Certainly I'm angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don't think it's a helpless emotion.

When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing. And so, laughing and crying, we said good-bye to my grandmother. And when we said goodbye to one grandmother, we said good-bye to all of them. Each funeral was a funeral for all of us. We lived and died together. All of us laughed when they lowered my grandmother into the ground. And all of us laughed when they covered her with dirt. And all of us laughed as we walked and drove and rode our way back to our lonely, lonely houses.

What's the difference between bulimics and anorexics?" I ask. "Anorexics are anorexics all the time," she says, "I'm only bulimic when I'm throwing up." Wow. She sounds just like my dad! "I'm only an alcoholic when I get drunk." There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. Penelope gorges on her pain and then throws it up and flushes it away. My dad drinks his pain away. (107)

At the halfway point of any drunken night, there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future.

Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.

She was in pain and I loved her, sort of loved her, I guess, so I kind of had to love her pain, too.

I recognize now that the conditions that Indians are living in are the conditions that poor people everywhere are living in.