destructive. I think everything is connected, that I'm a part of the destruction; we all are. Investigating why we're sometimes apathetic is probably the best work we could do."

"Blessed are they who listen when no one is left to speak."

"[He] wanted to plant the seed. It was hope. It was a future. He wanted a future to grow in this place made so nearly desolate by bombs, craters and burned woods. (p165)"

"By incorporating history, by remembering, Indian women continue to define themselves. It is through this remembering that we survive. It is through this speaking out that our history is preserved more whole and intact than it was in the past."

"The desperate need to articulate this was what went into these early poems, the need to say what hadn't been spoken, to tell an untold story of our lives. They are home speaking through me. Home is in blood, and I am still on the journey of calling myself home."

"Day is breaking through doors. Earth has made another revolution."

"Feminism is a complicated issue for Indian women because what affects the women also affects the entire community. As individual nations, we have allegiances to the members of our tribes that seldom exist for non-Indian American women. Political and economic injustices are practiced against entire tribes, and are not limited to just the women. The issue of survival affects all people and the major efforts of Indian feminists have been struggles against the dominant society."

"Once a people are victims, they have to struggle hard to politicize themselves and to be able to break the cycle, to be able to somehow, as they say today, to empower themselves once again, to get back their health and their wholeness."

"There are such cruel tricks I have wondered about in nature, the way a whale must surface to breathe in the presence of its waiting killers, the way the white tails of deer and rabbit are so easily seen as they run from danger. There is something, too, in some human beings that wants to die, that drives us to our own destruction. There is something that makes us pretend to be less than we are, less than the other creatures with their grace and dignity. Perhaps it is this that makes us bow down to an angry god when we might better have knelt at the altar of our own love. (p344)"

"let your roots grow outward meeting and intertwining with other roots of those all over the planet consciously connecting for the same reason of maintaining peace and compassion. Feel the strength and support we give to the planet while connected with intent. (p 203)"

"Nature is the most profound multimedia event that you will ever experience. Why not turn off your television and go witness the greatest show on Earth. (p 152)"

"It has been my lifelong work to seek an understanding of the two views of the world, one as seen by native people and the other as seen by those who are new and young on this continent. It is clear that we have strayed from the treaties we once had with the land and with the animals. It is also clear, and heartening, that in our time there are many-Indian and non-Indian alike-who want to restore and honor these broken agreements. (Preface)"

"What a joy to share what I loved most with those I loved most."

"The gifts of the Earth are so precious and they are free. Mother Earth puts on a constant show and never charges admission. What I now see is incredible. I know that, as I continue to be in nature, I will be gifted with more and more sight."

"We are moving so quickly in today's world that our experiences are blurred. We need to slow down so that our senses will awaken and our hearts will open. When we learn this and reconnect to nature we are able to receive her energy and the many gifts she has for us."

"Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do. I love what will consume us all, the place where the tunneling worms and roots of plants dwell, where the slow deep centuries of earth are undoing and remaking themselves. ("The Caves" p30)"

"I write out of respect for the natural world, recognizing that humankind is not separate from nature. Some of this work connects the small world of humans with the larger universe, containing us in the same way that native ceremonies do, showing us both our place and a way of seeing. (Preface)"

"The native tradition of respect for other species, for the land, and for the water, is a view of the world that informs my work. The more I study, the more I see that the traditional stories, the traditional ceremonies, and the ways of living in the world are superior to what has developed from the Western view. I use that word "superior" with hesitation. I mean that there isn't room for species extinction, for exploitation of the land or water. One thing that indigenous people on all continents have been able to do is to keep a balance between all the relationships of what is now called ecology."

"There are traditions and laws that are beyond human. Just because it is drawn up on a piece of paper doesn't make something right, legal, ethical. I consider my own work to be traditionally centered."

"A bird killed in the name of human power is in truth a loss of power from the world, not an addition to it. ("The Feathers" p15)"

"I know this telling is the first part of the ceremony, my part in it. It is story, really, that finds its way into language, and story is at the very crux of healing, at the heart of every ceremony and ritual in the older America. ("All My Relations" p37)"

"The humor was always there also, because even in desperate situations people are human. They still do funny things, and they still have their obsessions and habits. It bothers me when I read a book where everything is clear-cut and there isn't anything human about or in it. One of the things that often happens between cultures is the denial of common humanity."

"for me writing is like - I follow it, it comes first and then I follow it. I mean it's really saved my life, my soul. It's been my leader and my helper and my mate in life really, in a way. So it has been my map because it's been the pathway I've followed and it's been my direction out of a certain way of living and being. I don't know how to describe it - it's like the thread out of the labyrinth."

"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)"

"in revolutions, it is the poets that are taken away. Because it speaks a truth that enters more than just the mind. It conveys a life and a life of change, of possibility, into the whole self. (2012)"

"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)"

"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)"

"I began writing fiction because our lives are made up of stories and a story can change a life. (2020)"

"in our human development we begin with ourselves and move outward toward relationship, and in writing work, it seems to be the same, that most writers begin with their own identity, with autobiography, and then move out toward family, friends, environment, country, world. I have noticed there's a return for many writers as they age…for others the world expands outward more and more, never returning to self...We need for writers to do both. We need the personal in its global context."

""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."

"But I could see right away that this lost him points in the white men's book. Tenderness was not a quality of strength to them. It was unmanly, an act they considered soft and unworthy. (p281)"

"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 discovered Kenneth Rexroth and I was really excited about him. It was the first contemporary poetry I read, and it was alive for me. It became a kind of model for how I wanted to write."

"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)"

"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."

"My own particular circumstance guaranteed that I'd never feel normal or manage to fit into mainstream life. Until a person knows that, from the mind, they feel crazy. Now I see there's no need to fit. You know, it's not that Indians are different from the dominant culture. We are the same with the same needs and loves and heartaches. It's just that most Indians know time and space well enough from the heart to know that life is for living. Because we are short in our span here and we are not the most significant of lives on earth. We share the planet with plants and animals equal to ourselves, and we are small in the universe. So the daily strivings fall into place. I feel that poetry is a process of uncovering our real knowledge. To manipulate the language merely via the intellect takes away the strength of the poem."

"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."

"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)"

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

""Why are only white laws followed? This will kill the world. What is the law if not the earth's?" (p283)"

"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."