Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

I think one of the reasons to be here on earth is to finally be who we are, at all times - to know and be predictable to ourselves.

It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

But then as time passed, I learned the lesson that parents do early on. You fail sometimes. No matter how much you love your children, there are times you slip. There are moments you can't give, stutter, lose your temper, or simply lose face with the world, and you can't explain this to a child.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

Hunger steals the memory