True shamans live in a world that is alive with what is to rationalist sight unseen, a world pulsing with intelligence.

The root of oppression is the loss of memory.

In the native world, major gods come in trios, duos, and groups. It is the habit of non-natives to discover the supreme being, the one and only head god, a habit lent to them by monotheism.

Human beings need to belong to a tradition and equally need to know about the world in which they find themselves.

For the American Indian, the ability of all creatures to share in the process of ongoing creation makes all things sacred.

Snowflakes, leaves, humans, plants, raindrops, stars, molecules, microscopic entities all come in communities. The singular cannot in reality exist.

We are the land. To the best of my understanding, that is the fundamental idea that permeates American Indian life.

Idealization of a group is a natural consequence of separation from the group in other words, it is a by-product of alienation.

My mother told me stories all the time... And in all of those stories she told me who I was, who I was supposed to be, whom I came from, and who would follow me... That's what she said and what she showed me in the things she did and the way she lives.

We are the women of daylight of clocks and steel foundries, of drugstores and streetlights, of superhighways that slice our days in two. Our dreams are pale memories of themselves, and nagging doubt is the false measure of our days.

An odd thing occurs in the minds of Americans when Indian civilization in mentioned: little or nothing.

The Indians used to be the only inhabitants of the Americas, but times change. Having perceived us as belonging to history, they are free to emote over us, to re-create us in their history-based understanding, and dismiss our present lives as archaic and irrelevant to the times.

I am not especially defined by my sex life, nor complete without it.

... America has amnesia. ... Certainly, there is a passion for memory loss in American thought. ... Americans may be the world champion forgetters.

It's a little-known linguistic curiosity that the name Jehovah or Jaweh is the same name as Eve Havva, the counterpart name in Farsi, the language spoken by the Persians, means either Jaweh or Eve.