Victoria Safford, in the Nation (Sept. 2004):

In his book On the Rez, Ian Frazier tells a story about South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation. In the fall of 1988 the Pine Ridge girls' basketball team played an away game in Lead, South Dakota. It was one of those times when the host gym was dense with anti-Indian hostility. Lead fans waved food stamps, yelling fake Indian war cries and epithets like "squaw" and "gut-eater." Usually, the Pine Ridge girls made their entrances according to height, led by the tallest seniors. When they hesitated to face the hostile crowd, a 14-year-old freshman named SuAnne offered to go first. She surprised her teammates and silenced the crowd by performing the Lakota shawl dance--"graceful and modest and show-offy all at the same time," in Frazier's words--and then singing in Lakota. SuAnne managed to reverse the crowd's hostility--until they even cheered and applauded. "Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game."

Here's another story of daring, of the meeting of our passion and the world's great hunger for justice: Thirty years ago, to march in the streets of any city, as a gay man or a lesbian, openly, took wild courage, outrageous imagination. But there was more. Those who were there tell us that once you have glimpsed the world as it might be, as it ought to be, as it's going to be (however that vision appears to you), it is impossible to live anymore compliant and complacent in the world as it is.

To march was a dangerous risk. But not to was a risk of another kind--of living half-dead, with no name, unremembered, in the dark, surviving on scraps and the pious ultimatums of the hate-filled present moment. Why not risk all that, and walk out into the sun in the summer, in the world as it ought to be, thereby bringing it to bear? Why not march and carry on--act out, act up--as if your life depended on it?

I am interested in what Seamus Heaney calls the meeting point of hope and history, where what has happened is met by what we make of it. I am interested in hope on this side of the grave--for me there is no other kind--and in that tidal wave of justice that could rise up if only we would let it....