Quotes About Culture

But I stopped crying when I noticed that very few people were being openly emotional. I'd never seen that many stoic people at a funeral. I'd never experienced a silent and polite funeral. My tribe doesn't bury our dead that way. We wail, weep, and tell dirty jokes at graveside.

They call me an apple because they think I'm red on the outside and white on the inside.

So I draw because I feel like it might be my only real chance to escape the reservation.

Exoticism was hard to find in Pullman, Washington.

During one week when I was little, Dad got stopped three times for DWI: Driving While Indian.

Adam and Eve covered their privates with fig leaves; the first Indians covered their privates with their tiny hands.

Junior talks about it—relating to dozens if not hundreds of tribes. Even as the world tries to define you, narrow the definition of you, don't do it to yourself. True

Mostly, I just think Mr. P is a lonely old man who used to be a lonely young man. And for some reason I don't understand, lonely white people love to hang around lonelier Indians.

Perhaps everybody, indigenous and not, lives on their own kind of reservation.

Political Correctness has forced racists to become poets.

On a reservation, Indian men who abandon their children are treated worse than white fathers who do the same thing. It's because white men have been doing that forever and Indian men have just learned how. That's how assimilation can work.

I was successful and acceptable and loved because I was—and still am—great at negotiating with whiteness. But that means my white friends often mistakenly believe that my ability to successfully negotiate the white world means that I am white—or more white than Native. My white friends can mistakenly believe that my intellectual and artistic abilities are intrinsically white.

The people at home," I said. "A lot of them call me an apple." "Do they think you're a fruit or something?" he asked. "No, no," I said. "They call me an apple because they think I'm red on the outside and white on the inside." "Ah, so they think you're a traitor

Seymour looked around the Tucson McDonald's. There were white people and Mavajos; there were people who preferred their Quarter Pounders with cheese and those who didn't care for cheese at all; and there were those who desperately wish that McDonald's would introduce onion rings to its menu.

If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture everybody can understand it.

Seattle is Sweden! Extremely liberal, progressive, and very white, with a strong undercurrent of racism.

We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We weren't trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture.

I'm not an Indian warrior chief. I'm not some demure little Indian woman healer talking spider this, spider that, am I? I'm not babbling about the four directions. Or the two-legged, four-legged, and winged. I'm talking like a twentieth-century Indian woman. Hell, a twenty-first century Indian, and you can't handle it, you wimp.

He was a white man and, therefore, he was allowed to be romantic.

I wasn't there when the old Indian man from Worley said it, but I know it must be true: Every highway in the world crosses some reservation, cuts it in half.

But it happens mostly because "being American" means "being white," even for a brown boy like me.

I guess every song has a special meaning for someone somewhere. Elvis Presley is still showing up in 7-11 stores across the country, even though he's been dead for years, so I figure music just might be the most important thing there is.

Despite all the talk of diversity and division--of red and blue states, of black and white and brown people, of rich and poor, gay and straight--Paul believed that Americans were shockingly similar. How can we be so different, thought Paul, if we all know the lyrics to the same one thousand songs?

After all, one doesn't choose his culture nearly as much as one trips and falls into it.