Does what we try most to avoid come after us because we pay too much attention to it with our attention?

Time only seems to have skipped, or to have sped by without you when you looked the other way. That's what Opal has been doing. Closing her eyes and ears to the closing of her eyes and ears.

No one on the train knows about the powwow. Tony's just an Indian dressed like an Indian on the train for no apparent reason. But people love to see the pretty history. Tony's regalia is blue, red, orange, yellow, and black. The colors of a fire at night.. Another image people love to think about. Indians around a fire. But this isn't that. Tony is the fire and the dance and the night.

Old songs that sang to the old sadness you always kept as close as skin without meaning to. The word triumph blipped in your head then. What was it doing there? You never used that word. This was what it sounded like to make it through theses hundreds of American years, to sing through them. This was the sound of pain forgetting itself in song.

But what we are is what our ancestors did. How they survived. We are the memories we don't remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for our bounty, or just to get rid of us.

When we go to tell our stories, people think we want it to have gone different. People want to say things like "sore losers" and "move on already," "quit playing the blame game." But is it a game? Only those who have lost as much as we have see the particularly nasty slice of smile on someone who thinks they're winning when they say "Get over it.

This [forced migration into cities] was part of the Indian Relocation Act, which was part of the Indian Termination Policy, which was and is exactly what it sounds like. Make them look and act like us. Become us. And so disappear.

There is no there there,” he says in a kind of whisper, with this goofy openmouthed smile Dene wants to punch. Dene wants to tell him he’d looked up the quote in its original context, in her Everybody’s Autobiography, and found that she was talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore.

She scans the field for the boys. It's a blur. She should probably get glasses, probably should've gotten glasses a long time ago. She would never tell anyone this, but she enjoys the distance being a blur.

All the way from the top of Canada, the top of Alaska, down to the bottom of South America, Indians were removed, then reduced to a feathered image. Our greats are on flags, jerseys, and coins.