The streetlight outside my house shines on tonight and I’m watching it like it could give me a vision. James ain’t talked ever and he looks at that streetlight like it was a word and maybe like it was a verb. James wanted to streetlight me and make me bright and beautiful so all the moths and bats would circle me like I was the center of the world an held secrets.
I hoped and prayed that they would someday forgive me for leaving them. I hoped and prayed that I would someday forgive myself for leaving them.
Well of course man. We Indians have lost everything. We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we lost our songs and dances. We lost each other. We only know how to lose and be lost.
There are family mysteries I cannot solve. There are family mysteries I am unwilling to solve.
If Heaven ain’t filled with gender-swapping Indians,” I said, “then I don’t want to go there.
We didn’t domesticate cats. They domesticated themselves. But not totally, you know? You take a good look at any house cat, and you can tell there’s eventually going to be a day when it goes back wild, you know? When it reverts to its true nature. You fall over and die in a house with your dog, and your dog will lie down beside your dead body, maybe right on top of it, and starve to death. But a house cat will feast on your eyes as soon as its stomach starts growling.
Gay people were seen as magical, too. I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers. Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives!
My parents came from poor people who came from poor people who came from poor people, all the way back to the very first poor people.
Held on to me like I was a baby. And she kept crying. So many tears. My clothes and hair were soaked with her tears. It was, like, my mother had given me a grief shower, you know? Like she’d baptized me with her pain.
I was crying because I had broken my best friend’s heart.
You have to get very comfortable with the idea of being lonely. For all of human history, we’ve always run away from being lonely and now there are even more distractions. But that’s the thing – if you’re going to make the decision to rebel against your tribe, you’re going to get very lonely.
Thing is, I don’t believe in ghosts. But I see them all the time.
At what point do we just re-create the people who have disappeared from our lives?
I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism – in order to believe themselves to be nonracist.
I realized that my mother had not taught us the tribal language because she knew her children would not be strong enough to carry the responsibility of being the last fluent speakers. She protected us from that spiritual burden. She protected us from that loneliness.
Your mother is a better man than me. Mothers are almost always better men than men are.
Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other. It was like being Indian was my job, but it was only a part-time job. And it didn’t pay well at all.
Sometimes we meet a character and we fall so hopelessly in love with him or her that we want to be that character, no matter how tough they have it, no matter how they might mess things up.
She went searching for her dreams, and she didn’t find them, but she made the attempt.
I always think it’s funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during that first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians. So I’m never quite sure why we eat turkey like everybody else. “Hey, Dad,” I said. “What do Indians have to be so thankful for?” “We should give thanks that they didn’t kill all of us.