Women Authors From The United States

"American people need to revise their ideas about spirituality. Spirituality ends up being very much like capitalism. It ends up being a force to control other people or to make yourself look good-to give yourself a position of power and integrity."

"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."

"You can really change the world with a good story, you can really make a difference with a good story, or you can really touch a heart with a good poem or essay. But you can't do it sometimes just with a sign...the power of story and sharing is the power to make change, the ability to make a difference. And it's not fixed, like a belief system would be a fixed thing. So when we talk, when we share, when we hear a story, read a story, learn a new story, it has the real ability to make a difference and change the world, change a person."

"As for the Indian wars, it seems that the time is far away, but it isn’t. The Wounded Knee massacre took place when my grandmother was seven. And Native people, throughout the world, live with history as part of life in the mind, the heart, every day. We may live in modern America, hold jobs, but history is present. Time is different for us. (2012)"

"I love to read poetry, phone books, playing cards, novels, newspapers, bathroom walls - there's a story in all of it. And I love poets who bring together poetry and life in all its motion: Neruda, Forche, Cardenal, Dugan, Bishop...I learn from all of what I read and hear. And as Lame Deer said, we're surrounded by books. The stones are books, and we may read their stories. The trees are books with a story written in them. The water and land and each animal is a book, with a poem and story and song."

"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."

"I consider caretaking the basic work of living on earth. I've often thought about how one of the things that was probably necessary for the woman's movement-the dominant culture woman's movement - was to break free of the duty of being a caretaker. But then, for women to return to being caretakers, because it's important to offer service to the living, and to the planet. I find many women now who are returning to the idea of being a caretaker, of nourishing as one of the primary roles of both men and women. I see a direct relation between how we care for the animal-people and the plants and insects and land and water, and how we care for each other, and for ourselves. Part of our work here is to care for life. (Smith: And what you're saying, I guess, is you can't limit that care to just your family and friends, to just the human creatures you love who come your way - you have to widen that.) LH: Yeah, it has to be widened. If you look at the book Call to Consciousness for instance, a community is not just us-our nuclear family, or the Indian community, or a "University community," as they say here--but the community of all living creatures."

"I find that my writing now, in the softness I would like, looks at the political, and even when I don’t wish it. Because more and more the world is revealed to us. I am, have been, more of a writer who thinks about environment, but the kind of world we are living with now seems to require that we speak the words that open it and keep it in the minds of all people. The corruption of the past lives in the present and while I would prefer to talk about trees and their plant communities, their root systems, etc. I end up in the process writing about the root system of America. (2012)"

"If I look back on my novels as a pattern, every one of them has a return to indigenous knowledge systems, a person who says "okay, I'm not going to be part of this other world, I'm going to return to the original way of thinking about the world." And so, do I think there's an answer to this crisis that we're in? I don't know what it is. If I did would I be here? [laughing]. But it's a step, because the thing is, indigenous people know the environment. Sometimes we're seen as ignorant or as knowing less than people in the Western world. But the truth is that you've lived some place for generation after generation, maybe a thousand years, maybe, like in Australia 60,000 years, some places here 20,000 years. You know everything about that environment, and you don't endanger it because you have to keep it-the new word is - "sustainable." But you do, you have to keep it sustainable."

"thinking about plot and character development is a much more linear way of thinking than it is to be in a poem. To be in a poem means you drop deeper down into yourself and your subject. And it's more resonant. I like the experience of writing poetry a lot better than composing fiction...I love to do poetry because it's so-- the experience of it is like a whole body experience and not just an exercise that's mental."

"There's nothing that can really prepare a person for a novel. It's not, for me, a static form of writing, but a process of seeing what will unfold, even a novel rooted in history as this one is."

"writing for me is like a form of meditation that I think it is for other writers too. You go into what I call when I'm teaching "the zone" or "the heart of it," and so you're in a different place. And time is different, everything is different there...it's like magic. And every creative person I talk to, no matter what kind of thing they're doing, says there's magic that enters in somewhere along the way in the creative process. And it's beyond you."

"…She is a woman who lives in the body and that is very difficult to achieve in a civilized society where the mind overpowers it, keeps us out of touch. We do not find ourselves whole so much of the time. And again, it is a cultural gulf, but most of us here in America, even those of us I work with, are more involved with our work than with being conscious of our whole body self throughout the day. (2012)"

"I work best if I allow the process to take place. That doesn't mean I don't think, take measurements of what is just, feel out what is valuable to life, to self, to earth, where to take, where to return, what is the responsibility of my own work-you know, response-ability. I ask myself how best to let my words serve. I know that part of that is to take a global perspective, because I see what's happening in the world, and others see, and our combined voices are a chorus, a movement toward life. They are a protest against human-imposed suffering. They are vital energy going out into the world. We feed each other with that energy when we read each other's work. My other responsibility, I think, is to be honest about my life. That doesn't mean I won't write fiction, or that I'll "tell all"...But it means this: that I, as an Indian woman, from a non middle-class background, on the margin, not a member of the dominant culture I need to speak what my struggle has been, and offer the strength of that survival to keep us all moving together, to offer back my own words. This means to speak about what it's like to be of mixed blood, to have suffered losses, to have not been educated, to have worked primarily at working-class jobs until fairly recently and to have worked as a writer. Not that I think my own life is so significant although sometimes I think it's pretty incredible, I'll tell ya!...it's part of a historical process. It's a woman's experience, and an Indian woman's experience. And I've been given this gift of words, and I need to speak this life, and the political dimensions of it. I need to make the interpretation of my own place and the places of others in the American context. But I don't want to get too serious here. These responsibilities shouldn't be taken so seriously by writers, by women, as to take away passion, and joy, and play. Because we've got to keep energy moving. We must take in and out, like breathing. I've always thought there's nothing less peaceful than a somber peace movement, you know what I mean? You know those T shirts with Emma Goldman, saying, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution?" That's what peace and equality must mean to us all-that we can have joy in living, and no more cold war of the inner self."

"It's not my purpose to please all people. It's my purpose to write the most honest feeling work I can, work with integrity and respect for life."

"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."

"It really is true that the history of your people and your land is in the human body."

"Each morning when I step outside my door I walk into the Garden of Eden. "O Great Spirit, thank you for this beautiful day." There has not been one day in the past 20 years that I have not started my day this way and really meant it. When you are truly connected to Mother Earth and Spirit, you see as much beauty in a cold, gray, sleety, December morning as a warm, sunny day in June."

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

"When we learn to align our own energy with that of the Earth's, we will move forward effortlessly. When we slow down and allow our senses to open, great transformations occur. Living on the planet Earth becomes living in the Garden of Eden. (p 212)"

"I was struck by the fact that Native American tradition is to recognize Spirit in everything. I started to look at the natural world a little differently."

"Nature is now too often defined by people who are fragmented from the land. Such a world is seldom one that carries and creates the human spirit. Too rarely is it understood that the soul lies at all points of intersection between hum in consciousness and the rest of nature. Skin is hardly a container. Or boundaries are not solid, we are permeable, and even when we are solitary dreamers we are rooted in the soul outside."

"[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)"

"It is a still day, everything silent. Even the wind isn't blowing. There is just a breeze of something living, like the breath of the universe. (p281)"

"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."

"All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one. (p116)"

"He had a map. He looked at it, trying to figure out where he was. He'd studied the legend. Legend. It was a good word for kilometers and miles, things covering space. As if the world was merely a story, and it was, one story laid down over another. As it was in his older country, too. (p164)"

"Like the water, the earth, the universe, a story is forever unfolding. It floods and erupts. It births new worlds. It is circular as our planet and fluid as the words of the first people who came out from the ocean or out of the cave or down from the sky. Or those who came from a garden where rivers meet and whose god was a tempter to their fall, planning it into their creation along with all the rest. (p288)"

"...most of the [European] theories made nature smaller than it is and made the human larger. Vision was about the seer only, not the seen. Nothing could be more different from how tribal people on all continents have seen the world. From the perspectives of those who have remained in their own terrain for thousands of years, there were - and are other points of view. For tribal thinkers, the outside world creates the human: we are dive to processes within and without the self. It is more humble way to view the world, and far more steady. Nature is the creator, not the created. There exists too, a geography of spirit that is tied to and comes from the larger geography of nature. It offers to humans the bounty and richness of the world. If we are open enough, strong enough to connect with the world, we become something greater than we are."

"The poetry writing was very important to me. It was a way of trying to define who I was in an environment that felt foreign. I realize now that writing had everything to do with my life and my survival."

"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)"

"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."

"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."

"Lies couldn't call out the way truth does. They feared discovery. They were constantly confused and had soft edges that overlapped. (p45)"

"lies are the first recognition of truth. (p45)"

"During the daylight hours he travels, without wanting to, the inside passage of his own self, a human labyrinth of memory, history, and the people that came before him. [He] is in trouble, not with the law, not with other people, but within. What lonely creatures humans are when they thread through these passages. It is an inner world, one of disasters and whirlwinds, unknown islands, and he must journey them all alone. There are circles inside the mind of a man, circles a man can't escape because each time he comes to a conclusion, it is the same place and it begins over again. It courses hard. And [he] harbors too many secrets."

"Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places. (p53)"

"If, when you are there, you see women wading on the water and clouds in the valley, the smell of rain, or a lotus blossom rises out of round green leaves, remember there is always something besides our own misery."

"Even the land gives in to history. (from Prologue)"

"The infant Thomas W. Just was born on July 2, 1947, to much happiness and many pictures of his mother smiling down at him. It was the day just before the octopus left the water, walked on all eight legs across land and into Seal Cave. Sometimes young people made love in that cave. Sometimes boys escaped school and smoked cigarettes there. But on this day, the day after Thomas was born, the octopus walked out of the sea and they watched it..."

"The people her own age had not ever recovered from the war. The older people are still in the pain of history. (p64)"

"community lies beyond family within the surrounding, enfolding environment. We are co-creators in the universe, the world, within all the rest, all fluid, shifting movement, and without the emphasis on measurement. The world is there in its entirety, not in segments. And we inhabit it. This is what makes us human."

"Even today we focus on diversity as part of Earth's creativity while Euro Americans still search for the universal, an absolute, something that can be understood, spoken, be assimilated into their own system of knowledge. The Native understands the world as more complex and not the static that is implicit in an absolute where all communication remains within a narrow circle of like-minded. One group emphasizes the individual as part of the whole. The Euro emphasizes the individual. There is "we" and there is "I.""

"We need to acknowledge the differences and their spectrum of human being, the significance of accepting all and not wishing for a monoculture. Diversity is a way of being, and the attempt to find an absolute is yet another part of the separate matrixes. Tribal peoples do not require a sameness of thought or belief. We come from different stories, different origins, and we respect the differences."

"Waking today just before winter when I try to name the color of grasses, how I feel their beauty, there is no word."

"Even when we have been sent away from that place or have not learned our own languages, we still have it; from subtle gesture and learned ways of being, it is passed down to us. This is "How It Is." The knowledge is in the manner of being, even when the words are not spoken. Our philosophies come of being from a place and a community, of knowing a place and respecting its boundaries."

""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)"

"even stars come apart in the play of universal wind."

"Most of us think of the earth as a living being and that we must live upon it with care and love and respect. The idea of subjugating the earth is the product of another mind. Even environmentalists, she maintains, are of another mind because they are not concerned so much with the sacred as with the idea of stewardship."

"We live not only inside a body but within a story as well, and our story resides in the land as sure as the vision of Dorothea Lange's desperate, running horse. (p 204)"