If we call the young ones, say 10 to 30 years old, 'siblings,' we can see they tend to be naturally ecological. They regard whales and owls as siblings too. That's a great advance.

Adolescents are in just as much trouble in Native America as they are in the white community.

In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.

I have daughters and I have sons./When one of them lays a hand/On my shoulder, shining fish/Turn suddenly in the deep sea.

During the patriarchal time, the men were always and invariably dominant, legally and socially in marriage, so now it's possible to remodel the entire house of marriage, put in new footings and new joists and a new sort of interior. That is exactly what some men and women are now doing.

One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.