We did not move to cities to die…. The quiet of the reservation, the side-of-the-highway towns, rural communities, that kind of silence just makes the sound of your brain on fire that much more pronounced.
-- Narrator / Prologue-Interlude (Prologue)

Importance: This quotation introduces two thematic ideas: that reservations are a trap that heightens systemic disadvantages, and that urban spaces are valid aspects of modern Native identity. All of this nonfiction information is delivered in the first-person plural voice of the Prologue and Interlude narrator.

We are the memories we don’t remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to...
-- Narrator / Prologue-Interlude (Prologue)