Drawing on the Difuentes Available to Purchase

It’s 1 a.m. My homegirl and I are working on tribal research after our kids are asleep. We are exhausted but driven by curiosity knitted from our connection to the confluence of two great rivers via our O’odham and Yo’emem ancestors. She’s found another elder and is thinking through questions for an oral history interview. The next night, we stay up again. The elder’s interview released a flood of tears and triggers—the bitter taste after the contamination of sacred rivers, words he remembers in native language despite being beaten in school for speaking it, and how my great-great aunt Carolina was the traditional midwife who pulled him into this world. That shocks me, but the deeper we get into this work, the tighter the weave revealed on our ancestral basket of relations. We push beyond objectivity toward understanding our people and felt experiences. Our families read and critique our work,...