We need to acknowledge the differences and their spectrum of human being, the significance of accepting all and not wishing for a monoculture. Divers… - Linda Hogan

He had a map. He looked at it, trying to figure out where he was. He'd studied the legend. Legend. It was a good word for kilometers and miles, things covering space. As if the world was merely a story, and it was, one story laid down over another. As it was in his older country, too. (p164)

I teach in American Indian studies at the university and I find that many of the non-Indian students are desperately searching for spirits, for their own souls, that something in the contemporary world has left many Euro-Americans and Europeans without a source, has left them with a longing for something they believe existed in earlier times or in tribal people. What they want is their own life, their own love for the earth, but when they speak their own words about it, they don't believe them, so they look to Indians, forgetting that enlightenment can't be found in a weekend workshop, forgetting that most Indian people are living the crisis of American life, the toxins of chemical waste, the pain of what is repressed in white Americans. There is not such a thing as becoming an instant shaman, an instant healer, an instantly spiritualized person.

being "traditional" means you have a great deal of responsibility. Rather than people cutting themselves off from white communities to be traditional, the more I think about it in my life the more I have thought that breaking down those barriers is much more important than building them up. Any kind of racism at this point is not good for any people. And to become anti-white is a mistake. It's self-destructive for those who do. Talk about a balance of things-talk about head and heart or head and soul-somehow I think that merging the two cultures in a really healthy way, not as done in the past, might be an integration in the way that we were talking about earlier. Indians have already begun that process. Years ago. Now I see white people integrating in that way. Mostly women at this point.