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May 13, 2019 Aileen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fivestars, 2019-05

"One time she used the word devastating after I finished reading a passage from her favorite author—Louise Erdrich. It was something about how life will break you. How that's the reason we're here, and to go sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples fall and pile around you, wasting all that sweetness. I didn't know what it meant then, and she saw that I didn't. She didn't explain it either. But we read the passage, that whole book, another time, and I got it."

"The quote is important to Dene "One time she used the word devastating after I finished reading a passage from her favorite author—Louise Erdrich. It was something about how life will break you. How that's the reason we're here, and to go sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples fall and pile around you, wasting all that sweetness. I didn't know what it meant then, and she saw that I didn't. She didn't explain it either. But we read the passage, that whole book, another time, and I got it."

"The quote is important to Dene. This there there. He hadn't read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it's been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there."

"We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum. We keep powwowing because there aren't very many places where we get to all be together, where we get to see and hear each other."

"There was something about that ride though. It was like we could put on someone else's clothes, live in someone else's house, drive their car, smoke their smokes—even if just for an hour or two."

"He wants to hear the drum one more time. He wants to stand up, to fly away in all his bloodied feathers. He wants to take back everything he's ever done. He wants to believe he knows how to dance a prayer and pray for a new world."

"A wind from the bay sweeps through the stadium, moves through him. Tony hears a bird. Not outside. From where he's anchored, to the bottom of the bottom, the middle of the middle of him. The center's center. There is a bird for every hole in him. Singing. Keeping him up. Keeping him from going. Tony remembers something his grandma said to him when she was teaching him how to dance. 'You have to dance like birds sing in the morning,' she'd said, and showed him how light she could be on her feet. She bounced and her toes pointed in just the right way. Dancer's feet. Dancer's gravity. Tony needs to be light now. Let the wind sing through the holes in him, listen to the birds singing. Tony isn't going anywhere." ...more

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Jan 23, 2025 Laura Cunningham marked it as to-read

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