Quotes from David Treuer

This book is meant to tell the story of Indian lives, and Indian histories, in such a way as to render those histories and those lives as something much more, much greater and grander, than a catalog of pain.

As brutal and bitter as the winters are in the northern reaches of the Ojibwe homelands, there is a kind of peace that falls over the land in February and March. Or if not a peace exactly, a kind of watchful waiting: April and May will erupt with their usual vernal violence soon enough.

To understand American Indians is to understand America. This is the story of the paradoxically least and most American place in the twenty-first century. Welcome to the Rez.

American did not conquer the West through superior technology, nor did it demonstrate the advantages of democracy. American "won" the West by blood, brutality and terror.

I was looking for a book. A very particular book in a vast and wonderful library. I found what I was looking for. It hadn't been opened for quite a long time judging by the dust that coated the upper edge and by the way the paper had yellowed on all sides creeping toward the gutter. When I opened it, some loose pages different from those in the book fell onto the floor. I picked them up and noticed that they were covered with a text in a language I did not understand.

To each head of a family, one-quarter of a section; To each single person over eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section; To each orphan child under eighteen years of age, one-eighth

Whether this strategy was better for Indian communities than fixing the more traditional reservation system is open to debate.

teams of phrenologists were sent to Indian country. Using the theory and practice of craniometry developed by Samuel George Morton (which determined "scientifically" that Caucasians had the largest brain capacity—1,426 cubic centimeters versus a paltry 1,344 for American Indians and 1,278 for blacks), the phrenologists set about measuring skulls,

That Native American cultures are imperiled is important and not just to Indians. It is important to everyone, or should be. When we lose cultures, we lose American plurality—the productive and lovely discomfort that true difference brings.

In a series of rulings known as the Marshall Trilogy, the court affirmed the rights of the Cherokee and ruled the removal of Indians unlawful. Andrew Jackson did it anyway.

it is impossible not to feel a kind of sickness at the thought that the government stole Indian land in order to fund the theft of Indian children.

A fascinating index of the system's success is the spread of the turkey vulture, which had previously been confined to the southeastern states. The interstate highways functioned as a kind of moving buffet for them; as they followed the long lines of roadkill north and west over the next two decades, they came to inhabit every part of the country.

I feel that I owe my life to them and I set out to write a book that reflects this, reflects the debt I owe them, and does them honor.

We are, for better or worse, the body of our republic. And we need to listen to it, to hear - beyond the pain and anger and fear, beyond the decrees and policies and the eddying of public sentiments and resentments, beyond the bombast and the rhetoric - the sound (faint at times, stronger at others) of a heartbeat going on.

In 1891, the Indians who remained everywhere poked their heads aboveground and surveyed the desolation of their homelands and asked the question Indians had been asking since the beginning: What can we do next to survive?

Not until 2006 did documents surface in Spain that detailed the extent of Columbus's tyranny and depravity.

wound down in 1842 at a cost of nearly $60 million

Any Indian or mixed-blood who shall pay or offer to pay any money or other valuable consideration to the friends or relatives of any Indian girl or woman, for the purpose of living or cohabiting with said girl or woman,

What is life?" he mused. "It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

the Indian "must be imbued with the exalting egotism of American civilization so that he will say 'I' instead of 'We,' and 'This is mine' instead of 'This is ours.

Perhaps no other aspect of Indian education during the sixty years of the boarding school era is more tragic than the fact that the school grounds at Carlisle and Haskell and all the other schools included graveyards

They say you can't step into the same river twice. But maybe a truer saying is that you can't ever dry off.

As of today, on Leech Lake, like many other reservations, the tribe owns roughly 4 percent of the land within the reservation boundaries. The rest of the land is divided among county, state, federal, corporate, and private owners.

is that we created a government that is doing this to us. It