Indians have no monopoly on environmentalism. That's one of the great myths. But we were subsistence livers. They're two different things. Environmentalism is a conscious choice and subsistence is the absence of choice. We had to use everything to survive. And now that we've been assimilated and colonized and we have luxuries and excesses, we're just as wasteful as other people.

If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.

There have been players with Indian heritage, but there hasn't been a Native-American professional basketball player who became a regular for all sorts of social and political reasons.

The problem for me with liberals is that we've abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe.

Okay, so maybe I'm romantic... but somebody is supposed to be romantic. Some warrior is supposed to go to war against the imperial forces of cynicism and irony. I am a sentimental soldier.

Sometimes it's called passing out and sometimes it's just pretending to be asleep

I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.