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.

For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.

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.

In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.

Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it.

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.

To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.