You don't have to be the specialist on everything. You can try to inform yourself.

You know, you want to be outrageous when you're young, so all the young people say, "Oooh . . ." Now my tactics are different.

I wanted to write something in a voice that was unique to who I was. And I wanted something that was accessible to the person who works at Dunkin Donuts or who drives a bus, someone who comes home with their feet hurting like my father, someone whos busy and has too many children, like my mother.

As Indigenous peoples, we know there is more to the world. We know spirits exist. We know as women, because we're especially attuned to this kind of knowledge, that spirits exist and have a presence in our lives. Some of us are gifted and can communicate with the spirit world. Not everyone has that gift and can perceive the borders between the living and the dead and our society actively discourages us of exploring the knowledge of what many of us have already always known in our cultures.

When you become a driver, they don't tell you that you have to switch languages. The drivers have their own language and they don't tell you that as girls. How am I supposed to know that blinking light means something? There are all these little languages that you have to know, but you don't know.

When I was a child, I was very shy, and there's still a part of me that's very shy.

[Dennis Mathis] was very sensitive about keeping the unique way that I spoke English - it had a lot of Mexicanisms or Mexican syntax. So you keep it in because it's adding something unique.