I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything.
They took all our land; I don't have any land to toil. My crops have to grow somewhere else.
I was going mad. One day, I just started writing, and it was like therapy because I was in a position where I couldn't rage. I never expected to be a writer; it's a different world than I ever expected to be in.
We cannot change the political system, we cannot change the economic system, we cannot change the social system, until the people control the land, and then we take it out of the hands of that sick minority that chooses to pervert the meaning and the intention of humanity.
When I left politics in the early Eighties and started writing and recording, my idea was that I could have an influence further down into other generations. That Natives could come into the culture through arts and music.
White people don't seem to have many Elders. They do have a lot of oldsters.
I consider the electric guitar to be like a drum with strings. It became the drum of the Baby Boom generation. And the drum has always been the center of the tribe, a new electronic tribe.
What I view life like is about energy. Everything is about energy - everything. We physically are little units of electrical energy, and we vibrate and project electromagnetic thought.
Whatever their reasons, Hollywood, or the entertainment industry, is saying something about Indians. I don't see the rest of the media knocking down any doors to do that.
You go back and you read your Constitution. You read your Declaration of Independence. And you will see that the only people who could decide these freedoms were white males who owned property, and all the rest of us were excluded.
I'm a member of the American Indian Movement, and I'm from the indigenous nations of the Western Hemisphere.
Because we are all of an oral tradition in our beginning histories, the voice of the poet in this particular society will be heard.
The whole point is to take from our native culture and from contemporary culture without using one art form to mimic the other, so that our native identity remains the native identity, the contemporary identity remains the contemporary identity, and the mixing of these two musical identities creates a third musical identity.
There have been some positive things that have happened for the tribes, but it's a constant, vigilant fight about protecting what resources we have in terms of land and rights.
All politics to me - Indian or white - is an illusion preventing us from being authentic because we're communicating through something that isn't real to us.
I don't want to tell people how to remember me. I want people to remember me as they remember me.
It's always good to go home. It's strengthening to see your past and know you have someplace to go where you're part of a people.
For us, it's a matter of just staying alive and getting the best deal we can now. Eventually, this will all straighten out. It may be two generations away or 10 generations away, but time is irrelevant in that sense. As long as we, as a people, stay alive, we will survive.
I find there is room in music to talk with music. It may expand ways people can participate with music. It doesn't sound hokey or like some kind of voice-over.
