London is such a beautiful place that it can be easy, as you stroll around the city, to forget that much of it was built on imperial plunder.

The American West owed its existence—as an American West—to the federal government. And the federal government owed much of the legitimacy and authority it assumed during the nineteenth century to the American West.

No republic is eternal. It lives only as long as its citizens want it.

What a demented doctrine, that man is born evil; how cruel it is. It’s not found in Judaism; Paul made it up to explain the Crucifixion. To make sense out of Christ’s death, which in fact makes no sense.

Often we do not grasp what has happened to us until we tell someone else about it.

The descendants of those who inhabited the region during that cataclysmic moment of turmoil and warfare sometimes refer to it as “the time when the stars fell.”

Those Europeans who reached across the canyon of language and culture, as curious fellow humans rather than as combatants, almost always discovered Indians willing to respond in kind. The list of such men is short

In 1970 the American Indian Student Association at the University of Minnesota satirized the archaeological establishment by submitting a proposal to the National Science Foundation that called for the exhumation and scientific analysis of human remains in a pioneer cemetery.

They said he had tuberculosis, but it was a mysterious death—one of the first I heard of—that fluttered the nerve endings of our collective subconscious. Someone was walking on our graves.

If you take a vacation with a close friend and it’s not the best goddamn time either of you has ever had in years, it was a flop, and marks the end of the good times between the two of you forever.

“You can feel it on that one, like a tingle. You ever feel something like that? Like you can just feel the ghosts of the raped around a certain kind of man?” “I know what you mean,” Trace says. She does. She has felt this, often.

Abraxa loves them both, wishes them only good. They’ll leave me, she tells herself, and then the thought rearranges itself like a warm wax lamp: they’ll let me go.

Native trees like native people do not understand or care for the profit motive.

I keep trying to make everything fit in my head, and the best I can figure is: We’re all we’ve got. You know? We have to take care of each other.

Relationship building. > Empire building.

I was convinced that I’d never have any friends, so I had this idea of being one to myself. I could be honest and loyal and supportive. I could listen to myself and make myself laugh.

I know what it is like to be from an extraction zone. What it is like to grow up in the place where the taking begins.

Their evil is mighty but it can’t stand up to our stories.

…we live in this hellhole, and we think it’s got to be this way. But what if we’re wrong?

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.