We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.

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

I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.

In some Mayan villages they even have a stage beyond the elder that they call the Echo Person. They say that when an Echo Person, whether a man or a woman, speaks, the words echo both in this world and in the other world. That's why they are called Echo People.

If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.

When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.

The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.