In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.
But the real interesting stuff is in the cellar and the attic.
My only purpose is to teach children to rebel against authority figures.
There have been players with Indian heritage, but there hasn't been a Native-American professional basketball player who became a regular for all sorts of social and political reasons.
I don't have to participate in another culture's ceremonies in order to respect that culture.
I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators.
We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.
My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.
I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.
When you construct a mix tape, the first song you come out with has to be a barnburner.
In high school I dated a white woman. She would come to visit me on the rez. And her dad, who was very racist, didn't like that at all. And he told her one time, 'You shouldn't go on the rez if you're white because Indians have a lot of anger in their heart.'
I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian.
A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.
All art is exploitation.
Well, I think the worst part about tribalism is its tendency to fundamentalize, and if I can fight fundamentalism in any of its forms I'm happy.
I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.
I think that white women are more apt to read laterally. So I think there's some strong identification for women, and their political and social positions, and minorities. I think that the political power of, let's say, the average Indian man and a white woman are pretty equal.
Writing is a lonely business.
I've come to the point in my life where I encourage young Native Americans to become much more selfish about their personal needs and wants.
Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.
