They remembered volleyball as a laid back backyard barbecue pastime, or a gym requirement. They had no idea how fierce and cool the sport had become, how girls had taken it over.
You can’t assimilate Indian ghosts. It’s too late!
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.
The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.
They’d built that place to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth. Hinsdale.
That’s what a drum is all about – it gathers people in and holds them.
I bounced around on top naturally. But that belly, yai! It grew big as a hill and I couldn’t see over it. I’d call out, Are you still back there? Holler to me! Like most fat Indians he did have a skinny butt. Man, those muscles in his back cheeks were powerful, too. He swung me around like a circus act. So I enjoyed him real well, those times were good. Awee, said Mooshum. His voice was wistful.
They stood inside their own quiet like a pocket.
My petunias,” she tells me in a flat voice, “are none of your business.
Even the most traditional Indians, the ones who’d kept the old ceremonies alive in secret, either had Catholicism beaten into them in boarding school... or they had decided to hedge their bets by adding the saints to their love of the sacred pipe.
Things started going wrong, as far as Zhaanat was concerned, when places everywhere were named for people – political figures, priests, explorers – and not for the real things that happened in these places – the dreaming, the eating, the death, the appearance of animals. This confusion of the chimookomaanag between the timelessness of the earth and the short span here of mortals was typical of their arrogance.
Barnes spent a lot of time driving the boys to matches with other towns – off-reservation towns where the crowds broke out fake war whoops and jeers when their hometown favorite lost.
Temptation is a slower process and you’ll feel it more in the morning just after waking and in the evening, when you are at loose ends, tired, and yet not ready to fall asleep.
The gun jammed on the last shot and the baby stood holding the crib rail, eyes wild, bawling.
And so to be afraid of entering the cemetery by night was to fear not the loving ancestors who lay buried, but the gut kick of our history, which I was bracing to absorb. The old cemetery was filled with its complications.
That old buffalo woman gave Nanapush her views. She told him that he had survived by doing the opposite of all the others. Where they abandoned, he saved. Where they were cruel, he was kind. Where they betrayed, he was faithful. Nanapush then decided that in all things he would be unpredictable. As he had completely lost trust in authority, he decided to stay away from others and to think for himself, even to do the most ridiculous things that occurred to him.
Any power she owned lay in her feigned indifference.
To Delphine, the hesitation of March was cheering. March was all expectation, a gathering of power. Still cold but marginally warmer every day – a hopeful time of the year.
Eddy tells me his book is basically an argument against suicide. Every page contains a reason not to kill yourself.
This is how the world ends, I think, everything crazy yet people doing normal things.