Walking up here, I kept thinking about what they've done to this forest. Sometimes at night it seems like I can hear the earth crying.
In a conversation with Cole Robert's passion for nature, and he seems to be strangely passionate about the Native American past. He comments about the campus being built on a burial site and how the people are destroying the forest which to him seems to be one living tree. Robert is a strange and mysterious character as a whole and this understated moment of connection with nature serves as a foreshadowing of the bigger picture in the novel.
That's what the whole f*** world wants, isn't it Robert? To see Indians as noble and mystical and, most important of all, impotent and doomed?
In his conversation with Robert, Cole expresses his frustration on how the world sees Native American people; how the white people are trying to find justification for history, find a way to justify their appropriation of the Native American culture. This anger that Cole is showing in these sentences comes from the dehumanization as a result of making a different culture, Native American culture, mystical, interesting, for a lack of a better word exotic, while excluding the humaneness, the human factor from that narrative.
Perhaps the man who frightened you today wants to make you see yourself only through his eyes, so that you can only imagine yourself from outside the window looking in.
Abby gets a visit from the man painted black and white, just like her father. She calls Onatima, a woman she calls grandmother, for help. Onatima is a character that is a definition of wisdom. She advises the young girl to not let the man frighten her to the point of losing herself. She advises her to not let herself be convinced to look at herself from someone else's eyes, to not let someone else's perception of her become her own, to not allow herself to start living someone else's life but her own. Despite it being a message for the young girl and for the Native American existence, it is a message that can be universally applied.
