Talking talking inside the head

"As a child of ten, I once sat on a hillside on the reservation with my father and his mother as they looked down into the town in the valley floor. ... My grandmother said (translated from Okanagan), 'The people down there are dangerous, they are all insane.' My father agreed, commenting, 'It's because they are wild and scatter anywhere.' I remember looking down into the town and being afraid. ... The words my grandmother and my father used to describe the newcomers in the valley offer a way into the perspective I wish to share with you. ...
If I were to interpret/transliterate the Okanagan meaning of my grandmother's words, it might be this: 'The ones below who are not of us [as place], may be a chaotic threat in action; they are all self-absorbed [arguing] inside each of their heads.' My father's words might be something like this: 'Their actions have a source, they have displacement panic, they have been pulled apart from themselves as family [generational sense] and place [as land/us/survival].'*


* Jeanette Armstrong, "Keepers of the Earth," in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, T. Roszak, M. Gomes & A. Kanner (Eds.), San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995, pp. 316-324.