SOURCE: An interview in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 30, No. 2, Autumn, 1990, pp. 62-76.

[An American-born critic and educator, Rooke has served as a member of the Canada Council's Advisory Panel on Writing and Publication. In the excerpted interview below, King discusses stylistic and thematic aspects of Medicine River, his identity and origins, and the recent focus on Native Americans in contemporary literature.]

[Rooke]: Let's start with some questions on Medicine River. Will, the narrator of Medicine River, is a Native photographer. And in the novel, a white woman suggests that's funny, given how Indians feel about photography: the fear, presumably, of one's soul being gobbled up by the camera. I wonder how charged that very glib remark was for you, and what you're saying about it. Is it important in some way to your conception of Will as photographer? Or was the woman's remark just a throwaway crack?

[King]: Not really. There are points in the book where I play off historical stereotypes—one of which is that Indians don't like to have their picture taken because it is going to capture their soul.

I remember that the woman seems very thick when she asks the question, and that there's no follow-up from Will.

There's no need for Will to answer the question. The question itself is enough to remind the reader of the range of stereotypes and clichés that go into the popular portrait of the Indian in Canada. Just by having her ask the question, and by having Will not answer it—well, that's pointed enough for me.

What I was thinking about is the parallel between Will as photographer and you as writer. In each case, the slightly detached Native artist is engaged partly in making a record of Native life—and that raises for me the question of whether in making Will a photographer you are taking the position that the writer can speak for others, and that he can speak in a way that doesn't take the soul away.

I'm not sure a writer should try to speak for others. I think you speak for yourself and if others like what you said then they can allow what you've said to speak for them if that's what they want. There's a scene in the book where Will is taking a picture of the community. He's outside the community, speaking for them, in a sense, with his camera. But before he takes the first picture, the community invites him into the picture, so that the community speaks for itself.

I thought that was important: the fact of his entering the photograph, which breaks down the authority position.

Yes. It also begins to break down the barriers that exist between Will and the community. But even more than that, I suppose, I'm questioning the position of the person who's making the choices, the decisions—whether it's the artist, whether it's the photographer, whether it's the community, whether it's the camera all by itself. In that one scene, the group photograph takes itself, as it were. There's no kind of outside agency that is setting the thing up. The camera is just aimed and then Will leaves it.

But this time the artist or the speaker is one of the community being spoken about, and so you can insert him into that.

Yes, more of the time when you see photographs of Indian people, of course, they are taken by non-Natives who come to the community, take a picture of it, and are never a part of the community. They simply vanish, and you have what they call the historical record. In Will's case, in the case of the artist, the important thing for me is that the artist is part of that community. He's an extension of it. He's behind the camera taking the picture, but he is also part of it. I think of myself as being a part of that community, even though I'm outside of it especially as I am writing the novel. But it's a tricky stance, I think, too. And I'm not sure if it's always successful.

The chapters in Medicine River also work as free standing stories, and I believe began that way. Have you come to think of the book as a novel now?

No, not yet. I try to think of it as a novel. You're right about the chapters. They did start out as free standing pieces, but before the first draft was finished, many of them became more dependent on each other, vignettes, if you will, knitted together by those long-running bits of narrative—the father's letters, the flashbacks to the mother, the flashbacks to Will's younger days, especially to the woman he knows in Toronto. All of those things give the book some sense of a novel, but I prefer to think of Medicine River as a cycle of stories.

It's quite a prominent form in Canadian literature generally, isn't it? Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Sandra Birdsell, George Szanto, and so on. It's nice to see another fine example of the story cycle in Medicine River. I like it as a form.

Yes, so do I. It's also a form that's very prominent in Native oral literature and probably that had something to do with my choosing it too.

I assume that you made some changes in the stories when you put them together as a kind of novel. But you chose not to delete certain repetitions. For example, when the characters are named again there is always a little introductory kind of thing that you wouldn't normally see in a novel. It's a pleasing effect, I think.

Actually, that kind of repetition was more prevalent in the earlier drafts where I would rename and re-introduce characters at the beginning of each chapter. That didn't bother me at all. But the editors at Penguin said, you know, we don't mind the fact that you keep introducing these people in different ways, but let's take off their last names, so it doesn't appear that they are being introduced for the first time, and maybe get rid of some of the information that is redundant. I probably would have left it in because it gives you a feeling of starting over again, and the repetition of all that makes it easier for you to remember characters. There's something soothing and comfortable about seeing the same characters and hearing about them again and again, like a refrain in a song. But I did make changes and some of the chapters have lost that sense of wholeness and some of the stories do begin to lean on each other. They don't stand as nicely on their own as they did at first. In the end, it was okay.

Many of the chapters or the stories are structured by counterpoint, an alternating movement between separate time periods with separate characters and so on. Sometimes the relationship between those layers of the text, those separate stories within the story, is very clear and sometimes it's very subtle, as in an Alice Munro story—where part of the pleasing strangeness is that you don't quite see the linkages. The one I'm thinking of is chapter 14, I guess, which has David Plume and Wounded Knee, and May dean Joe and the clothes dryer. I was intrigued by that one.

People are social animals, and I believe we are most comfortable when we are part of a community or group. In that particular story I wanted to deal with the various forms that alienation might take and the ironies that are created as people try to maintain or change their positions. David Plume goes to Wounded Knee, and in part, loses his place within his community. But he has a place within that small group of Natives who did go to Wounded Knee. May Dean, because of her handicap, is not accepted as a full-fledged member of the kids who hang out in the basement. Will didn't go to Wounded Knee, but he is alienated from the Native community in much the same way David is. I don't try to make these layers and linkages line up perfectly or to use them to point to a moral. Maybe I'm interested in the ways we punish ourselves and others. Certainly David and May Dean and Will present different facets of a particular malaise that I've known first hand. I'm not sure I can name it, but I know what it feels like.

But what is the connection between getting into the dryer and AIM and the Wounded Knee episode?

The connection for me is community. David Plume goes to Wounded Knee because he wants to do something important. May Dean crawls into the dryer because she wants to be like everyone else. Will wants to be part of the community in Medicine River, but he doesn't know what to do. He doesn't want to go with David and he doesn't want to get in the "dryer," as it were. For that one instance in the book, he's sort of caught out. He goes back in the office, and he turns all the lights on and opens all the doors just to keep himself from being trapped, I suppose, trapped in that dryer, trapped in that van for no reason that he really understands. I'm not even sure I understand.

It's very strong.

I go back and read that and still find it quite moving. Partly I'm pleased by it and partly I'm frightened. There is a level of disaster in each of those episodes that I feel helpless to prevent.

There are some independent women in this book, Louise Heavyman and Susan, too, the woman in Toronto. And there's a lovely kind of tension, I think, between the need for pairing with a man and the need not to be gobbled up by that, to stand apart. I wonder if you'd like to comment on that.

Well, I've been around independent women all my life. There weren't really many men in my life, and the ones there were were transient for the most part. I suppose when I was a teenager I never really learned exactly what men did. I sort of saw it from a distance, but it was all filtered through my mother and my grandmother. And while they didn't always get along together, they were very strong women. They had their own views. They kept themselves apart. My mother never remarried after my father took off, and my grandmother lost her husband when I was five years old, I guess. So they were women who had to make it on their own.

That whole thing of women having to pair up within the confines of a novel strikes me as being very artificial. A strong woman such as Susan, even though she seems to be a bit of a flake when we first meet her, is obviously capable of making very tough choices. So much so that after a very long silence, when she invites Will to a party at her place, Will thinks everything is going to be great and he's going to wind up in bed with her again. But it's a large party, and she ends up introducing him to her ex-husband who is also at the party. There's certain cruelty in that, I suppose. But for me, it's the way that character has of breaking off with her past and putting some kind of closure to it.

Louise Heavyman makes the same kind of hard choices, first about Harold and later about Will. There's that scene when she buys the house that has a darkroom downstairs. Harlen runs around like crazy, telling Will, "This is your chance. She bought the house for you, because there's a darkroom in there." Will comes back the next week, and she's had the darkroom torn out.

Are we to conclude then that it really was totally accidental that she bought a house with a darkroom, or was that an expression of her ambivalence?

No, I think it's an expression of her ambivalence. She asks at one point, "Did you ever think about us living together?" Will says "Yeah." And she says "So have I"—and rolls over and goes to sleep.

But, you know, shortly after that scene Will wonders whether she's ever going to suggest that he move in. I was intrigued by that because her question—"Did you ever think about us living together?"—could have been an invitation. Maybe he was supposed to say "Yes, let's do it." In that case, one could read her getting rid of the darkroom as a sign that she was miffed: "You didn't bite at the bait, baby, so there goes your room."

Well, Will's ambivalent, too. I mean, he starts to sweat when she asks that question. You know the covers on the bed are not that heavy, and he's sweating because she's more or less asking the question that in one sense Will is supposed to ask. It's the question Harlen keeps pushing Will to ask, and Will is slightly ambivalent. Probably less so than Louise. But yes, I think she's thinking about that. I mean, they really like each other; you couldn't help but think about that. And so she buys a house that has a darkroom, and she thinks about it during that period of time, and then probably says "No, wait a minute; we don't really need a darkroom, particularly." It's not that she closes living together off as a possibility. But she closes it off as an immediate possibility, I think.

I like that reading a lot. As you know, Harlen Bigbear is my favourite character in Medicine River. His role as a social convenor and his itch to help everybody is a wonderful device for creating community and also for lending a tone of great sweetness to the book. In some way Harlen, and in particular Will's friendship with Harlen and Will's valuing of Harlen, seems to chime nicely with this whole issue of the female independence and the tension between independence and community. The two things together—the way you handle the women and the way you handle the Harlen/Will friendship—seem enormously optimistic to me. It's as if males are moving towards female strengths, and females towards male strengths. It's part of a very moving thing in the book for me.

Harlen's my favorite character, too. Harlen rarely reacts the way you expect a typical male to react. His whole notion is that the world is a fragile place, and he says "You know, it's like a spider web, and it's like a starfish because a starfish can grow a new arm." And so Harlen's job, as he sees it, is to make sure that the world is in good health. And in order to do that you can't yell at people and tell them what to do. You have to use what I suppose is a more feminine approach to that world and remind people of their responsibilities and their obligations. Suggest things that they should do. It is a softer and tenderer method of arranging the whole community. That is what Harlen's about. Even with the great tragedies that overtake the community—the suicide of Jake Pretty Weasel, for instance—there's that sense of having to close the wound. And in a sort of crazy way, it is closed—partly by the letter that January writes for Jake, and partly by the willingness of January and the community to let Jake's bad behaviour die with him. In this instance, Harlen keeps his silence while the other men speculate on what exactly happened. Other times Harlen moves actively to try to fix up what he sees as holes in the fabric of the community. For instance, when Louise Heavyman gets pregnant, Harlen starts worrying about her not having any family or friends. Everybody's thrown her out, Harlen tells Will, and then you discover that that hasn't happened at all. Of course, Will believes Harlen and when he goes to the hospital to stand by Louise, he gets caught out. Yeah, I'm quite fond of Harlen.

Harlen's role is mending and keeping up the community.

Darning the community.

Yes, darning the community. It's very much the role of the women characters in Sheila Watson's The Double Hook, which in fact uses the imagery of threads and darning and so on. But it's very pleasing to see a male character performing that role, and quite rare too, I think.

Well, Harlen is very much a traditional character. He's the trickster figure, rearranged in some ways.

In what ways is he a trickster?

One of the roles of the trickster is to try to set the world right …

And sometimes, like Coyote, he destroys?

Oh yes, that's the problem. He's creator and destroyer. Harlen is always looking to do good—and sometimes he does good. Other times he gets things totally wrong. Or he creates a situation in which things don't go as well as they should.

He's something of a meddler, then.

He's a meddler, a constant meddler. He doesn't have a job, you know. I mean, nobody knows what Harlen does. He's got to do something for a living, but no one ever sees him working at a regular job. He just sort of appears. There's a certain surrealistic quality to Harlen. He's not like Will or Louise, who have reasonably normal lives. Harlen is just there. He's like the land and the sky.

I'm thinking particularly of that wonderful scene at the airport, when Will at last heeds Harlen's advice and comes back to Medicine River, and finds Harlen still standing there. It seems to Will that Harlen might have been waiting for him there all that time, ever since he'd shown him off on the plane for Toronto months earlier.

Actually, you know, I sort of stole that scene from a poem….

A poem by Michael Ondaatje called "Bear Hug."

Right!

Isn't that funny?

Yep, I read that and I was very moved by that poem. You know, how long had the child been standing there with his arms open, waiting for his father's hug? And when I was writing the story I was reminded of Ondaatje's "Bear Hug," and I thought to myself what a marvellous image….

Harlen is Bigbear too.

And he's Bigbear too, that's right. So there he is with that bear hug … Well, that's great, because it really was very much in my mind, and I had to be careful. I didn't want to use the same line that Michael had used. But I wanted that image you know, wondering how long Harlen had been standing there like that, to let the reader know that he hasn't moved in all that time. Harlen's been there waiting….

And therefore magic.

And therefore magic. There is a magic part to Harlen. I really love magic.

How important is the absent father to your conception of the book?

Well, the father's letters become the core around which the book is built. The letters themselves begin to bring the reader into those early flashbacks, and they also set up a dichotomy of sorts for Will because he only knows his father through the letters. Every time he tries to remember something about the father he's thwarted. Every time he thinks he's got his father pegged, he discovers he's wrong. Like the time his mother tells stories about someone she doesn't name; it turns out that it's not his father at all, but he thinks it is. He even goes so far as to make up stories about his father so he has some kind of past, some kind of history for the man. But in large part the father's letters become a counterpoint to the way in which Will is going to live his own life.

There's a metaphor I'm especially fond of that shows this. The father writes a letter in which he talks about a top he's bought for James and Will, a top that mysteriously never arrives. And you never know if the father actually bought the top or not, and there's the sense that Will's father never took responsibility for his sons. So when South Wing is born, Will takes responsibility for her, but it is only when he buys South Wing that musical top at the very end of the book (the top he never got from his father) that you know he is really taking responsibility for that little girl—and he's doing it not for Louise, but for himself and perhaps for his past.

It's kind of a moving spot for me as a writer because there's a lot of emotion tied up for Will in his father and those letters. It's not that Will loves his father and it's not that he misses his father particularly. It's just that he never knew the man. There are parts of his life that he'll never know and responsibilities that were not taken for him. For Will at least, there is always that question of responsibility to individuals and the community. I suppose in some ways the letters from the father remind him of what he should do and what he must not become.

There are several references to New Zealand and Australia in the book, and I know you've spent some time there. I'd like you to comment on that and to indicate whether you feel a special connection with Maori writers or Aboriginal writers in Australia.

Well, I spent almost three years in Australia and New Zealand. And when I came to Joe Bigbear and had to send Joe some place in the world, the obvious places were New Zealand and Australia. I do feel an affinity with other aboriginal people, and the Maori in New Zealand and the Aboriginal in Australia for instance, in part because I think our experience with colonization is similar, but more because we seem to be concerned about the same things. Writers such as Colin Johnson, Keri Hulme, and Patricia Grace write about community in the same way that Native writers in Canada and the US do. I've just finished Grace's Potiki which is about a Maori community. It touches on some of the same things that I like to write about and many of the storytelling techniques, the characters, and the voices are familiar.

Here comes the inevitable question. Where do you stand on the controversy about non-Natives writing on Natives? Do you like reading those accounts from the outside? Do you feel it's an appropriation?

I don't mind reading it. Writers like Tony Hillerman and William Eastlake do a pretty good job with it. Other writers—well, Bill Kinsella is certainly the easiest target.

Or M. T. Kelly?

You have to include people like M. T. Kelly, and in some ways you even have to include Rudy Wiebe in that. I think there is a problem with the way in which they approach their material. For instance, there's a very strong romantic strain that runs through The Temptations of Big Bear. Instead of describing the community, he really does isolate Big Bear as a character off by himself. Now, I know part of the reason is that Big Bear is the focus of that novel. But it's a bit bothersome because it begins to remind me of some nineteenth century novels that deal with Indians in which the focus is on the individual rather than the community. Kinsella has, what, six collections of Hobbema stories out now. And out of all of them, maybe ten percent are really moving stories. Very well written. I was quite taken with some of the stories in Dance Me Outside, but the majority of the stories are just sort of eighth-grade playground jokes that have been extended into short stories with Indians affixed to them. I don't care much to read THAT. I find that poor writing. I also find some of the images offensive, as I found some of the images in M. T. Kelly's book offensive: that whole sort of yuppy shamanism thing that appears there. I mean Kelly starts off well enough, but the whole thing becomes a magical mystery tour part way through the book. It does bother me when non-Native writers write poorly about Indians or use Indians for purposes that don't really have anything to do with Indian people or Indian culture. But I'm not going to go out and say that they can't do it. I'm not going to tell Ruth Beebe Hill who wrote Hanto Yo, which was an absolutely awful and stupid B western, that she can't write about Indians. But these writers can't expect that we're going to say that we like this kind of crap.

You'll reserve the right to be offended.

I'll reserve the right to be offended, and I'll reserve the right to say something about it. As I'm sure they'll exercise their right to say anything they want about my stuff. I mean, I don't like criticism. It pains me deeply if someone doesn't like something I do. But you can't be a writer without opening yourself up to criticism. Outside of the problem of plain shoddy writing, I think the real problem is with writers who go into a Native community and take a story that is the community's story, and simply pull it out and put it in print, and don't pay much attention to whether they've really got it right or not. I think that's offensive to the community itself. Many traditional communities feel that there is a stock of stories that they themselves possess. It is part of their culture, and if they want to share it with the outside world, they will. If they don't want to share it, they won't. There have been instances where people have gone in and just simply taken those stories as if they were commodities off a shelf and sold them, as it were.

Do you feel then that the white writer hearing of such stories ought to ask permission before using them?

It depends on what the situation is. If you're invited as a guest onto a reserve, let's say, or into a group and they let you sit in on one of the ceremonies or a story cycle … yes, I think you need to ask. Some writers will say "OK, we'll ask, but we'll do it anyway." Well, you can't stop that from happening, but I think it's poor judgement. And besides, you know, with a lot of the writers who are looking at Native material, I think the biggest crime—not crime …

Offense?

Yes … offense is that Indians sort of become the flavour of the month. You have all these writers jumping on the bandwagon and writing about Indians because it's going to sell. I find that offensive. Again, I can't say to them, "Don't do it" or "You shouldn't be doing that." But I find that offensive, very offensive. And once again, I'm not unwilling to say so.

You were born in the United States and hold Canadian citizenship. I wonder how relevant such distinctions seem to your work as a Native writer or your sense of yourself as Native.

Well, I guess I'm supposed to say that I believe in the line that exists between the US and Canada, but for me it's an imaginary line. It's a line from somebody else's imagination; it's not my imagination. It divides people like the Mohawk into Canadian Mohawks and US Mohawks. They're the same people. It divides the Blackfoot who live in Browning from the Blackfoot who live at Standoff, for example. So the line is a political line, that border line. It wasn't there before Europeans came. It was a line that was inscribed across the country after that. I'm not a fan of nationalism, although I consider myself a Canadian writer—in part because of my Canadian citizenship. But my material is Canadian, for the most part; the landscape that I deal with in most of my fiction is Canadian. This side of the border. And I prefer to be here rather than down in the US. At the same time, that kind of border and that kind of nationalism create centres that I don't think do Indian people any good. It suggests things to us that we should become, things I'm not much interested in becoming.

What do you mean?

Well, the other day when we had our little tête-à-tête in the meeting, there was the sense—at least to me—that I was being asked to buy into a particular image of Indians. I mean Indians sitting around drinking Lysol is a real knee-jerk image. Part of the question that was asked was why wasn't I saying the things that Canadian readers and Canadian intellectuals knew intimately to be true about Indians? Now that's an attempt to centre literature around a certain set of expectations. And much of it, I think, has to do with nationalism, which always creates superior/inferior relationships. Canadians may not feel superior to the British, but they damn well feel superior to Indians. I'm not at all interested in reinforcing stereotypes and clichés….

Tom, I have a question about the audience you write for, the extent to which you are simply writing for whoever wants to read it, and the extent to which you are writing for Native people or to illuminate Native experience for non-Native readers.

Well, I do both Native and non-Native material. When I do my Native material, I'm writing particularly for a Native community. That doesn't mean that I've got a specific community in mind. It's just that as a Native writer I think you take on responsibilities and obligations. And those are different from the obligations and responsibilities that I might take on when I'm doing non-Native stuff. But when I'm doing material like Medicine River, I'm quite aware that there's a Native community out there that is looking at this material, and I have to ask myself the question, "Is what I'm doing proper? Does it fulfil the responsibilities I have?" It's not as though I have a list of those responsibilities that I can talk about; it's just a sense of responsibility to that community. And so with Medicine River I'm really writing initially for a Native audience. It's a real irony because as I see my audience out there, and as I think about that Native audience and how much I hope they'll enjoy the book and the kind of storytelling that goes on in the book, I'm also reminded that the book costs twenty-five bucks for the hard copy. And, you know, not a great many Native people are going to want or have twenty-five extra bucks to put out on the book. So the audience that I write for in some ways almost becomes a lost audience. I mean, the paperback may get out into the Native communities, but aside from that…. Nonetheless, it sustains my writing to keep that audience in mind. For instance, I try to keep away from poor language in the book.

What do you mean by poor language?

Poor language—obscenities, for example, that Native people would find offensive. I also try to stay away from dialect. Dialect creates centres, and so instead of creating dialects I try to reorder my syntax. People can argue with you and say, "Well, if you change the syntax around you create a dialect." But I am willing to say "No, that doesn't necessarily happen." Syntax is very difficult from "you seeum moon come upum over mountain," that kind of thing. I think of that as a responsibility not to show Native people as illiterate or stupid, because dialect has that tendency …

And there are you thinking of a white audience or …

No, no, there I'm thinking of the Native audience. I really don't care about the white audience at that point. I also like to be careful that I don't try to tell too much about the Native community….

Do you speak a Native language?

No. Bits and pieces of some, but not enough to get me fed and a bed to sleep in at night.

Are you worried about the survival of Native languages? Do you think that's essential to the survival of Native traditions?

Yes, I worry about Native languages. I think they're in better shape than many people give them credit for being. I like to point out that Native cultures, over the last 500 years since the advent of Europeans in North America, have been under a state of siege. The demand to assimilate, to give up traditional ways, has certainly been a part of Canadian and US history right up to the present. And every twenty years or so somebody writes the obituary for Indian people: Indian people aren't going to survive; they're losing their traditions; they're losing their language, etc. etc. You can go all the way back to the 1700s and find these obituaries. And yet the tribes and the cultural groups remain, and they continue into the present day. You can go out to the Blood Reserve at Standoff, down to Window Rock on the Navaho reservation, back out to James Bay Cree or down to St. Regis. There are Indian tribes everywhere. It is true that many of these tribes have made changes—all cultures change—and many of those changes they've chosen for themselves. Other changes have been enforced on them. But for all of that, for all those centuries of colonization—and the colonization hasn't stopped—the tribes have remained in pretty good shape. Along with that is the periodic revival of Native traditions and language. Whether the languages will all survive or not I don't know. I hope they do, because with-in the language is contained much of the literature, the oral literature that is a pool for all of us to use.

But it must get translated, since you know it.

Yes, it does, and of course much of the material that I'm working with is material that has been translated and there is nothing wrong with translation, though it has its limits. There was a great book published just a little while ago by Theytus Books and Talonbooks called Write It On Your Heart by Harry Robinson, who passed away just a little while ago. He was a storyteller and he wrote a collection of stories in English that were transcribed by Wendy Wickwire. She didn't translate them; but what's marvellous is that you can see the oral characteristics coming through into written English. And again it's that sense of syntax, part of it's the syntax that Robinson is able to create.

But what does that have to do with the Native language?

Robinson is a traditional elder. He speaks his language. In addition to maintaining the language and encouraging other people to maintain the language, in his book, Robinson also begins to develop ways in which oral literature and written literature can merge so that the characteristics of oral performance and the tenets of culture can be successfully retold and re-created in a written format. The key to Robinson's literature is that he knows both languages and he understands storytelling.

Do you know how many Native people speak only English?

No. I don't know if anyone really does.

We ought to know that.

Yes, but I don't think anyone is really interested in that. It's the whole assimilationist idea that Native languages are inferior to European languages. One of the great jokes that I keep with me happened down at University of Utah, when Native students from the Navaho reservation went in to get credit for a foreign language. The administration said, "Oh yes"—this was during liberal days—"certainly, we'll give you a foreign language credit for Navaho." And the Navaho said, "No, no. That's not what we want. We want credit for English as a foreign language." But the administration did not want to do that. A real irony when you think about it.

Oh, that's wonderful.

They did it for a while because the logic was impeccable. But they didn't want to do it; they didn't want to give foreign language credit for English.

Let me just ask one final question, Tom. What do you think you value most of your Native heritage?

Oh God! That's like asking someone what they like best about their mother when she's sitting in the same room, listening. It sustains me. I value that.