Quotes from Thomas King

Land. If you understand nothing else about the history of Indians in North America, you need to understand that the question that really matters is the question of land.

historians are not often appreciated because their research tends to destroy myths. I

After watching what has happened over the past fifty years in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and seeing the money that is to be made from such ventures, I wonder if the adage should have a corollary: 'Those who understand the lessons of history are only too happy to repeat them.

There was no particular reason for the Canadian government to remember what had happened to the Cherokee in the 1840s. After all, most governments can't remember the promises that got them elected.

The fact of Native existence is that we live modern lives informed by traditional values and contemporary realities and that we wish to live those lives in our terms.

No one needs a watch. What we need is time.

Perhaps we shouldn't be displeased with the 'environmental ethics' we have or the 'business ethics' or the 'political ethics' or any of the myriad of other codes of conduct suggested by our actions. After all, we've created them. We've created the stories that allow them to exist and flourish. They didn't come out of nowhere. They didn't arrive from another planet.

Would it have made a difference? This is the question we always ask after we have given up.

How important is it for us to maintain protected communal homelands? Are our traditions and languages worth the cost of carrying on the fight? Certainly the easier and more expedient option is simply to step away from who we are and who we wish to be, sell what we have for cash and sink into the stewpot of North America.

More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.

The Institute of Confound and Demoralize is something that Mimi has made up to deal with the contradictions that seem to arise with alarming frequency. Coffee is bad for you. Coffee is good for you. Red win helps blood health. Red wine reduces your ability to fight infection. Exercise is essential for general fitness. Exercise contributes to inflammation of the joints. Kale, the silent killer.

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

historians are not often appreciated because their research tends to destroy myths.

This is a Christian world, you know. We only kill things that are useful or things we don't like.

Indeed, North America Indian policy in the last half of the nineteenth century had many of the qualities of a bad movie. It was a low-budget affair with a simplistic plot: politicians, soldiers, clerics, social scientists, and people of unexamined goodwill dash about North America, saving themselves from Indians by saving Indians from themselves

Donald Trump, looking after his own profits, was particularly vocal in his opposition to Native gaming.

Everybody's related, Lucy told us. The trouble with this world is that you wouldn't know it from the way we behave.

Once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world.

If you see Roxanne," said Thumps, "you might tell her to mind her own business." Chintak paled. "We are friends, are we not?" "We are." "Friends should not suggest such dangerous enterprises." "Roxanne is all bark." "Ah," said Chintak, "then the stories of gratuitous violence are not true?

If he were to come away with anything from this schedule, it would be that his life revolved around food and little else. It didn't feel like a meaningless existence, but perhaps that's what happened when you lived alone long enough. When you no longer noticed the silence. Or felt the cold.

Except for the sign on the front lawn, there wasn't much difference between this house and his. World War II bungalows with clapboard siding. Two bedrooms, one bath. A small lawn that ran out to the street. A peaked roof with dark asphalt shingles. Both ordinary, in all ways. One vacant. One empty.

Andy was one of those delightful combinations of bigotry and ignorance, an arrogant man who had no mind to speak of and spoke it.

Women, Thumps decided years ago, had a need to know what people around them were doing every minute of the day. It wasn't curiosity exactly, and it wasn't control. It was more as though they were keeping track of the world so that if anyone hit them with a pop quiz, they'd have the right answer.

Democracy ….[is not]… simply a form of government but an organizing principle that bundles individual freedoms, Christianity, and capitalism into a marketable product carrying with it the unexamined promise of wealth and prosperity.