Ledfeather Quotes

“In the old days, the boy's mom would have gotten a name for what she did: Shoots the Car Twice or Four Holes in the Glass or Doesn't Ever Learn or Can't Stop Fighting.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Ledfeather

“He stood over her for as long as he could endure the cold, long enough for the boy tending the dead to pass twice on fingertips and toes. The boy's self-appointed mission was to keep all of their eyes closed, the dead. Otherwise he couldn't sleep, the boy. But he never did anyway, as far as the Agent could tell. Any hour, there he'd be, scuttling from body to body under his calf robe.

Many nights when the Agent locked his door, it wasn't to keep the Piegan from stealing his tins and blankets, but to keep the boy's hands from covering his own eyes.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Ledfeather

“It was his punishment, to become Blackfeet, to be Piegan. To live on the reservation he'd created, the situation he was already leaving behind. To replace his own life with an Indian one, and thus know firsthand the end result of his policies. An end result generations away from last Winter, just so he could see the scope of what he'd done, that it still had traceable effect. So that, in a sense, he could be inflicting it upon himself.
He nodded, accepted this.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Ledfeather

“I was glad I'd never had any kids on the reservation, because this is what happens. They drive off every road they can, and then, because it hasn't started hurting yet, whichever one can still walk does, to the nearest light, his face packed with windshield glass.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Ledfeather

“Could feel the reservation wheeling around him, changing shape so that he nearly had to vomit, or hold his arms to his head and scream against it all.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Ledfeather

“The Agent stood there, and stood there, and finally screamed out to them that he was sorry, that he didn't know, that nobody could have known, that he only meant to…that he never intended to hurt anybody, that it hurt him too, that it was Collins, not him, that nobody could have—that, that…what did they want? To punish him? To see him suffer as they had?
And then he stopped screaming.
Surely that was it: as they had.
The only fitting sentence for his crimes would be to live as they did, as they had. As an Indian.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Ledfeather

“Browning.
The encampment of the dead. Of the dead's children, and those children's children.
And they'd been here for more generations than that, the Indian Agent could tell.
Worse still, he belonged among them. Could feel it in the pit of his stomach, the base of his jaw.
He knew this place, had been walking it in his sleep for weeks, stalking it even as he woke, letting it haunt his every movement, as if he could feel it pulling at him, as if it were somehow shaping him, or…or—
Like it already had.
He'd grown up here. Somehow. Knew what was here now and what had been here before.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Ledfeather

“Thanks Giving.
The Indian and the White Man together.
The pageantry spoke to me of civilization.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Ledfeather

“. . . what I told Malory happened next is that when he looked over at her then it was like he'd been waiting a hundred years to see her, and this crazy ass Ledfeather girl all the way from Standing Rock, she looked off after the elk and then back at Doby through her hair, like she'd maybe been waiting for him too, but was scared a little, wanted to be sure, so Doby opened his mouth and said her name across the backseat of Junior's cab, Claire, like a flower opening in his mouth, and she held her lips together and nodded thank you to him, yes, thank you, and then swallowed what was in her throat and just let the sides of their hands touch together again some like it didn't really matter.
But it did.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Ledfeather