Great writing, all Indians, all the time!
Quotes:
Five bucks, he said, give me five bucks and I’ll give you enough meth to put you on a Vision Quest.
For a half-assed Indian, Junior talked full-on spiritual. Yeah, he was a born-again Indian. At the age of twenty-five, he war-danced for the first time. Around the same day he started dealing drugs.
Whenever an Indian says he’s traditional, you know that Indian is full of shit.
Powwow is like high school, except with more feathers and beads.
I do love you, I said, but I don’t love you enough to save you.
He reduced Jeri all the way down to the sacred parts of her anatomy. And those parts stop being sacred when you talk blasphemy about them.
It seemed that every Indian knew all the lyrics to every Hank Williams song ever recorded. Hank was our Jesus, Patsy Cline was our Virgin Mary, and Freddy Fender, George Jones, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Charley Pride, Ronnie Milsap, Tanya Tucker, Marty Robbins, Johnny Horton, Donna Fargo, and Charlie Rich were our disciples.
Indians hardly ever travel in a straight line,
Take care of each other is what my dreams were saying. Take care of each other.”
“We are all given one thing by which our lives are measured, one determination. Mine are the stories which can change or not change the world. It doesn’t matter which as long as I continue to tell the stories. My father, he died on Okinawa in World War II, died fighting for this country, which had tried to kill him for years. My mother, she died giving birth to me, died while I was still inside her. She pushed me out into the world with her last breath. I have no brothers or sisters. I have only my stories which came to me before I even had the words to speak. I learned a thousand stories before I took my first thousand steps. They are all I have. It’s all I can do.”
Joey and Big Ed loved each other with the kind of straight-boy-devotion that started wars, terror attacks, and video game companies.
Every man must have his secrets, right? And every man was supposed to ignore every other man’s secrets. That’s how the game was supposed to be played.
Basketball Presbyterians
And being funny was sometimes a way of being dishonest.
Maybe being funny was usually a way of being honest.
And we laughed, you know, because sometimes that’s all two people have in common.
Low Man believed the Coeur d’Alene Reservation to be a monotonous place—a wet kind of monotony that white tourists saw as spiritual and magic.
Whites and Indians laughed at most of the same jokes, but they laughed for different reasons.
In Sara’s voice, the others heard something new: an adulthood ceremony taking place between syllables.
Nothing happened, of course. Nothing ever really happens, you know. Life is infinitesimal and incremental and inconsequential.
She wished that she could be called Coeur d’Alene as a description, rather than as an excuse, reason, prescription, placebo, prediction, or diminutive. She only wanted to be understood as eccentric and complicated!
And didn’t they deserve better, these white salesmen and middle managers, these twenty-first century Willy Lomans, who only wanted to be better men than their fathers had been? Of course, thought Mary Lynn, these sons definitely deserved better—they were smarter and more tender and generous than all previous generations of white American men—but they’d never receive their just rewards, and thus their anger was justified and banal.
If white people are the mad scientists who created race, thought Jeremiah, then we created race so we could enslave black people and kill Indians, and now race has become the Frankenstein monster that has grown beyond our control.
Jeremiah turned from the water and walked away from the crowd. He knew that people could want death as much as they wanted anything else. What did Jeremiah want? Did he want his wife? Did she want him? After all these
She believed in the endless nature of human possibility. She would be delighted if these two messy humans transcended their stereotypes and revealed themselves as mortal angels.
White people, no matter how smart, were too romantic about Indians. White people looked at the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the full moon, newborn babies, and Indians with the same goofy sentimentalism.
It’s tough to share a bathroom with an Indian and continue to romanticize her.
She knew there would come a day when white folks finally understood that Indians are every bit as relentlessly boring, selfish, and smelly as they are, and that would be a wonderful day for human rights but a terrible day for Corliss.
Sure, they were men raised in a matriarchal culture, but they lived in a patriarchal country. Therefore, they were kind and decent and sensitive and stupid and sexist and unpredictable.
“Indian is easy to fake. People have been faking it for five hundred years.
He was one of those rare men who did not monologue his way through life.
Because they don’t want to be perfect, because only God is perfect, Indian people sew flaws into their powwow regalia. My family always sewed one yellow bead somewhere on their regalia. But we always hid it where you had to search hard to find it.
“The two funniest tribes I’ve ever been around are Indians and Jews, so I guess that says something about the inherent humor of genocide.”
Do you know how many good men live in this world? Too many to count!
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