This happened a long time ago. I was not there. My father was there when he was a boy. He told me of it. And I was there. - N. Scott Momaday

Eleven magpies standing in the plain.
They are illusion—wind and rain revolve—
And they recede in the darkness, and dissolve.

Mammedaty was my grandfather, whom I never knew. Yet he came to be imagined posthumously... having invested the shadow of his presence in an object or a word, in his name above all. He enters into my dreams... His grandfather Guipagho the Elder was a famous chief. His mother... was the daughter of Kau-au-ointy... There was a considerable vitality in him... and a self-respect that verged upon arrogance.

as if the prehistoric civilization had gone out among the hills for a little while and would return; and then everything would be restored to an older age, and time would have returned upon itself and a bad dream of invasion and change would have been dissolved in an hour before the dawn. For man, too, has tenure in the land; he dwelt upon the land twenty-five thousand years ago, and his gods before him. The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.