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must hear it or else I cannot appropriate it to my spirit.
They perceive him, and he is the sum of their perceptions.
“1889.”
long outwaiting.
Now the white man deals in words, and he deals easily, with grace and sleight of hand.
“My grandmother was a storyteller; she knew her way around words.
She had learned that in words and in language, and there only, she could have whole and consummate being.
I was a child, and that old woman was asking me to come directly into the presence of her mind and spirit; she was taking hold of my imagination, giving me to share in the great fortune of her wonder and delight. She was asking me to go with her to the confrontation of something that was sacred and eternal. It was a timeless,
The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted,
You see, for her words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold. And she never threw words away.
There was a voice, a sound, a word—and everything began.
himself. It represents a very rich literature, which, because it was never written down, was always but one generation from extinction. But for the same reason it was cherished and revered.
scheme
He could not understand the sea; it was not of his world.
Fat Josie.
Word by word by word these men were disposing of him in language, their language, and they were making a bad job of it.
But Milly believed in tests, questions and answers, words
Easy laughter was wrong in a woman, dangerous and wrong.
idiot,
and them goddam bullets going pop, pop,
and at last Daddy began to hate the land, began to think of it as some kind of enemy, his own very personal and deadly enemy.
Though she lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountain, the immense landscape of the continental interior—all of its seasons and its sounds—lay like memory in her blood.
They put us away before
But he doesn’t come from the reservation. He doesn’t know how it is when you grow up out there someplace.
And like a fool he had taken up the bait, whole and at once, had allowed himself to be run into the ground.