Once there were songs for everything, Songs for planting, for growing, for harvesting, For eating, getting drunk, falling asleep, For sunrise, birth,… - Joy Harjo

The wanting infected the earth.
We lost track of the purpose and reason for life.
We began to forget our songs. We forgot our stories.
We could no longer see or hear our ancestors,
Or talk with each other across the kitchen table.

Many people assume that all Indian people lived a long time ago in a certain in a certain way and wore certain clothes, so if you don't look like that now, you're not really Indian people; but all cultures change. In our case, the change has certainly been abrupt and shocking, and we have had to a struggle to maintain the heritage within that terrible upheaval...Maybe all artists now must struggle to understand the connections between the world of heritage and the present world. Those worlds certainly do converge and maybe poems are points of convergence or, in some sense, paintings of that convergence. Maybe the artist has always worked to find those connections, but I think the struggle is especially important in these difficult times when the illusion of separation among peoples has become so clear...*For me the illusion is that we're separate. That's the illusion.

...it is what we are made of, the stories that we carry with us. Stories create us. We create ourselves with stories. Stories that our parents tell us, that our grandparents tell us, or that our great-grandparents told us, stories that reverberate through the web. (1994)