Despite the arts through thousand of years, there are still too many who are not willing to change. I am very pessimistic when it comes to human behavior.

Silko's argument stems from her initial intent to become a lawyer and realizing that Native rights will never be solved within the very system that negates those rights. She turned to art instead. While many people don't even know that she is a Laguna novelist/essayist, her works are determined not only to record Native experience, but to keep Native traditions alive and growinl. She is quintessentially a storyteller.

I used to teach her works all the time in order to illustrate a unique method of creating literature. A side benefit was introducing students not only to a new way to write, but also to a culture about which the vast majority of them knew literally nothing.

And then there's this from Percy Bysshe Shelley in The Defence of Poetry: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

ETA that Shelley meant that art opens the mind in ways that other forms of expression are unable to equal. I htink that's why those who want to control freedom of expression are so eager to censor art.