Imagery:
"Don't get me wrong - we hold no grudge against Lincoln, Jefferson or Washington. They signed a few good treaties with us and it wasn't their fault that they weren't kept. What we object to is the white man's arrogance and self-love, his disregard for nature which makes him desecrate one of our holy mountains with these oversized pale faces. It's symbolic, too, that this 'Shrine of Democracy,' these four faces, are up to their chins in one tremendous pile or rubble, a million tons of jagged, blasted, dynamited stone reaching all the way down to the visitors' center. If you look up the mountain, the way most tourists do, you see these four heads rising out of something like a gigantic, abandoned mine dump. But nobody seems to notice that." (p. 81)
"You have made it hard for us to experience nature in the good way by being part of it. Even here we are conscious that somewhere out in those hills there are missile silos and radar stations. White men always pick the few unspoiled, beautiful, awesome spots for the sites of these abominations. You have raped and violated these lands, always saying, 'Gimme, gimme, gimme,' and never giving anything back. You have taken two hundred thousand acres of our Pine Ridge reservation and made them into a bombing range. This land is so beautiful and strange that now some of you want to make it into a national park. The only use you have made of this land since you took it from us was to blow it up. You have not only despoiled the earth, the rocks, the minerals, all of which you call "dead" but which are very much alive; you have even changed the animals, which are part of us, part of the Great Spirit, changed them in a horrible way, so no one can recognize them. There is power in a buffalo - spiritual, magic power - but there is no power in an Angus, in a Hereford." (p. 109)
Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions