" We don't need cameras here; we have enough trouble controlling our eyes! I waste my time looking and not seeing. If a camera helped us to
see, we would be better off-but it would not be us, seeing. A camera distracts you. It makes you less of a person. Words are even worse; they make birds Ay away, and they make us dizzy with noise. Who can pay attention to the world while someone chatters? The books of the Anglos are as noisy as their planes overhead. My mother says that the books fill up our head with words, and take over our eyes, too. We end up seeing what the words told us about. We stop seeing; the noise of the words takes over. I have a cousin who is a New Hopi; he went to a BIA school, and lived with the Anglos in Albuquerque. He came back to us and said that he doesn't look at the mesa anymore. He doesn't watch the clouds, see them meeting, leaving each other, doing a dance for us. He thinks about them; he talks to himself about them. He wishes his head could be quiet, the way it used to be. Stick with the Anglos, and you have a noisy head! "

― Robert Coles , Doing Documentary Work