"There are so many pieces of the potential solution to this puzzle, and some of them are for you to put together. Whether they will multiply or ever add up to enough we don’t yet know. We need more: more people, more transformations, more ways to conquer and dismantle the oil companies, more of a vision of what is at stake, more of the great force that is civil society. Will we get it? I don’t know. Neither do you. Anything could happen."
— Rebecca Solnit on climate change and the movement to mitigate it, from “The Case for Hope, Continued.”
"I was able to slip a copy of The Color Purple to him before I returned to California. Years later, when we reconnected in Cuba, where we had gone to deliver medicines and to meet with Fidel Castro, who seemed to know as much about Indian concerns as we did, Dennis told me how he had read the novel and passed it around the prison to other inmates until the pages were like onionskin. Years later, over dinner at my house, he would laugh as he told me how the men in the prison always returned the book, but that when it was shared with the women in the prison, it disappeared for good."
— Alice Walker on American Indian Movement activist Dennis Banks.
"I remember being struck by his lightness of spirit, believing as I do that happiness is already victory. I don’t recall everything he was wearing, but the effect was of someone blessedly returned to the clothing and hairstyle that suited him. Jeans, a fawn-colored ribbon shirt, a robe perhaps made from a Pendleton blanket. Wrapped around the coils of hair that made up his long, dark braid, the reddest of red thread signaled to the world that, yes indeed, here is an Indian and he is incredibly hip and alive."
— Alice Walker, on seeing (and eventually meeting) Dennis Banks, a founder of the American Indian Movement. Read more.
