To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electrici….

All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history..

Sensitivity to nature is not an innate attribute of indigenous peoples. It is a consequence of adaptive choices that have resulted in the development….

In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures o….

Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does n….

The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, the….

Risk discomfort and solitude for understanding..

The surface of the Earth itself is an immense loom upon which the sun weaves the fabric of existence..

Genocide, the physical extinction of a people, is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not cond….

The problem is that those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful, but somehow reduced to margins of ….

If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singularly generic modern culture that t….

If we accept that we are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all cultures share the same genius. And whether that genius is placed into technologica….

Heroes are never perfect, but they're brave, they're authentic, they're courageous, determined, discreet, and they've got grit..

What is science but the pursuit of the truth? What is Buddhism but 2500 years of observation as to the nature of mind?.

We accept it as normal that people who have never been on the land, who have no history or connection to the country, may legally secure the right to….

The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of….

The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations..

A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. ... Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind..

Only, in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god..

Language is an old-growth forest of the mind..

What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the w….