“They need enemies. I watch my back, but I have my careless moments. I don’t think they’re watching me every day, but I do think they check up on me every now and then…And if something political or controversial is coming along, they might dabble in my life for a while to see if I have any relationship to this stuff…I don’t know how scary it is, but it tells me how insane they are. I’m no economic threat, no political threat, no military threat, but it tells me something about their paranoia, how disconnected from reality they are, and their insecurity with what they perceive to be their own power…If they have to pay all this attention to me, and all I do is think and talk … it tells me more about them.” -On being perceived as a threat by the U.S. government.
“I wrote it back in ’81 and I’d always liked it and thought about using it as a song, but the right music never came along until now…There are certain songs, like Tina Smiled and After All These Years, that I don’t perform because it’s very difficult, but I may try and perform Wish You Were Here.” -Regarding Wish You Were Here, off his Blue Indians CD.
“They have a right to put me through this song and dance of a process, but they don’t have a legal basis to keep me out” – Issues Trudell anticipates at the Canadian border.
“I look at anger as healthy. It’s like sadness. There are certain feelings we’re given and there’s a reason we’re given them…I think anger is very necessary to our survival. If we understand anger I think we can use it as fuel for clarity and accomplishment. It doesn’t have to be a distorting experience.” -Trudell on anger.
“It is just another year. This is something man created. When you deal with the evolutionary process of the earth itself, the year 2000 was about a million years ago, you know what I’m saying?” – Trudell on millennium fever.
“It’s a white problem. We’re poor, we don’t have computers, we don’t have these services anyway. Most people on reservations are lucky if they have telephones. The only people I hear talking about it are non-Native people.” – Trudell on Y2K.~
SOURCE: The Toronto Sun.