The initial impulse was just liking it in other books. … Also, coming from a community that felt voiceless in the larger scheme of things—as far as m… - Tommy Orange

They tore unborn babies out of bellies, took what we were intended to be, our children before they were children, babies before they were babies.

Our heads are on flags, jerseys, and coins. Our heads were on the penny first, of course, the Indian cent, and then on the buffalo nickel, both before we could even vote as a people — which, like the truth of what happened in history all over the world, and like all that spilled blood from slaughter, are now out of circulation.

I wanted to write characters that felt true and real, and there’s a lot of harrowing detail about the lives of Native people. You can just look at the health statistics and they’re pretty staggering. I wanted the characters to be working-class, because so often the characters in novels that I’ve read are white and upper-middle-class with white, upper-middle-class problems…