“The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent worldview—but whether it was about spirituality and the afterlife, the role of women, the nature of glaciers, the age of the world, or the theory of evolution, these white Victorians were in a world topsy-turvy with change, uncertainty and controversy. Deference was paid to Christianity and honest agricultural toil, but more than few questioned the former, and most, as the gold rushes, confidence men, and lionized millionaires proved, would gladly escape the latter. So the attempt to make Indians into Christian agriculturists was akin to those contemporary efforts whereby charities send cast-off clothing to impoverished regions: the Indians were being handed a system that was worn out...”

“Much fuss has been made over the idea of the frontier, as though it were a line advancing east to west, but the West was settled piece meal, and Indians fled in many directions to escape the tightening noose of the railroad lines and towns.”

“Reading these stories, it's tempting to think thatthe arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting,navigating, skills of survival and escape. Even in theeveryday world of the present, an anxiety to survivemanifests itself in cars and clothes for far more ruggedoccasions than those at hand, as though to express somesense of the toughness of things and of readiness to facethem. But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival,seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's calledfor is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness todeal with what comes next. These captives lay out in astark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: thetransitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldomis it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something ofthis journey between the near and the far goes on inevery life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend,an old letter will remind you that you are not who youonce were, for the person who dwelt among them, valuedthis, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Withoutnoticing it you have traversed a great distance; thestrange has become familiar and the familiar if notstrange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrowngarment. And some people travel far more thanothers. There are those who receive as birthright an adequateor at least unquestioned sense of self and thosewho set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or forsatisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit valuesand practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have toburn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.”

“The anthropoligical theorist Paul Shepard writes, 'Humans intuitivesly see analogies between the concrete world out there and their own inner world. If they conceive the former as a chaos of anarchic forces or as dead and frozen, then so will they perceive their own bodies and society; so will they think and act on that assumption and vindicate their own ideas by altering the world to fit them.' The loss of a relationship to the nonconstructed world is a loss of these metaphors. It is also loss of the large territory of the senses, a vast and irreplaceable loss of pleasure and meaning.”

“Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.”

“To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.”

“In idyllic small towns I sometimes see teenagers looking out of place in their garb of desperation, the leftover tatters and stains and slashes of the fashion of my youth. For this phase of their life, the underworld is their true home, and in the grit and underbelly of a city they could find something that approximates it. Even the internal clock of adolescents changes, making them nocturnal creatures for at least a few years. All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture enter adulthood as a prison, and death reassures them that there are exits. “I have been half in love with easeful death,” said Keats who died at twenty-six and so were we, though the death we were in love with was only an idea then.”