our body has a memory of all time - Lee Maracle

(You write about how reconciliation is a misnomer, that Indigenous people are still dying — what should we be talking about instead?) LM: The first part — truth. No truth, no reconciliation.

the government had a very deliberate plan to eliminate Indians, and it still pretty much carries out that plan- eliminate us culturally and intellectually in every way possible. Even in the recent Native studies programs that they have in university, we study what they did to us, we don't study us...The plan is for us to know them, not to know ourselves. That's always been the plan, and it still is. We're to integrate, yeah? And now there's very few of us left, I think, that have any kind of a foundation in the culture, in the knowledge. Most of our knowledge was expropriated and distorted, bowdlerized, and then sold back to us in transformed form. That's anthropology, and we had to purchase it.

I think of everybody as my audience. I write to be read in the year 2525, you know. I write forever. When I lay a word down on that page, some tree had to perish, and that tree is my relative, and I believe that. (interviewer: "So you better make the word good.") LM: Words are sacred, just like that tree. I took a life so that this book could exist. So everybody is my audience and all of their ancestors...I have a huge caring for the direction that humanity's currently travelling in, I care about that direction. And my writing serves that. Serves to alter that direction. All we've got to do is make an about-face and turn this wheel the other way. It's not just us that's heading for destruction, you know? The world is a terrible place right now, but it's also a wonderful place (knock on wood) because there's so many people coming forward trying to alter the direction and the course we're currently on, and it's only terrible for human beings. The Earth will survive; she knows how to take care of herself. But we may not.