Mia > Recent Status Updates

“But roads are used to carrying symbolic weight: as one historian has noted, they are as much “expressions of ideology” as physical features. A road is never just a road.”

The chief irony of biological annihilation is this: We are both its cause and its solution.”

“species loneliness—estrangement from the rest of Creation.”

“when you share a city with wildlife you can’t help but grasp animal standpoints or ways of being”

small overpasses work in places like utah bc there is less traffic and noise pollution, but not in more populated areas where there is never any quiet

“Overpasses…are billboards that advertise the preservation of movement, reminding us that we share the land—even with very large carnivores, in our very largest cities.”

“we see the carcass on the shoulder, but never the doe who loses her fawn because a remote drilling operation disrupted her green-wave surfing”

“ungulate culture and human technology together forging a new pathway”

“the loss of migration transcends individual species. It is the endangerment of a biological process, the loss of life way nearly as ancient as movement itself.”

Whereas other ungulates stray widely, mule deer remain faithful to their inherited pathways. Deer migration isn’t merely a movement pattern but a form of culture, transmitted from doe to fawn like family lore. And when roads thwart their treks, the loss is as thorough as the erasure of a language.

i hate this lady i hate this lady i hate this lady

“They, who walked so proudly now, had not fashioned for themselves or their children so sure a foundation as was hers.”

“Around her she heard the saints’ voices, a steady, charged murmur, with now and again the name of Jesus rising above, sometimes like the swift rising of a bird into the air of a sunny day, sometimes like the slow rising of the mist from the swamp ground”

symbolism of food?

-dogs eating it earlier on in the book and then the food rotting
-dogs swarming and eating the food intended for arthur

“this Chesterfield, being mass-produced, was easier to draw through, and the straightness of its shaft was comforting in that its regularity suggested a modern world where order reigned supreme, each cigarette like the previous one, in a line extended back and back—soldiers in a column, advancing steadily and implacably forward, to bring civilization to the savage wilds.”

“as a boy, i had never understood how we had made it through winter like that, with so little, but we always had, farther back than anybody could remember, back to when Napi shaped the land.”

“one of the calves bawled loud and long and desperate, asking to feed, saying it was scared, and the napikwans all laughed, turned back to the fire… greased-shooters cost too much to waste on calves they can’t even get good robes from.”

“i’ll never understand the mind of the indian, who would give away that which he himself most direly needs.”

“amos short ribs tossed the bacon out for the dog, which snapped it up and swallowed without chewing, which i suppose is a thing i can identify with”

this man talks so much about food oh my god

“the savage mind is more rhetorically capable than i would have given it credit for.”

oh fuck off arthur

“i’ve heard our elders and many-faces men and even chiefs say that it’s the napikwans who are ruining the world, but napikwans are just what happens when we forget we’re pikuni. when we think a many-shots gun is more important than beaver medicine”