“It’s more than a race war. They are waging a war with the earth. Our forests and cornfields are burned by them. But, I say to you, our tears reach God. He knows what’s coming round, so may God speak to the greedy hearts of men and move them.” (Part One)

“The women were a business investment. Another white man, when asked what he did for a living, said by way of an answer that he’d married an Osage woman, and everyone who listened understood what he meant, that he didn’t work; he lived off her money.” (Part One)

“The Indian people wanted, with all their hearts, nothing more than to be left alone and in peace. They wanted it so much that they turned their minds away from the truth and looked in the other direction, and even Horse, who was known for his divinations, saw it coming only a little at a time.” (Part One)

“He missed South Dakota, but he believed he could do more for his people in Washington than he could do at home where so many of the young Indian men had been broken that a cop’s sole job was to keep them from killing each other as they relived the heritage of violence that had been committed against them.” (Part One)

“ ‘We’ve had awful hard times,’ Ben said, and his words seemed strengthened by the shock of the blast. And everyone knew he didn’t mean his own bad times. ‘They put us on this godforsaken land and no one knew what was underneath it, but even with all this oil and money, it seems we can’t come out ahead.’ ” (Part One)

“She thought of the history of her hands. They were like her grandmother’s hands, were made up of them. Her grandmother who had come to Oklahoma over the Trail of Tears. Soldiers had forced the line of people west, out from their Mississippi homeland. They were beaten and lost, forced to give up everything that had been their lives until they thought of nothing more than how to go on, to preserve their wounded race, their broken tribe.” (Part Two)

“He thought about Stace and about faith, and how vulnerable human men were. They were soft and hopeful as children, and their lives easily dispensed with. That was the history of the world. But he never spoke these words to Stace. He remained silent. He wasn’t one to sit in judgment on any other man, but he was thinking that Stace believed too deeply in the people who paid his wages. He thought that even a prophet, even a warrior, could not survive the ways of the Americans, especially the government with rules and words that kept human life at a distance and made it live by their regulations and books.” (Part Two)

“The stakes were high. They bet silver and horses and cows. They bet orange and purple woolen blankets that had been in the families for years. Old women put up their dance shawls and the baskets that had belonged to their grandmothers. And staggering young men bet their unfortunate medicine boxes and bundles, willing to lose even the sacred to dollars. It broke the hearts of many people to see that they put everything up against money and odds.” (Part Two)

“No one spoke. But they were alive. They carried generations along with them, into the prairie and through it, to places where no road had been cut before them. They traveled past houses that were like caves of light in the black world. The night was on fire with their pasts and they were alive.” (Part Two)