Quotes from Kent Nerburn

of its usage. "The Creator loves the smell of sweetgrass. If you smoke the pipe and pray and then put sweetgrass on the fire, he will listen to you.

THE YEAR WAS 1988. I had taken a job helping young people on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota to collect the memories of the tribal elders. It was a wonderful job, and tremendously rewarding. As well as working with young people, I had the good fortune to meet and share time with the elders. I sat at their tables, heard their stories, shared their laughter, and felt their sadness. It was a profoundly human time, and I valued it more than I can express.

bed and watch distant flashes of lightning illuminate the inside of giant, looming thunderheads six or seven miles high. The earth itself had ceased to be the prime element in my consciousness. This was a land of the sky, and every turn, every action, lifted the eye upward.

The white man who is our agent is so stingy that he carries a linen rag in his pocket into which to blow his nose, for fear he might blow away something of value. — Piapot

Continue to contaminate your own bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. " — Chief Seattle Suqwamish and Duwamish T

FATBACK'S DEAD" The words on the slip of paper struck me like a blow. "Fatback's dead." It was not just the news itself, though the words cut deep. It was the very fact of the note, stuck on my windshield on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota

White eyes, Nerburn. You've got white eyes. The boy probably left it there. This is what I mean. Watch our little children. They might get a bike and ride it, then just leave it somewhere, like that. You say they are irresponsible. They are just being like their ancestors who believed that you owned something only so long as you needed it. Then you passed it to someone else.

If I lived in a big house and had rooms full of different things, if I had big cars and a library full of books, if I had pulled out all the flowers and medicine plants and made a lawn that looked like a rug, people would come to me and ask me about everything because they would say I am a 'good' Indian. All it would mean is that I am an Indian with lots of possessions, just like a white man. That would make me good and important in your eyes. Admit it.

Every once in a while I would have to go to a powwow and put on some feathers so you could believe I was a real Indian. But other than that you would think I was smarter and more important if I lived in a big house and owned lots of things. That's just the way white people are. It's the way you are trained.

A tragedy has taken place on our land, and even though it did not take place on our watch, we are its inheritors, and the earth remembers.

There is something we don't like, though. It's when people call us Indians and then start calling sports teams and other things Indians. If we're going to have a false name, at least let us have it and then leave it alone. Don't start putting it on beer bottles and ice cream cartons and making it into something that embarrasses us and makes us look like fools. And don't tell us it's supposed to be some honor to us. We'll decide what honors us and what doesn't.

When you knew I was coming?" I said. "I wrote it when I knew I wanted to speak. I went to my hill and spoke to my grandfathers. They gave me that song. They gave it to me in the wind. They said I had too much anger to speak. They told me that anger is only for the one who speaks. It never opens the heart of one who listens.

I am an Indian; and while I have learned much from civilization, for which I am grateful, I have never lost my Indian sense of right and justice. I am for development and progress along social and spiritual lines, rather than those of commerce, nationalism, or efficiency. Nevertheless, so long as I live, I am an American.

You took the places where the spirits talked to us and you gave us bags of flour.

For more than two decades I have tried, honestly and respectfully, to walk the difficult line between the world of Native America and the world of those of us whose people came, willingly or otherwise, to these American shores. I have done this because I believe that we, as Americans, are poorly served by our willful avoidance of the true facts of our national experience, and also because I believe that the lives and ways of the Native American peoples have much to teach us all. It

People should think of their words like seeds. They should plant them, then let them grow in silence. Our old people taught us that the earth is always speaking to us, but that we have to be silent to hear her.

There is a dignity about the social intercourse of old Indians which reminds me of a stroll through a winter forest ." — Frederick Remington

And when I am old, and my body has begun to fail me, my memories will be waiting for me. They will lift me and carry me over mountains and oceans. I will hold them and turn them and watch them catch the sunlight as they come alive once more in my imagination. I will be rich and I will be at peace.

History is but a tapestry of stories, imperfectly woven.

The way we see it, the Creator put his lessons everywhere. Built them right into the earth before he even put people here. Our job is to learn those lessons in the place we were given, and the way to learn those lessons is to sit still and listen.

Mr. Mailer's work probably gave me hope that there was a way to be intelligent without being an intellectual.

It's a way to turn your mind to the Creator and to make sure you're dedicating everything to him. Get up in the morning, give thanks to the Creator. Have a chance to do some good, give thanks to the Creator. Whatever you do, make a little gesture to remind yourself that you are doing it in the presence of the Creator.

Joseph returned home to the Colville an even greater hero in the public mind but no closer to achieving success in his quest to get his people back to the Wallowa. The American people, like the American government, were happy to lionize him as a symbol of the nation's exotic frontier past, but they had no interest in seeing him as a person with a legitimate legal dispute in the present.

He closed with entreaties mixed with excoriations and visionary hopes for the brotherhood of all people, where "we shall all be alike—brothers of one father and one mother, with one sky above us and one government for all.