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The townspeople outside the reservations had a very superior attitude toward Indians, which was kind of funny, because they weren't very wealthy; they were on the fringes of society themselves.

Indians are usually seen as capsulized: limited to one environment, with the illusion of stability in that environment. But Indians have been engaged all over the world for centuries, in Europe, even in Asia.

Indians are numerous in the tropical regions; not so elsewhere.

The economic piece is still missing, since it's so hard to attract industry to reservations, but spiritually and educationally, they're doing just fine. Each tribe has a community college now, and they teach the language, they teach the traditions.

The Indians, however, could not migrate from one part of the United States to another; neither could they obtain employment as readily as white people, either upon or beyond the Indian reservations.

I remember hearing stories from my mother and father about their parents and grandparents when they were taken off the reservation, taken to the boarding schools, and pretty much taught to be ashamed of who they were as Native Americans. You can feel that impact today.

I often find myself unsatisfied with books 'about' Indians because they are written from the viewpoint of non-Indians.

Looking at the purpose of our government toward the Indians, we find that after subjugating them it has been our policy to collect the different tribes on reservations and support them at the expense of our people.

Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.

Native Americans' families experience living surrounded, living in increasingly small reservations surrounded by the society that destroyed their civilization, and are still stigmatized. For decades and decades, for hundreds of years except in Indian schools, they weren't allowed to speak their language. That stigma takes a terrible toll.