Home of the Heart

A Tohono O'odham Woman Teaches a Thoroughly Modern Writer an Ancient Truth “Where is your home?” my friend asked as we drove west with the morning. We were heading across the Sonoran Desert to the capital of the Tohono O'odham reservation in Sells. The Tohono O'odham, the Desert People, number about 24,000. Their reservation, their traditional homeland, is the size of the state of Connecticut.

When we crossed the invisible line between the rural outskirts of Tucson and the reservation, my friend, an O'odham, sighed deeply. “We are on the People's land,” she said. “I always feel better.” “No matter where we go, we come home to be buried,” she told me, her eyes on the straight-as-a-ruler road. “We always come home.” Then she asked me that question.

I had to think about that one. “Going way back, I suppose Ireland, Scotland, France,” I said with a shrug, but with the words came the reality. I didn't have her kind of homeland. Still, I wasn't short of a burial plan. I told her I wanted to be cremated, my ashes flung into the wind. She looked at me in shock and, I think, sadness. I had no home, not even in death.

The land of the O'odham people runs west from Tucson to the Gulf of California and south to the border with Mexico. “There are some places out there where you think you can see the curvature of the Earth,” as one friend said of his experience on this great patch of desert. And yes, it can seem desolate, achingly empty, breathtakingly silent.

“We are quiet people,” my O'odham friend tells me. She and her people told me about themselves during the communications seminars I led on the reservation. The seminars were based on courses I've taught at Pima Community College in Tucson. With the money now flowing in from the casinos, with new investments being made, the O'odham must deal more and more with the world of corporations, small businesses and the media. Seminar participants were interested in how communication works in the business world outside the reservation.

They asked me questions about the Anglos, the not-so-quiet people. Sitting with their arms folded across their chests, their eyes often averted, they asked about our right-in-their faces ways. They wondered about how we use our eyes and our mouths, about our demanding answers to questions that they feel should require long, silent contemplation. They asked me to explain these ways of the people they call Mi:lgan.

Well, we do use our eyes differently. We tend to stare, widen our eyes and forever try to catch theirs. They look away, down, off, guarding their privacy and ours. We invade with our eyes; they retreat with theirs.

We assault with our questions. “Why do you ask how do you feel?” one seminar participant demanded. “Why do you do that?” I had no answer. Such a question seemed normal to me.“We want to think,” the woman went on. “Why do you want an answer right away?” She was angry. Such a demand for an immediate response was too personal, delving again into a private realm.

For weeks, I thought about that reality, the way my culture snaps out the “What do you think? How does that sound? What are you going to do?” questioning that peppers our every interaction.

“We really don't want an answer,” I explain at the next seminar. “We just want some kind of assurance that we've been heard. So, just say anything, like, 'Yeah, that's interesting. I'll get back to you.' Just let us know we've been heard.” My culture apparently looks for constant assurance that we exist. O'odham need no such assurance. They exist, have always existed, will exist as part of this land forever while one out of three new settlers in Arizona will move on to some other temporary home. Like me, many won't even stay put at death, happy to let their ashes blow higgledy-piggledy across the earth and sea.

“You taught us things, brought us things,” my friend said of her people's seemingly benign acceptance of the Anglo intrusion into their desert world.

We brought them a dependable source of food, cattle, fruit and grains. But we certainly didn't have to teach them farming. They had that one down since ancient times and could have taught us a few things about irrigating a desert. What we added to their diet and their movement away from the natural foods of the Sonoran Desert led them down the path of diabetes. They have one of the highest rates for any group in the world. We provide insulin; they have their own ways.

One O'odham acquaintance heard I had been troubled and ailing since the death of my aunt. He came to me unannounced while I was signing books at the gift shop at Mission San Xavier del Bac on the reservation southwest of Tucson. He placed his hand on mine, hard. He looked at me and then away and began a healing. The crowd of tourists, pilgrims, artists, historians, parted around my little desk, moving away, back, as he moved his hands in the air over my head, shoulder, arms. "Don't think about it so much," he whispered as he continued his movements. "Am I better?" I asked. Oh, will I never learn? I had asked that direct I-want-ananswer, a change, a response-right-now question. He smiled at my foolishness. "I don't know, I haven't looked at you," he said, looking right at me. We needed more time, I and my question and my healing and my culture, O'odham time. As my friend and I drove across the People's land, I believed I knew why some native people of this continent just watched as we Anglos came tromping into their territory. I believed I knew why they let us come on with little resistance. They must have thought we would go back to our homeland someday, in the O'odham way. Do they still wait? H Kathleen Walker of Tucson has spent much of her writing career driving the highways and telling the stories of people of southern Arizona. Her book, San Xavier-The Spirit Endures, was published by Arizona Highways.

Joseph Daniel Fiedler, nom de guerre "Scaryjoey," was born and raised in western Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in numerous national and international publications.