Quotes from Louise Erdrich

This confusion of the chimookomaanag between the timelessness of the earth and the short span here of mortals was typical of their arrogance.

Just as he dropped with a jerk into the pit of unconsciousness, he thought how odd it was that he was falling asleep in his sleep. When he entered the dream that he was dreaming, later, it was a dream within the dream he dreamed originally when he lay down in his bed.

And so, you see, her absence stopped time. What

Zhaanat's knowledge was considered so important that she had been fiercely hidden away, guarded from going to boarding school. She had barely learned to read and write on the intermittent days she had attended reservation day school. She made baskets and beadwork to sell. But Zhaanat's real job was passing on what she knew. People came from distances, often camped around their house, in order to learn.

AUGUST 9 The next morning, I travel north to my Potts reservation home...In one enormous, empty field a sign is planted that reads Future Home of the Living God. ...I pull over and take a photograph of the sign, and keep driving....We are an idea, then. Maybe God has decided that we are an idea not worth thinking anymore.

1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime (and that figure is certainly higher as Native women often do not report rape); 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted.

I've been told by a couple of knowledgeable elders that you should not wear red at a funeral, or for a year after someone close to you dies. Red is the fire, the doorway to the spirit world. Who knows how long until they are done walking. When the dead see flashes of red as they pass on their journey, they are confused. They think a door is opening and it distracts them from their task, which is to reach a place where we are nothing to them.

Juggie Blue: We don't want to leave our homes We are poor, but even poor people can love their land. You do not need money to love your home.

Indeed, the Trump administration and Assistant Secretary of the Interior Tara Sweeney have recently brought back the termination era by seeking to terminate the Wampanoag, the tribe who first welcomed Pilgrims to these shores and invented Thanksgiving.)

His father was so very old now that he slept most of the day. He was ninety-four. When Thomas thought of his father, peace stole across his chest and covered him like sunlight.

With the postwar housing boom, the fabulous Klamath and Menominee forests were especially coveted. It is no coincidence that those tribes were among the first five slated for termination.

I love a good relish plate," Wood Mountain said sincerely.

You're not very trusting. Are you sure you haven't been around here before?" "My dad is a drunk." "Oh, I get it," said Jack. "Mine was too.

Thomas Wazhashk: I am not sure what study the information about our advancement, financially speaking, was based on. But I will tell you it was faulty. Most of our people live on dirt floors, no electricity, no plumbing. I haul my own water like most Indians in this room. I consider myself advanced only because I read and write. Should I not be an Indian person because I read and write?

Why now that he's sober and thoughtful, and living as a good man, does he get in the worst trouble of his life?

He began his morning at six a.m. with a cup of coffee and a paperback.

Why do the chimookomanag want us?" she growled. "They take all that makes us Anishinaabeg. Everything about us. First our land, then our trees. Now husbands, our wives, our children, our souls. Why do they want to capture every bit?

And Patrice thought another thing her mother said was definitely true—you never really knew a man until you told him you didn't love him. That's when his true ugliness, submerged to charm you, might surface. After all, it had happened with Bucky.

Thomas remembered something from his boarding-school days. There, he'd strategized. The only way to fight the righteous was to present an argument that would make giving him what he wanted seem the only righteous thing to do.

which...to kill yourself means never having to say you're sorry.

Sometimes late at night the hospital emitted thin streams of mist from the cracks along its windows and between the bricks. They took the shapes of spirits freed from bodies. The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world.

I close my eyes and listen to the roar and clatter of the world as it rushes by. We are rushing too. The wind is whipping past us. We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don't know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.

We don't want to leave our homes We are poor, but even poor people can love their land. You do not need money to love your home.

No. I don't see," said Patrice flatly. But she did see. Jack would have tampered with her slightly, just enough so that when somebody else came along she'd have that shame, then more shame, until she got lost in shame and wasn't herself.