Leslie Marmon Silko Quotes

“They are afraid, Tayo. They feel something happening, they can see something happening around them, and it scares them. Indians or Mexicans or whites—most people are afraid of change. They think that if their children have the same color of skin, the same color of eyes, that nothing is changing.” She laughed softly. “They are fools. They blame us, the ones who look different. That way they don’t have to think about what has happened inside themselves.” (p99)

And in the belly of this story
the rituals and the ceremony
are still growing.

(How do you feel about the Bicentennial-do you have feelings about it?) LMS: Oh, I do, definitely, I have all kinds of things to say-I think it's one reason I'm very anxious to try to get the novel out during 1976. I just want to make sure that during this year when all of this sort of celebrating is going on, that Americans can be reminded that there are different ways to look at the past 200 years. I just want to make sure that beside all of the rhapsodizing about Paul Revere and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin that Americans are reminded that this great land, this powerful nation they are celebrating was established on stolen land. It was the resources, the metals, the minerals, it was the water, it was the coal, that enabled those people who came to America to build this nation. In this Bicentennial year we should remember, we should remember that it was on this stolen land that this country was settled and begun. In Anglo-Saxon law, in common law, when something is stolen, no matter how many times the stolen property changes hands, in common law, that piece of property still belongs to the original owner. It doesn't matter whether the people take the stolen article in good faith. The property remains stolen. As long as this fact is acknowledged, then I'll be satisfied, and they can celebrate all they have done with this stolen land and the stolen resources and they can pat themselves on the back for the achievement.

Sacred time is always in the Present.

Earth was their mother, but her land and water could never be desecrated; blasted open and polluted by man, but never desecrated. Man only desecrated himself in such acts; puny humans could not affect the integrity of Earth. Earth always was and would ever be sacred. Mother Earth might be ravaged by the Destroyers, but she still loved the people.

I will tell you something about stories . . .
They aren't just entertainment.
Don't be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.

...But he had known the answer all along, even while the white doctors were telling him he could get well and he was trying to believe them: medicine didn't work that way, because the world didn't work that way. His sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything. (p125)

Even idiots can understand a church that tortures and kills is a church that can no longer heal.

The white man had violated the Mother Earth, and he had been stricken with the sensation of a gaping emptiness between his throat and his heart.

She was an old woman now, and her life had become memories.

In the Americas the white man never referred to the past but only to the future. The white man didn’t seem to understand he had no future here because he had no past, no spirits of ancestors here.

Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there was a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions-exactly which way to go and what to do to get there; it depended on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. (p19)

He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together—the old stories, the war stories, their stories—to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time. (p246)

The powers who controlled the United States didn't want the people to know their history. If the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up.

...how easy it was to stay alive now that he didn't care about being alive anymore. (p39)