What is it like to be a Spokane Indian without wild salmon? It is like being a Christian if Jesus had never rolled back the stone and risen from his tomb.
I know the answer has a lot to do with basic human decency, and also with the seductive nature of fame, but I think the answer has most to do with compartmentalism. It’s easy for a white racist to fall in love with and accept one member of a minority – one Indian – and their real and perceived talents and flaws. But it’s much tougher for a racist to accept a dozen Indians. And impossible for a white racist to accept the entire race of Indians – or an entire race of any nonwhite people.
That word means ‘earth-dream’. And, depending on how you use it, it means we, the people, are dreaming the earth into being. And it also means the earth is dreaming us, the people, into being. We are dreaming each other. And making each other real. And it means other things, too, that I don’t understand. That I might never understand. But I am going to keep learning.
But I am more afraid of the quieter forms of right-wing anger and sociopathy that have found power with Donald Trump’s election. I never directly feared for my life and career during a Republican presidency until Trump won the office. I have never felt so scared for the peace and safety of the entire world.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the sign of a superior mind “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time.
I don’t recall the moment when I officially became a storyteller – a talented liar – but here I must quote Simon Ortiz, the Acoma Pueblo writer, who said, “Listen. If it’s fiction, then it better be true.
How does one survive these revelations? One just lives.
Our love will be loud, and it will be bright.
It really made me wish I was Roman or Greek, you know? A classical Greek god would have killed his lying, cheating father and then given him forgiveness. And a classical Greek god would have better abs, too. That’s what Greek gods are all about, you know? Patricide and low body fat.
Each of us – rich and poor, gay and straight, black and white – we are fragile and finite. We all go through this glorious life without guarantees, without promises of rescue or redemption. We have freedom of speech and religion, and the absolute freedom to leave behind our loved ones, or to force them to unhappily pursue us.
So I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me.
Dear wife, I’m sorry that I am mysteriously incapable of folding clean laundry, but I iron, oh, I iron. Sweetheart, I’ll make your white shirt so crisp and sharp that it will split atoms as you walk.
He was going to punish me now. He couldn’t beat me up with his old man fists, but he could hurt me with his old man words.
I often wonder why I am the one who remember all the pain?
We lived in a small house, so there was no escape from the goddamn racket of her loneliness.
He felt split in two, one crazy man eating hair and one rational man watching a crazy man eat hair. He chewed and swallowed the last pieces of his father’s life. He felt like he was building a museum of pain, a freak show, where he was the only visitor viewing the only mutant screaming the only prayer he knew: Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back Daddy...
I loved the smell of ocean water. Salt always smells like memory.
I then vowed to finally finish the years-late sequel to my best-selling book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I needed that money. My mother needed that money. I hadn’t been able to finish the book because of the pathological fear that my sequel would be The Phantom Menace instead of The Empire Strikes Back. But, on the airplane, I thought, “Okay, okay, Phantom sucked, but it still made big cash. I’m gonna Yoda this book for my mother.
Marie felt a sudden urge to smash the glass, break down the door, pull down the building. She wanted to tear apart the world. Mather would have never treated a white student that badly, nor would he have shut the door in the face of a man. At that moment, she wanted Dr. Mather to disappear. She wanted every white man to disappear. She wanted to burn them all down to ash and feast on their smoke. Hateful, powerful thoughts. She wondered what those hateful, powerful thoughts could create.
It made me cry for myself.