“My family was killed in February 1979. Somebody burned down the house where my wife, Tina, my mother-in-law and my three children were living on the Shoshone Paiute Reservation in Duck Valley, Nevada. It happened about 12 hours after I burned an American flag on the steps of the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. The Bureau of Indian Affairs and the government said the fire started in the fireplace and was an accident. But I had some people investigate it and discovered that it wasn’t an accident, but a fire of ‘suspicious origin.’ Soon after that I started writing. When I look at it now, I needed something to hang on to.”
“After the fire, I needed to look at what was going on because I was no longer in the same world.”
“I was entirely in a different world. It gave me a chance to step back and look at all the things that were going on around me and start to understand how I was going to, let’s just say, participate.”
“One of the things we accomplished in the political movement of the 60s is that the spirit was rekindled. The government, through its paramilitary war of deceit, smashed our political unity. But what happened is that simultaneously came the reawakening of the memory, our ancestral memory.”
“It’s important to communicate because somebody’s got to say something. Silence is dangerous. What’s missing in this society is people speaking their feelings. That’s how the spirit speaks to human beings. This is a time historically when we need everybody to communicate about how we feel. That’s all I’m doing.” ~
SOURCE: Petaluma Argus Courier