Dakota Quotes

Now I see some family resemblance. I was starting to wonder if Jill was adopted, but you two kind of look like each other." "So does our mailman back in North Dakota," said Adrian.

Dakota's head was stuck in his toga. He staggered around olike a Kool-Aid-stained ghost. "Um," Percy said, "should I wear my bed sheets?

Are you going to take Sang to the football games, Dakota? It'd make a nice date." (...) "Holy shit," Gabriel said. "The first time Sang gets asked out and it's by Kota's mother.

Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.

Micah showed up shortly thereafter and was happy to meet our other “brother.” He shook Adrian’s hand and smiled. “Now I see some family resemblance. I was starting to wonder if Jill was adopted, but you two kind of look like each other.” “So does our mailman back in North Dakota,” said Adrian. “South,” I corrected. Fortunately, Micah didn’t seem to think there was anything weird about the slip. “Right,” said Adrian. He studied Micah thoughtfully. “There’s something familiar about you. Have we met?” Micah shook his head. “I’ve never been to South Dakota.” I was pretty sure I heard Adrian murmur, “That makes two of us.

I met two twins, each named Dakota. I nicknamed the older one North, and the younger one I called—you guessed it—Cock Tease.

I'd rather lie bare-assed naked on the sidewalk and be trampled by tourists from South Dakota than be an accountant.

I don't think the real America is in New York or on the Pacific Coast; personally, I like the Middle West much better, places like North and South Dakota, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. There, I think, are the true Americans

She was hearing the words. They just weren't registering on her Richter scale of sanity.

To the stupidity of men, " Dakota said, raising a glass. "And my brother, who is their king.

It’s hard to go. It’s scary and lonely…and half the time you’ll be wondering why the hell you’re in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires. But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful… It will open up your life.

But when I am around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I'm dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and then, boom, it's 1980. Once I erupt, they'll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.

Before you hate something you should try to understand it.

She was like John Rambo meets Polly Pocket; Dakota Fanning crossed with Death Wish 4.

Hollywood movies are designed for 15-year-old youths from North Dakota who, intellectually speaking, are on equal terms with a British zoo animal.

I learned that lost is nice when you're not ready to be found.

True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'.

Jesus Christ in a miniskirt.

In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.

Her Pan-Cake makeup was cracking like a dried-out Dakota lake bed.

Dakota Jameson Lee! Get your butt in here.” Kota dashed back into the room, his eyebrows up, his hands up in surprise. “What? What’s wrong?

And failure, if you want to know, Dakota, is just another opportunity to try again.

IT'S PURGATORY BUT ITS LIVEABLE

About my boss, Tyler tells me, if I'm really angry, I should go to the post office and fill out a change-of-address card and have all his mail forwarded to Rugby, North Dakota.

When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

He has feelings for you.” Dakota’s eyes have that dreamy look in them. “Deep, consuming feelings. The kind that dominate your thoughts and control your decisions. And feed your soul.

To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.

Thus the white men and Native Americans were able, through the spirit of goodwill and compromise, to reach the first in what would become a long series of mutually beneficial, breached agreements that enabled the two cultures to coexist peacefully for stretches of twenty and sometimes even thirty days, after which it was usually necessary to negotiate new agreements that would be even more mutual and beneficial, until eventually the Native Americans were able to perceive the vast mutual benefits of living in rock-strewn sectors of South Dakota.

You can only look forward to a South Dakota winter if, as with childbirth, remodeling a house, or writing a novel, you're able to forget how bad it was the last time.

But what Dakota most enjoyed about the beginning of winter was the crispness of the air (that practically demanded the wearing of knits) and the way that tough New Yorkers - on the street, in elevators, in subways - were suddenly willing to risk a smile. To make a connection with a stranger. To finally see one another after strenuously avoiding eye contact all year.

Oh my God. I just got dumped by a red headed mortician in a funeral home named Crummy's, after pretending to be a circus freak at a visitation I had just crashed. I was pretty sure there'd be no bouncing back from this. -Dakota Bombay

When you come to a place where you have to left or right,' says Sister Ruth, 'go straight ahead.

I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change.

I'm not saying you didn't deserve it, O." Dakota laughed. "But I'm restocking the karma bank and you're at the top of my list.

This was like the Rubik's Cube of life. One big glob of scattered, multicolored possibilities she had to sort out and line up in the appropriate manner by twisting endless scenario after scenario in her head. And it sucked. Big, fat wankers.

Chemistry is a funny thing, miss. Sometimes those who are experiencing it aren't always aware they are.

Because we're framily. You know, I love you, you love me? Like Barney only with bad language.

Come, meat! Let this farce end! My people are hungry for manflesh!” “That’s what she said,” Joe whispered before shoveling more popcorn into his face.

It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn.

We see much more of this loneliness now. It's paradoxical that that where people are the most closely crowded in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is greatest. Back where people are so spread out in Western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much. The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's the psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are long but the psychic distances between people are small, and here, in primary America, it's reversed.

Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film "realistic," everyone knows what that means--it means the movie has an unhappy ending.

Yet there was no doubt that Theodore Roosevelt was peculiarly qualified to be President of all the people. Few, if any Americans could match the breadth of his intellect and the strength of his character. A random survey of his achievements might show him mastering German, French, and the contrasted dialects of Harvard and Dakota Territory; assembling fossil skeletons with paleontological skill; fighting for an amateur boxing championship; transcribing birdsong into a private system of phonetics; chasing boat thieves with a star on his breast and Tolstoy in his pocket; founding a finance club, a stockmen's association, and a hunting-conservation society; reading some twenty thousand books and writing fifteen of his own; climbing the Matterhorn; promulgating a flying machine; and becoming a world authority on North American game mammals. If the sum of all these facets of experience added up to more than a geometric whole - implying excess construction somewhere, planes piling upon planes - then only he, presumably, could view the polygon entire.

I imagine I should have told it to you before? I love you, Sejal.I wish for you to become my wife.Recently I’ve also opened a shop in North Dakota and thinking that, just maybe, you love me too.

I was shaking so hard, I could barely get the door unlocked. I just got the door shut behind me when I sank to my knees and fell apart. I cried so hard I was nearly convulsing. I had never felt such raw emotions in my life. I felt like someone had ripped my heart out of my chest and tore it to pieces. I curled into a ball on the floor and tried desperately to disappear. But no matter how small I got, I was still here. I still existed. And for a short while, I thought I had mattered to someone. I guess I was wrong. I mattered to no one.

Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.

Dakota got up so fast, he spilled Kool-Aid from his flask. “We were plenty good last night when we whipped your podex, Larry!” “Enough, Dakota,” Reyna said. “Let’s leave Larry’s podex out of this. As quest leader, Frank has the right to choose his companions. He has chosen Percy Jackson and Hazel Levesque.

Honestly, Im having trouble with the fact that youre having difficulty believing us. You are the only one in the room levitating.

Women were created gullible. It they weren't no babies would be born.

We losers don't fear death. For us it's the end of a lifelong losing spell.

What my mom failed to understand was that I didn't even want long hair -- I needed long hair. And my desire for protracted, flowing locks had virtually nothing to do with fashion, nor was it a form of protest against the constructions of mainstream society. My motivation was far more philosophical. I wanted to rock.

The most basic barrier was language itself, very few Americans in Iraq whether soldiers or diplomats or news paper reporters could speak more than a few words of Arabic. A remarkable number of them didn't even have translators. That meant for many Iraqis the typical 19 year old army corporal from South Dakota was not a youthful innocent carrying Americas good will, he was a terrifying combination of firepower and ignorance.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.

You all know from past experiences that the white man only sees the bad that our people do to them. They are blind to their own indiscretions.

And made Nina see rainbows and stars and stupid-assed unicorns.

Who was Greg and why was he biting Nina? In fact, how did he get close enough to Nina in order to bite her before she bit him first?

Everything had become so Twilight only without the sparklies.

Sure, scars can be painfull to look at, reminding you where you've been, but they also remind you of how far you've come.

OMG. Mulder was right. The truth really was out there.

That kind of devotion, that kind of sacrifice, came from a deeply selfless soul. It came from someone who loved hard and loved forever.

Do you promise to help me pack up my apartment and get all my stuff? I have a lot of stuff. A lot. Shoes and purses and clothes and nail polish. I have way more purses than you brought and at least a gatrillion dresses. I can't live without them-' 'I promise to haul your shit around.

For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.

Punk was perfect for lazy people, because anyone could do it--you didn't even need to know how to play your instrument, assuming you knew how to plug it in. There was really no difference between Sid Vicious and anyone in London who owned a bass.

Fuck Master Liu! He's some ascetic who counts snowflakes on a mountain in China and dips his balls in ice water for the hell of it. You're not Liu. You live in the real world

If you close your eyes, no one can see you...

So he was good-looking and he had a great set of thighs. Chickens had nice thighs, too.

Who says you’ll get hurt again?” I pouted. “Have you met you?” “Right.

Is anyone ever really the same after being pushed through an opening the size of a donut hole only to end up wearing a fez?

Werewolf was soooooo in her color wheel.

I sometimes wonder how many hours of my life I have wasted bitching about keyboards. The use of keyboards and synthesizers is the Roe v. Wade of '80s metal. It was-without question-the lamest instrument a band could use.

What if it wasn't the guy from the bar? What if it was some freak out looking to whack some chick off because his mommy didn't make him buttered toast and cut it into fun shapes when he was a kid?

The New York of the plays, the movies, the books; the New York of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and Vogue. It was a beacon, a spire, a beacon on top of a spire. A light, always glowing from afar, visible even from the cornfields of Iowa, the foothills of the Dakotas, the deserts of California. The swamps of Louisiana. Beckoning, always beckoning. Summoning the discontented, seducing the dreamers. Those whose blood ran too hot, and too quickly, causing them to look about at their placid families, their staid neighbors, the graves of their slumbering ancestors and say— I’m different. I’m special. I’m more. They all came to New York.

What music "means" is almost completely dependent on the people who sell it and the people who buy it, not the people who make it. Our greatest artists are the ones who understand how they can be interesting and unique within those limitations.

A million dollars? For a cow?

Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.

Steeple, people, banana-fana-fo-feeple. What the fuck ever. If you don't loosen up, lady, I'll drop your ass on it.

Point is, you can whine about it, or you can give this thing a shot. Either you're in or you're out. Love is love - even if it's only for a little while, that beats never.

Yeah, but that didn't mean he didn't like fistfuls of blondeness with legs longer than a Celine Dion note, now, did it?

Lou's was like a tour through Crucifix World with a spontaneous stop in Jesus Country.

Caffeinated! Temporary changes: Movement speed +10%! Charisma -2. Intelligence +1!

Hoorah, all things lycanthropic.

I want you to listen to me carefully. I don't give a shit what the council says. You're here, you're mine, and nothing they say or do will change that. Period.

In choosing a bare bones existence, we are enriched, and can redefine success as an internal process rather than an outward display of wealth and power.

Primarily, shapeshifters of the animal variety remain true to animal kingdom rules in their sexual behaviors. I cant say Ive ever seen two male shack up, set up housekeeping, and make crème brûlée together in their nest of love.

What I’m here to talk about is how our whole approach since day one has been like this: Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they’ve inherited. And we’re either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths, just like I did with my brother, or we’re absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up. I’m in suicide prevention now. I’ve had fifteen relatives commit suicide over the course of my life, not counting my brother. I had one community I was working with recently in South Dakota tell me they were grieved out.

Wisdom is really the key to wealth. With great wisdom, comes great wealth and success. Rather than pursuing wealth, pursue wisdom. The aggressive pursuit of wealth can lead to disappointment. Wisdom is defined as the quality of having experience, and being able to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting. Wisdom is basically the practical application of knowledge. Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs. Become completely focused on one subject and study the subject for a long period of time. Don't skip around from one subject to the next. The problem is generally not money. Jesus taught that the problem was attachment to possessions and dependence on money rather than dependence on God. Those who love people, acquire wealth so they can give generously. After all, money feeds, shelters, and clothes people. They key is to work extremely hard for a short period of time (1-5 years), create abundant wealth, and then make money work hard for you through wise investments that yield a passive income for life. Don't let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you're crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you're lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you're greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn't understand. Failure is success if we learn from it. Continuing failure eventually leads to success. Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly. Whenever you pursue a goal, it should be with complete focus. This means no interruptions. Only when one loves his career and is skilled at it can he truly succeed. Never rush into an investment without prior research and deliberation. With preferred shares, investors are guaranteed a dividend forever, while common stocks have variable dividends. Some regions with very low or no income taxes include the following: Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Delaware, South Dakota, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Panama, San Marino, Seychelles, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Curaçao, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Monaco, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bermuda, Kuwait, Oman, Andorra, Cayman Islands, Belize, Vanuatu, and Campione d'Italia. There is only one God who is infinite and supreme above all things. Do not replace that infinite one with finite idols. As frustrated as you may feel due to your life circumstances, do not vent it by cursing God or unnecessarily uttering his name. Greed leads to poverty. Greed inclines people to act impulsively in hopes of gaining more. The benefit of giving to the poor is so great that a beggar is actually doing the giver a favor by allowing the person to give. The more I give away, the more that comes back. Earn as much as you can. Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. Give as much as you can.

At that point, when she'd been staring down the account-whoring, turbo-bitch's face, she wouldn't have much cared if her head spun around and she'd yarked up pea soup at warp speed all over her. At least it would have matched Linda's new color ranking.

It's all a lie. I said to myself. Romance. This notion that some guy is going to swoop and fall madly in love with me and change my life and make everything perfect. It's one big, horrible lie and I bought it. Hook, line, and a ten thousand-pound sinker. Or I guess I should say it's a lie for a girl like me. For Skye, that's another story. The first time Dakota kissed me, down at the hot tub, I remember thinking, this is too good to be true. But if something feels too good to be true, maybe it's not true. Maybe the truth is that Skye deserves him. She'll always be the winner. And I, pathetically, will always be me.

Nina chuckled, giving Katie her infamous devilish grin. "It means you aren't just a werecougar, lady. You're a cougar-cougar. You took stereotyping to a whole 'nother level. You're like one of those 'doesn't look her age' chicks who hits on young dudes because they got the zoom in their boom still happening. You're a total label. Hot. Niiiice work, Mrs. Robinson.

God died before we were born. Our grandparents felt the last of him, that's why they nail crosses above their beds and drape rosaries from their necks. There's no heaven anymore and they'll take that to their grave. He'll be stuck in limbo and we'll probably meet Him there and just because we're baptised doesn't mean we're owed salvation. The angels are homesick and they can't find their wings, and I think I met an angel in hospital, but we're sick, and they're dying, and there's a difference. There is a difference. We all have blood on our hands but we're all too clean for hell.

L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time. Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on January 3, 1891, he wrote, “The Pioneer [sic] has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.

I can't say I've ever seen two male werewolves shack it up, set up housekeeping, and make crème brûlée together in their nest of love. Not that I'd care, mind you. I'm every bit as progressive as the next person. I support love, period.

You know my brother Robbie?” Dakota asks in a hushed voice. I snicker loudly. “No, kid, I don’t know Robbie. I just coach his team.” A sheepish flush blooms on her cheeks. “Oops. Right. That was a stupid question.” “Ya think?” Giggling, she says, “Anyway, you can’t tell anyone, but Robbie has a girlfriend!” I raise my eyebrows. “Yeah? And how do you know that? Are you spying on your big brother?” “No, he told me, dum-dum. Robbie tells me everything. Her name is Lacey and she’s in eighth grade.” Dakota shakes her head in amazement. “That’s a whole grade higher than him.” I stifle the laughter threatening to spill over. “Landed himself an older woman, huh? Good for Robbie.” Dakota lowers her voice to a whisper and proceeds to tell me every single detail about her brother’s eighth-grade girlfriend. I listen obligingly, all the while trying to pinpoint exactly when it was that hanging out with middle-schoolers became the highlight of my days.

Now, Ani.” Whitney was doing that thing I hate, pronouncing my name “Annie” instead of “Ah-nee.” “Luke says the wedding is in Nantucket. Why there?” Because of the privilege inherent in the location, Whitney. Because Nantucket transcends all classes, all areas of the country. Go to South Dakota and tell some sad smug housewife you grew up on the Main Line, and she doesn’t know she’s supposed to be impressed. Tell her you summer on Nantucket—be sure to verb it like that—and she knows who the fuck she’s dealing with. That’s why, Whitney.

Good storytelling is one thing rural whites and Indians have in common. But native Americans have learned through harsh necessity that people who survive encroachment by another culture need story to survive. And a storytelling tradition is something Plains people share with both ancient and contemporary monks; we learn our ways of being and reinforce our values by telling tales about each other.

The loss of that oral tradition and the breakdown of communication between generations had set my family adrift, floating aimlessly without history and all its accumulated experience to guide us. We need context, we need myths, we need family legends in order to see the invisible legacy that follows us, that tells us who we are.

The winning candidate, now the president elect, calls for rapid increase in use of fossil fuels, including coal; dismantling of regulations; rejection of help to developing countries that are seeking to move to sustainable energy; and in general, racing to the cliff as fast as possible. Trump has already taken steps to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by placing in charge of the EPA transition a notorious (and proud) climate change denier, Myron Ebell. Trump's top adviser on energy, billionaire oil executive Harold Hamm, announced his expectations, which were predictable: dismantling regulations, tax cuts for the industry (and the wealthy and corporate sector generally), more fossil fuel production, lifting Obama's temporary block on the Dakota Access pipeline. The market reacted quickly. Shares in energy corporations boomed, including the world's largest coal miner, Peabody Energy, which had filed for bankruptcy, but after Trump's victory, registered a 50 percent gain.

Under capitalism, neither Democrat nor Republican can save Indigenous lands or Black and Indigenous lives. The continuation of state-sanctioned racial terror against Black and Native people, from police violence to energy development, from one administration to the next demonstrates only radical change in the form of decolonization, the repatriation of stolen lands and stolen lives, can undo centuries of settler colonialism.

I have spent most of my life outside, but for the last three years, I have been walking five miles a day, minimum, wherever I am, urban or rural, and can attest to the magnitude of the natural beauty that is left. Beauty worth seeing, worth singing, worth saving, whatever that word can mean now. There is beauty in a desert, even one that is expanding. There is beauty in the ocean, even one that is on the rise. And even if the jig is up, even if it is really game over, what better time to sing about the earth than when it is critically, even fatally wounded at our hands. Aren’t we more complex, more interesting, more multifaceted people if we do? What good has the hollow chuckle ever done anyone? Do we really keep ourselves from being hurt when we sneer instead of sob? If we pretend not to see the tenuous beauty that is still all around us, will it keep our hearts from breaking as we watch another mountain be clear-cut, as we watch North Dakota, as beautiful a state as there ever was, be poisoned for all time by hydraulic fracturing? If we abandon all hope right now, does that in some way protect us from some bigger pain later? If we never go for a walk in the beetle-killed forest, if we don’t take a swim in the algae-choked ocean, if we lock grandmother in a room for the last ten years of her life so we can practice and somehow accomplish the survival of her loss in advance, in what ways does it make our lives easier? In what ways does it impoverish us? We are all dying, and because of us, so is the earth. That’s the most terrible, the most painful in my entire repertoire of self-torturing thoughts. But it isn’t dead yet and neither are we. Are we going to drop the earth off at the vet, say goodbye at the door, and leave her to die in the hands of strangers? We can decide, even now, not to turn our backs on her in her illness. We can still decide not to let her die alone.

Her mental list of items she’d need from her apartment was growing. There were things a girl just couldn’t live without, so Keegan would have to get them when he retrieved Muffin. “I need another purse. Can you get me my Prada knockoff? It’s in my closet on the shelf. Pink. It’s pink. I got it from a vendor in Manhattan. Jeez he was a tough negotiator, but it was worth the haggling. It’s soooo cute.” Keegan sighed, raspy and long. “Okay.” “Oh! And my nail polish. I have two new bottles in the bathroom under the sink in one of those cute organizer baskets, you know? Like the ones you get at Bed Bath and Beyond? God, I love those. Anyway, I need Retro Red and Winsome Wisteria.” Another sigh followed, and then a nod of consent. “My moisturizer. I never go anywhere, not even overnight, without my moisturizer. Not that I ever really go anywhere, but anyway I need it, or my skin will dehydrate and it could just be ugly. Top left side of my medicine cabinet.” “Er, okay.” “My shoes. I can’t be without shoes. Let’s see. I need my tennis shoes and my white sandals, because I don’t think there’s much hope for these, wouldn’t you say?” Marty looked up at him and saw impatience written all over his face. “And my laptop. I can’t check on my clients without my laptop, and they need me. Plus, there’s that no-good bitch Linda Fisher. I have to watch that she’s not stealing my accounts. Do you have all of that?” He gave her that stern look again. The one that made her insides skedaddle around even if it was meant in reproach. “I’m going too far, huh?” His smile was crooked. “Just a smidge.

When you grow up Indian, you quickly learn that the so-called American Dream isn't for you. For you that dream's a nightmare. Ask any Indian kid: you're out just walking across the street of some little off-reservation town and there's this white cop suddenly comes up to you, grabs you by your long hair, pushes you up against a car, frisks you, gives you a couple good jabs in the ribs with his nightstick, then sends you off with a warning sneer: "Watch yourself, Tonto!" He doesn't do that to white kids, just Indians. You can hear him chuckling with delight as you limp off, clutching your bruised ribs. If you talk smart when they hassle you, off to the slammer you go. Keep these Injuns in their place, you know. Truth is, they actually need us. Who else would they fill up their jails and prisons with in places like the Dakotas and New Mexico if they didn't have Indians? Think of all the cops and judges and guards and lawyers who'd be out of work if they didn't have Indians to oppress! We keep the system going. We help give the American system of injustice the criminals it needs. At least being prison fodder is some kind of reason for being. Prison's the only university, the only finishing school many young Indian brothers ever see. Same for blacks and Latinos. So-called Latinos, of course, are what white man calls Indians who live south of the Rio Grande. White man's books will tell you there are only 2.5 million or so of us Indians here in America. But there are more than 200 million of us right here in this Western Hemisphere, in the Americas, and hundreds of millions more indigenous peoples around this Mother Earth. We are the Original People. We are one of the fingers on the hand of humankind. Why is it we are unrepresented in our own lands, and without a seat — or many seats — in the United Nations? Why is it we're allowed to send our delegates only to prisons and to cemeteries?