What I had to learn

The subjects themselves weren't young, which is to say they weren't kids. They were adults, and, often as not, they were either at or approaching senior citizenship. They were grandparents because the focus of the interviews—and the stories I eventually wrote—was history, how the people, the Dine' and Zuni, had come to be part of the mission family of Rehoboth, a mission endeavor of the Christian Reformed Church for more than a century.

It didn't take me long to realize how little I knew, because the story I heard retold, time after time, began with something called "the Long Walk," the Navajo's own Trail of Tears.

In a story repeated for centuries after Plymouth Rock, white folks streamed into Native lands creating friction and hostility because co-existence, it seemed, was not a possibility. If there was to be peace, white people determined it would come at the expense of the indigenous, wherever they were, Massachusetts to California.