I mean, yeah, my dad would sometimes go on a drinking binge and be gone for a week, but those white dads can completely disappear without ever leaving the living room.
Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear.
If you want to make a white man cry, despite the amount of time it’s been since he last wept aloud, then all you have to do is employ “baseball” and “father” in three consecutive sentences.
Because the thing you learn as a hugely ambitious Indian is that you’re often going to be the only Indian in the room, so you’d better get used to it.
Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive. And, maybe, this repetition can become a chant inside a healing ceremony.
I think you forget things on purpose,” my mother’s ghost said.
The stuff that you hate in others is often the stuff you hate in yourself. But perhaps you can learn something about yourself when this happens. When you are angry at somebody, what does that say about who YOU are?
But I stopped crying when I noticed that very few people were being openly emotional. I’d never seen that many stoic people at a funeral. I’d never experienced a silent and polite funeral. My tribe doesn’t bury our dead that way. We wail, weep, and tell dirty jokes at graveside.
Everything, everything, everything can be installation art.
My mother once made a quilt from dozens of pairs of second- and third- and fourth- hand blue jeans that she bought us at Goodwill, the Salvation Army, Value Village, and garage sales. My late sister studied my mother’s denim quilt and said, ‘That’s a lot of pants. There’s been a lot of ass in those pants. This is a blanket of asses.
Aren’t all crimes, by definition, hate crimes? I mean, people don’t rob banks because they love tellers.
The United States wants all of us to forget the crimes it committed against the indigenous. The United States wants us to forget. The United States wants us to forget. The United States wants us to forget.
I’m dying from about ninety-nine kinds of shame.
How often had men sat around dinner tables and discussed women’s lives, their choices, and the reasons why one woman reached across the bed to touch another woman?
I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. If you speak and write in English or Spanish or Chinese or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture, everybody can understand it. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say “that’s a flower.” So I draw because I want to talk to the world and I want the world to pay attention to me.
I pretended I belonged.
Like a good Indian, he knew when to talk and when to remain silent. Like a good Indian, he knew there was never a good time to talk.
Words can be like that, you know? Whenever I get into arguments now, I remember her and I also remember Muhammad Ali. He knew the power of his fists but, more importantly, he knew the power of his words, too.
He was my best friend and I needed him.
Every time they ban the book, it becomes national headlines. I sell more books, so it’s actually lucrative for me. We call Banned Books Week in my house “Big-Assed Royalties Week.