One thing I noticed too-- and I'll
be interested to see what the students have to say about some
of the pieces that they read in here.
I noticed that this book--
when I look at a group of pieces,
it seems to be one of those things that says, me, me, me.
It's all about me.
And it gets kind of overwhelming.
It just comes off that way, although a lot of them
are not me.
So I tried to figure out how to arrange them so it wouldn't
appear so much that way.
But there is one here that is definitely my story.
The ending of the title piece, it is my story.
It is my experience and my sisters.
And then this one is definitely not only my story, but also
other O'odham people.
It is their story as well.
This one, though, has specific references that I went through
in trying to get a passport.
And I've told the other part of this story
many times, and so some of you are familiar with it,
about O'odham people and how our land extends,
of course, into what is now the country of Mexico--
northern Sonora, Mexico.
And so my family was one of those families that
was, as we say, on that side.
And so when we came into--
when our parents came into the US,
they settled on the edges of the reservation,
and were never part--
or never lived on the reservation,
basically because that's not where we're from.
And you just can't walk on there and say, here I am.
So we were on the edges, on the boundaries,
and so were not counted as part of the O'odham census
until fairly recently.
But so many of us have little documentation,
not only because we were not official members
of the tribe in that sense, but also because of where we lived
and how we live.
And in many instances, many from my generation and older,
we were born at home.
And O'odham people just were-- you were just born,
and there you were.
And you didn't have to write anything down to say,
she was born, or he was born.
So there was nothing there.
You just began existing.
But later on, it catches up to you.
Somebody want some kind of documentation saying,
you're here.
So that's what this one's about.
And so that's why I say, this is my story, but also
the story of many O'odham people who fall in this category,
and there's quite a few.
And not just O'odham as well, but Yaqui people here
in the Tucson area or Arizona.
So anyway, I want to share this story of when--
part of it is when I actually went downtown and talked
to this lady behind this glass wall,
and she kept asking me questions through the glass wall.
And so part of that dialogue is actually in here.
That dialogue stuck with me, and I ended up
writing it almost word for word sometime later.
And this is one that's called "Birth Witness."
"My mother gave birth to me in an old wooden row
house in the cotton fields.
She remembers it was windy, around 1:00 in the afternoon.
The tin roof rattled.
A piece had lifted from the wooden frame.
It quivered and flapped as she gave birth.
She knew it was March, a windy afternoon in the cotton
fields of Arizona.
She also used to say that I was baptized standing up.
'It doesn't count,' the woman behind the glass window tells
me, 'if you are not baptized the same year you were born.
The baptismal record cannot be used to verify your birth.
You need affidavits,' she said.
'Your older siblings, you have some, don't you?
They have to be old enough to have a memory of your birth.
Can they vouch for you?'
Who was there for my birth?
Who was there with my mother?
Was it my big sister?
Would my mother had let a teenager
watch her giving birth?
Was it my father?
I can imagine my father assisting her
with her babies, my aunts.
Who was there when I breathed my first breath,
took in those dried particles from the cotton fields?
Who knew then I would need witnesses of my birth?
The stars were there in the sky.
The wind was there.
The Sun was there.
The pollen of spring was floating,
and sensed me being born.
They are silent witnesses.
They do not know of affidavits.
They simply know.
'You need records,' she said.
'Are there doctors' receipts from when you were a baby?
Didn't your parents have a family bible--
you know, where births are recorded?
Were there letters, announcements of your birth?'
I don't bother to explain my parents are
illiterate in the English language.
What I really want to tell her is,
they speak a language much too civil for writing.
It's a language useful for pulling memory
from the depths of the Earth.
It is useful for praying with the Earth and sky.
It is useful for singing songs that pull down the clouds.
It is useful for calling rain.
It is useful for speeches and incantations
that pull sickness from the minds and bodies of believers.
It is a language too civil for writing.
It is too civil for writing minor things like my birth.
This is what I want to tell her.
But I don't.
Instead, I take the form she hands me,
and I begin to account for myself."
Oh.