One of the main attractions I have to the clinic is how sensitive they are to the Native American cultures.

One of the main objections, I think, was that I am American.

No. But then the American Government--whatever branch--has never really grasped the concept of tribal identity.

His grandfather had often told him that he tried too hard to move trees when a wiser man would walk around them.

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

But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it...
The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the Freeman had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others. Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but created equal was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched away what belonged to other people, whether it was something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or something you could not, like freedom.