What We Learn
poem
Article voiceover
Back in high school, I had a white girlfriend whose mother forbade her from visiting me on the reservation because she believed that Indians carry too much anger in our hearts. All these angry decades later, I understand that my girlfriend's mother wasn't completely wrong.
I'm married to a Native American woman but from a different tribe. I've taken to referring to our marriage as being Native Orthodoxy.
True enough, I'd say. But at your angriest, early in your writing career (I think), you had a great capacity for humor. In "Imagining the Reservation" (in LR&T) you offered the formula Survival = Anger x Imagination, proposing that imagination was the only weapon, but I countered (somewhere in print) that your formula should've been divided by Humor. You never have lost that capacity (genius?) for humor.