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I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators.

Sherman Alexie

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Sherman Alexie
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: October 7
Film Director
Film Producer
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Wellpinit
Washington
Sherman Joseph Alexie
Jr.
Think
Investigators
Thinking
Cheerleader
Indians
Cultural
Indian
Artists
Rather
Artist
Cheerleaders

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We are taught to take the bread into our bodies as proof of Jesus's body.
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Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.
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The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.
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But we danced, under wigs and between unfinished walls, through broken promises and around empty cupboards.
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Nobody recognizes that a bookstore or library can also be a drowning polar bear. And in this country [US], magazines, newspapers, and bookstores are drowning polar bears. And if people can't see that or don't want to talk about it, I don't understand them at all.
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All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new.
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Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is.
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If you're good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can't be wrong.
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I ain't interested in the truth. I'm interested in the way things should be.
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In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.
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Religious fundamentalists are unaware that freedom of religion necessarily brings with it the freedom to mock religion.
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I used to sleep with my books in piles all over my bed and sometimes they were the only thing keeping me warm and always the only thing keeping me alive. Books are the best and worst defense.
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Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.
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I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.
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Only in rock music and the literary world you see so many ugly white guys with beautiful women. That says a lot about the women, their character. They're attracted to more than surface.
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I'm not a pacifist by any measure, but I'm also fully aware that the reasons I might go to war could be very dubious.
Sherman Alexie
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Unlike landed white men, she didn't need to climb mountains to experience mystic panic. All she needed was to set her alarm dock for the next morning, wake when it rang, and go to class.
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In high school I dated a white woman. She would come to visit me on the rez. And her dad, who was very racist, didn't like that at all. And he told her one time, 'You shouldn't go on the rez if you're white because Indians have a lot of anger in their heart.'
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I'm quite aware of my differences. I wouldn't classify them as weird
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My only purpose is to teach children to rebel against authority figures.
Sherman Alexie