Scott Momaday:  As I look back on it, because I was very frequently among Indians who were not of my tribe, and we couldn’t converse, we didn’t have the same language. But I always had a sense of being one of them because I’m Indian. They had the same sense of me. We got along well because we were all Indians together. That’s something that I think is of importance, and something that happened in my lifetime. When I was little, people didn’t think of themselves as Indians. They thought of themselves as Kiowas, or Comanches, or Crees, or whatever. But in the last 50 years or so, the tribal distinctions have broken down. But the sense of Indianness has remained as strong as ever, and maybe it has become stronger. And I can’t account for that except to say that the outside world has made incursions, and the Indians have left the reservation, and so there’s been a much greater kind of communication back and forth. And now we have things like pow-wows, which are extremely important in bringing young people — especially — together from every kind of different tribe and language. And they trade words, and dance steps, and music, and so on. And so, they bond and become a people, instead of the members of a lot of different tribes, and I think that’s healthy.