Birding While Indian Quotes

“Besides Čontila Paha, it was also called Paha Wakan, which opens up a whole can of translation problems. Paha means hill or butte in Lakota - as in Paha Sapa (the Black Hills). Simple enough. Wakan, however, literally means power, force, energy, and - since such things are invisible - even mystery; but because the first makers of English/Lakota dictionaries were Christo-Custer-colonial men of the cloth, wakan has usually been translated as "spiritual," "sacred," or "holy." The problematic translation of this single word epitomizes the cross-cultural misunderstandings regarding the Lakota cognizance of a seemingly impossible - by Euro-colonial standards, anyway - union of the sacred and the secular, the miraculous and the mundane, the physical and the metaphysical - which should mean, via Occam's razor, an erasure of the latter term as an unnecessary conceptual imposition.”
― Thomas C. Gannon, Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir

“I do hear about twenty-five Western Meadowlarks, and I imagine these birds' ancestors singing the same song before the coming of Custer, or even the coming of the Lakota: through all this human racial politics bullshit, the Real goes on; the avian abides.”
― Thomas C. Gannon, Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir