It comes down to this. I believe in each and every Indian woman whose words and pictures lie between the pages of this book.Some hands are comfortable with a typewriter, with a pen. Some hands have only just begun to touch paper and pencil without fear.Our hands are strong. We make baskets, lift heavy machinery, bead earrings, soothe our lovers - female or male - hold our elders. We braid our hair.These hands fight back. We use our fists, our pens, our paints, our cameras. We drive the trucks to the demonstrations, we tie the sashes of our children, dancing for the first time in the circle of the drum. We weave the blankets. We keep us a culture.Our hands live and work in the present, while pulling on the past. It is impossible for us to not do both.- Beth Brant

Beth Brant is a Bay of Quinte Mohawk from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory in Ontario. She was born May 6, 1941. She is the editor of A Gathering of Spirit, the ground-breaking collection of writing and art by Native women. She is the author of Mohawk Trail, prose and poetry and Food Spirits, short fiction. Her work has appeared in numerous Native, feminist and lesbian anthologies and she has done readings, lectures and taught throughout North America. She has received an Ontario Arts Council Award, a Canada Council grant and is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowhip. Beth Brant is currently working on two books, Testimony from the Faithful, essays about land and spirit, and I'll Sing Till The Day I Die, oral histories of Tyendinega Elders. She divides her time between living in Michigan and in Canada. She is a mother and grandmother and lives with her partner of eighteen yeras, Denise Dorsz. She has been writing since the age of forty and considers it a gift for her community.

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