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that my grandpa Bud also taught Mom the fox-trot and some waltzes, and the Charleston, and that he would partner her in performances of these at big barn dances. “Can you see my dad doing the Charleston?” Mom asks. “Navajo men didn’t usually display that type of behavior. I believe he was way ahead of his time.”
    It was refreshing to learn that these relatives of mine, who always looked so distant and somber in all our family photographs, had actually had a little fun every now and then. And I was startled by how happy and fresh and innocent Mom’s early childhood sounded. She described weeks spent in the wilderness herding sheep and goats, and long meandering misadventures on horseback—in fact, every day seemed to be taken by her as an opportunity for low-grade mischief and spontaneous outdoor adventure.
    By the time Mom started high school, however, shadows started to fall across the jolly playing field of her youth. As a teenager during the last part of the boarding school era for Native Americans, when a federal policy of “assimilation” made it mandatory for Indian children to attend governmentrun schools that would impose Western traditions and “turn Indians into Americans,” Mom had to travel two hours to Gallup, New Mexico, where she lived in a high school dormitory that housed children from all over the reservation. During the summers she would return to her family, and to a busy schedule of performing at powwows and rodeos—but the back-and-forth was clearly confusing to her, and her descriptions of life on the reservation grew less and less euphoric. Her parents, she explains, had begun binge-drinking. “When their checks came in the first of the month they could be gone a couple of days or for a week at a time. I did not enjoy going home for holidays, nor summer vacations…”
    By this time my vivacious but completely innocent mother had begun to attract suitors, and in her amusing descriptions of each she never fails to comment on his ability to dance. Most didn’t make the grade, but there was one tall, blond, and blue-eyed young man named Jack—a highway construction worker from Colorado—who seemed to have come close. Jack would show up at my grandparents’ farm and literally carry Mom out of the house to the car, and then drive her to the middle of the reservation where they would turn up the car radio and dance the night away under the desert moon. “Boy, could Jack dance!” my mother comments. Jack loved watching my mother perform the hoop dance, and when she turned sixteen he offered my grandparents “five beautiful horses” for my mother’s hand in marriage. “Of course my dad said no, because I was going to go to college,” my mother writes.
    That was always the plan, for my mother to go to college, and by the time she graduated from high school my mother had a definite idea of where she wanted to go. “I took the scholarship that took me farthest away from home,” she says. In the summer of 1961, at age seventeen, she caught a train to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to attend nursing school. The trip to Philadelphia was the first train ride of her life and proved to be a miserable journey—she was sickened by all the cigarette smoke around her and bewildered when she had to change trains in Chicago. When she arrived in Philadelphia, she sat around the station for a long time, unsure of what to do next. When she finally called the school, whoever answered gave her the address and told her to catch a taxi. “I learned real fast that you do for yourself,” Mom concludes.
    This last phrase of Mom’s haunted me after I read it. It had been under different circumstances, and to a very different place, but I too had decided at a young age to move far away from my home in the Arizona desert. And I too had learned real fast that you do for yourself. I thought of the feral and