I have always felt safer alone in the hills than I feel when I am around people. Humans are the most dangerous of all animals, that’s what my mother said. She was fearless with snakes and picked up rattlesnakes with ease. Most of my life I have lived in small settlements or I have lived outside of town, as I do now, in the hills outside of Tucson, where the nearest house is a quarter mile away. I still trust the land—the rocks, the shrubs, the cactus, the rattlesnakes, and mountain lions—far more than I trust human beings. I never feel lonely when I walk alone in the hills: I am surrounded with living beings, with these sandstone ridges and lava rock hills full of life. Luckily I enjoy danger, so I find human beings irresistible; humans are natural forces, just like flash floods or blizzards.

         I was only five or six years old when my father was elected tribal treasurer. During his term, the Pueblo of Laguna filed a big lawsuit against the state of New Mexico for six million acres of land the state wrongfully took. The land had been granted by the king of Spain to the Pueblo hundreds of years before the United States even existed, let alone the state of New Mexico. The lawyer hired by Pueblo of Laguna and the expert witnesses, archaeologists, used to meet at our house to prepare to testify in court.

         What made the strongest impression on me, though, were the old folks who also were expert witnesses. For months the old folks and Aunt Susie met twice a week after supper at our house to go over the testimony. May of them were so aged they could hardly get around; Aunt Susie seemed spry compared to them. She interpreted English for the old folks because she knew them very well; in her own studies of Laguna history she had talked with them many times. Now she helped them prepare their testimony, that from time immemorial the Kawakemeh, the people of the Pueblo of Laguna, had been sustained from hunting and planting on this land stolen by the state of New Mexico. It was explained to me that the old folks testified with stories—stories of childhood outings with adults to gather pinons or to haul wood, stories they had heard as children. The old folks were going up against the state of New Mexico with only the stories.

         . . . .

         One of the advantages that we Pueblos have enjoyed is that we have always been able to stay with the land. Our stories cannot be separated from their geographical locations, from actual physical places on the land. We were not relocated like so many Native American groups who were torn away from their ancestral land. And our stories are so much a part of these places that it is almost impossible for future generations to lose them—there is a story connected with every pace, every object in the landscape.

         Dennis Brutus has talked about the “yet unborn” as well as “those from the past,” and how we are still all in this place, and language—the story-telling—is our way of passing through or being with them, of being together again. When Aunt Susie told her stories, she would tell a younger child to go open the door so that our esteemed predecessors might bring their gifts to us. “They are out there,” Aunt Susie would say. “Let them come in. They’re here, they’re here with us within the stories.”