Gerald Vizenor

“I use not casual phrases but imagistic phrases that create a rhythm of natural presence.”

“Naanabozho was the first tribal trickster on the earth.”

“The great liberation of imaginative writing is that you're not held back by the facts.”

“The idea of victimage is a dreadful thing, a product of a safe middle-class perspective. What people who are not safe develop is a tragic wisdom, a wisdom that embraces contradiction and seeks a sense of balance rather than going to extremes.”

“Mixed-bloods loosen the seams in the shrouds of identities.”

“W. P. Kinsella, who was born on a farm near Edmunton, Alberta, has earned wide recognition for his wild imagination and rash humor as a writer.”

“If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up sitting in prison. But desecrate an Indian grave, and you get a Ph.D.”

“There is a sense of motion and a concise, immediate image in haikus and Anishinaabe dream songs.”

“Even the earliest cave paintings in France and Spain had natural motion.”

“Confucius would give his seat to an old woman. Communist cadres, on the other hand, took the best seats and called it a cultural revolution.”

“Trickster stories are pleasurable, contradictory, annoying, abrasive. They're powerful, transformational acts of liberation because they are not nailed down to the real, to the representation of something in the world.”

“The first Western teacher of English in Japan was a Native American.”

“Indians are usually seen as capsulized: limited to one environment, with the illusion of stability in that environment. But Indians have been engaged all over the world for centuries, in Europe, even in Asia.”

“There are 13 stories in 'The Fencepost Chronicles' about corrupt tribal leaders, trouble on the reserve, survival schemes, and communal drinking.”

“It's so difficult to write in motion and get rid of the past tense, and also to create a sense of impermanence.”