Quotes from Janet Campbell Hale

If you were going to compete successfully in a white man's world, you had to learn to play the white man's game. It was not enough that an Indian be as good as; an Indian had to be better than.

If Irish or Italian culture dies in America it really isn't that big a deal. They will still exist in Italy and Ireland. Not so with us. There is no other place. North America is our old country.

She was not able to return to the beginning, of course, and remake her life more to her liking, but now she was free to go on with the life she did have.

Not poor? How can you sit there and say that with a straight face? Why I remember your momma told my momma once that your daddy got drunk and spent his paycheck and you had to pick up beer bottles alongside the road for lunch money and you had holes in the bottoms of your shoes. You had to line them with newspapers. If that ain't poor, I sure don't know what is.

She had been the daughter of a half-insane, mean old woman and an ineffective alcoholic father, and she had grown up poor and unwanted. She had been an unmarried welfare mother and finally become a drunk herself.

She remembered the old man in the bar in the Mission District telling her, 'We are the biggest tribe of all, us displaced ones, us urban Indians, us sidewalk redskins.

She was not able to return to the beginning, of course, and remake her life more to her liking, but now she was free to go on with the life she did have.

If you were going to compete successfully in a white man's world, you had to learn to play the white man's game. It was not enough that an Indian be as good as; an Indian had to be better than.