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" 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. "

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" I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots. "

" 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. "

" There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap. "

" I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian. "

" But the real interesting stuff is in the cellar and the attic. "

" Spiritual matters should be private. "

" We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization. "

" I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there. "

" Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations. "

" The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet. "

" I don't have to participate in another culture's ceremonies in order to respect that culture. "

" Certainly I'm angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don't think it's a helpless emotion. "

" The problem is that too many adults think their kids' lives are simple, or they try to make their lives simple, when their emotional lives are just as complicated as ours. They might have a few less tools to deal with it because they're young, but the emotions are all the same, and the subject matter is all the same. "

" 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. "

" The people who loved me when I was seven years old love my books, and the people who didn't like me when I was seven years old don't like my books. "

" White Americans have a short memory. "

" I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature. "

" Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming. "

" You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture. "

" My father is an amazing man. "

" Don't live up to your stereotypes. "

" You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it. "

" When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author. "

" What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment. "

" My only purpose is to teach children to rebel against authority figures. "

" If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time. "

" I look more Indian when I'm serious. "

" 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. "

" When you construct a mix tape, the first song you come out with has to be a barnburner. "

" 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. "