We are called upon to continuously grow from the realizations that we come to when we speak. - Lee Maracle

humour is like a push. When you want to sit down, humour stands you up and pushes you forward...You need that motivating force, which is a little bit a push every now and then. And that's [the role] humour serves in all of our stories.

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.

Academicians waste a great deal of effort deleting character, plot and story from theoretical arguments