My profanity has an aesthetic.
Branch by branch, Rowdy and I climbed toward the top of the tree, to the bottom of the sky.
Even Crazy Horse, the famous Oglala warrior, was named for his father. But nobody called him Junior, for rather logical reasons. “Look! There’s the most feared and mysterious Indian of all time! Behold! It is Junior!
Jesus, I thought, is there a better and more succinct definition of grief than It hurts a little to breathe, but we’re okay?
Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive.
Jesus, I don’t want to die today or tomorrow, but I don’t want to live forever.
Perhaps everybody, indigenous and not, lives on their own kind of reservation.
Sometimes I caught my mother digging through old photo albums or staring at the wall or out the window. She’d get that look on her face that I knew meant she missed my father. Not enough to want him back. She missed him just enough for it to hurt. On.
She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with this library. The huge number of books confirmed how much magic she’d been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks. She.
Susan Alexie died of tuberculosis on August 30, 1945. I don’t know why the exact date of her death is not on her gravestone. Perhaps it had been about money. Those extra letters and numbers might have been too expensive. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I could write “I don’t know” one million times and publish that as my memoir. And, yes, it would be repetitive, experimental, and more metaphor than history, but it would also be emotionally accurate.
My father went on a legendary drinking binge. My mother went to church every single day. It was all booze and God, booze and God, booze and God.
If God really loved Indians, he would have made us white people.
And, sometimes, when I’m being the best version of myself, I will remember that bullies are created – that bullies seek to torture because they’ve been tortured.
I prayed to Our Father and I called my father. And one father remained silent and the other quickly came to get me.
Can a writer forget something that he’s written in one of his own books? Yes, of course.
Doesn’t an Indian tribe finally surrender to colonization by becoming as capitalistic as our conquerors? Isn’t indigenous economic sovereignty one of the sneakiest damn oxymorons of all time?
I suppose, in many ways, one never stops loving the people they loved during their youth. Or hating the people they hated.
Junior based all of his decisions on his dreams and visions, which created a lot of problems.
Whites and Indians laughed at most of the same jokes, but they laughed for different reasons.
I thought maybe if you wore different clothes at school,′ Paul said, ‘maybe you could start a trend. You’d be original.’ ‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘It’s high school, Dad. People get beat up for being original.