The strength of the poetry as we enter into whatever it is we are entering into, will be determined by the clarity of the thinking we put into it.

There have been some positive things that have happened for the tribes, but it's a constant, vigilant fight about protecting what resources we have in terms of land and rights.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

There are a lot of people who want to give orders and be bossy that don't deserve respect.

I'm just a human being trying to make it in a world that is very rapidly losing it's understanding of being human.

When I go around in America and I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed; they feel powerless... and we understand the psychological genocide that they have already inflicted upon their own people.

It's always good to go home. It's strengthening to see your past and know you have someplace to go where you're part of a people.

I think that if the political and social movement groups and organizations that operate in this country today had the same kind of energetic commitment that the medical marijuana people have, many things could change in this country.

We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off.

The average human being in America is going through some sort of hard times -- physical, emotional, psychological. Everybody's carrying a bit of bone days in them.

Because we are all of an oral tradition in our beginning histories, the voice of the poet in this particular society will be heard.

I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything.

I wasn't interested in having to live with a camera -- I have a hard enough time getting along with myself. I don't need cameras around and all that action.

What I view life like is about energy. Everything is about energy -- everything. We physically are little units of electrical energy, and we vibrate and project electromagnetic thought.

I'm basically a starving artist.

All that I am is me. So I'm not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist; I'm me, and these are things that I do.

Before Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had dream of soldiers falling from the sky.

I was going mad. One day, I just started writing, and it was like therapy because I was in a position where I couldn't rage. I never expected to be a writer; it's a different world than I ever expected to be in.

We have power... Our power isn't in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems... they have power... but it's not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings.

I have experienced within my own lifetime the attack of my winter camp and the killing of the women and children. It left me even angrier than I was -- and I was never too calm to begin with.