When I go around in America and I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed; they feel powerless... and we understand the psychological genocide that they have already inflicted upon their own people.

We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off.

We’re not Indians and we’re not Native Americans. We’re older than both concepts. We’re the people, we’re the human beings.

They’re called poems but in reality they’re lines given to me to hang on to

I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything. Or these lines will come into my head and I'll write 'em down in a little book, just little sets of lines, but I won't try to make stories or poems out of them. I'm doing a lot of that now, just the lines.

The strength of the poetry as we enter into whatever it is we are entering into, will be determined by the clarity of the thinking we put into it.

In the society of illusion, reality must manifest itself. The story songs of Joel Rafael are that manifestation... the essence of minstrel.