Loneliness is an aspect of the land.
They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies but have held on to their own secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming a long outwaiting.
Her name is Ago and she belonged to the last culture to evolve in North America.
I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.
The landscape of the American West has to be seen to believed and has to be believed to be seen.
If you believe in the power of words you can bring about physical changes in the universe.
Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountian the immense landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood
Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it.
I have deep roots in this Oklahoma soil. It makes me proud.
I have a pretty good knowledge of the Indian world by virtue of living on several different reservations and being exposed to several different cultures and languages.
Your imagination comes to life and this you think is where Creation was begun.
In the beginning was the word and it was spoken.
The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred.
The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see.
I wonder if in the dark night of the sea the octopus dreams of me.
To look upon that landscape in the early morning with the sun at your back is to lose the sense of proportion.
The first word gives origin to the second the first and second to the third and the third to the fourth and so on. You cannot begin with the second word...
My father was a painter and he taught art. He once said to me 'I never knew an Indian child who could not draw.'
Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.
It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And as I say on occasion it may have to be believed in order to be seen.
I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable.
A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.
Words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold.
For the storyteller for the arrowmaker language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.
Writing is not a matter of choice. Writers have to write. It is somehow in their temperament in the blood in tradition.