Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there’s nobody to read it, does it make a sound?
If a poet falls in a forest, and there’s nobody there to hear him, does he make a metaphor or simile?
On a reservation, Indian men who abandon their children are treated worse than white fathers who do the same thing. It’s because white men have been doing that forever and Indian men have just learned how. That’s how assimilation can work.
He may not have loved me perfectly, but he loved me as well as he could.
This is who I am. This is who I have always been. I am in pain. I am always in pain. But I always find my way to the story. And I always find my way home.
So I draw because I feel like it might be my only real chance to escape the reservation.
I was successful and acceptable and loved because I was – and still am – great at negotiating with whiteness. But that means my white friends often mistakenly believe that my ability to successfully negotiate the white world means that I am white – or more white than Native. My white friends can mistakenly believe that my intellectual and artistic abilities are intrinsically white.
The reservation doesn’t sing anymore but the songs still hang in the air. Every molecule waits for a drumbeat; every element dreams lyrics. Today I am walking between water, two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, and the energy expelled is named Forgiveness.
There’s always time to change your life.
During one week when I was little, Dad got stopped three times for DWI: Driving While Indian.
Seattle is Sweden! Extremely liberal, progressive, and very white, with a strong undercurrent of racism.
But he wasn’t ugly, just misplaced and marked by loneliness.
I know that death is never added to death; it multiplies.
I wasn’t shocked and I’m still not shocked. It’s total exploitation, with everything up for grabs. Health care, gone. Destroy the environment in search of more profit. State-sponsored violence. Targeted incarceration. You know what’s happening, though: The whole country is becoming a reservation.
He smiled mysteriously. Adults are so good at smiling mysteriously. Do they go to college for that?
Adam and Eve covered their privates with fig leaves; the first Indians covered their privates with their tiny hands.
He doesn’t hurt you because you’re the only good thing in his life. He doesn’t want to give that up. It’s the only thing he hasn’t given up.
Late at night I go out and listen to the wind. That’s all the wisdom I need. I mean, I love books, but shoot, most of the world’s wisdom is not contained in books.
Well, in the early days of humans, the community was our only protection against predators, and against the starvation. We survived because we trusted one another.
How much do we remember of what hurts us most? I’ve been thinking about pain, how each of us constructs our past to justify what we feel now.