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.

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

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

Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.

To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion.

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

Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.