“And now I am sitting in the graveyard, staring at two headstones, and feeling good and bad at the same time. The way we do when our own lives continue to unfold, but the lives that gave us life and others that gave our lives meaning have ended.” DeathFamilyAcceptance Book:The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning Source: The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning
“To have deep roots in a place means having dead buried there. It is almost that literal, the dead forming your bond to the earth and to the others whose dead lie buried there. I always had that bond whether I knew it or not.” DeathFamilyRootsFamily HistoryBonds Book:The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning Source: The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning
“In the shop, breathing the scent of dusty grease and oil; in the old house, staring into the living room where Dad and Jake used to take naps together on the couch; in the sheep barn, remembering the joy implicit in so much baaing life; in every inch of the farm, I recalled my father’s presence.” MemoriesFamilyFathersFarm Life Book:The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning Source: The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning
“James hoped the newsletter would garner support from Bahana, or white people, to stop a town well that the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted to dig and a tower it wanted to erect to store the water. The Hotevilla elders were willing to lay down their lives in this battle. They’d done it before, preventing the BIA from bringing electricity to the village by lying down in front of bulldozers. If that well went in, James explained, people would waste water. Their spring would dry out- an unthinkable tragedy, as it would make it impossible for them to live there any longer. Could two cultures be any different? I now wondered. We were taking federal money to mine water and would do so until the unlikely day that same government made us stop. The Hopi had been trying to prevent the government from giving them a well in the first place.” WaterWildernessNatural ResourcesHopi Book:The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning Source: The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning