Living the Dream by Annie Dalton

respectful. To understand why our people act and think like they do, you need to know what they’ve been through over the centuries.”
    Cody flinched as if she was waiting for the dentist’s drill. “Like what?”
    “I’m seventy-eight,” Aunt Bonita told her. “I don’t have enough years left on this Earth to tell you all the things white people did to us. I’ll just tell you about the Long Walk.”
    “OK,” Cody said reluctantly. I think she felt that her aunt was accusing her personally.
    Aunt Bonita was staring off into the distance. Her expression was utterly bleak. “In 1864, for reasons too complicated to go into now, the US government decided to move the Navajo people off their ancestral land, the home where we had lived in peace and harmony for centuries. They sent us to a place called Basque Redondo, three hundred miles away in Mexico.”
    “Three hundred miles isn’t so far,” Cody said.
    “It’s a long way on foot,” Aunt Evalina said quietly. “If you were a half-starved little five-year-old, or old and frail, or heavily pregnant, or sick with fever.”
    “The journey took eighteen days.” Aunt Bonita seemed to be watching the ordeal unspooling in her head. “Two hundred Navajo died on the way. We lived in exile for many years. Thousands died from starvation or from the white man’s many diseases, or maybe just because our hearts were broken. The Navajo people almost died out.”
    Aunt Bonita turned to Cody with a grim smile. “Then one day the government agreed to let the tattered remains of our tribe return home. They didn’t give back all our land, just the poorest, driest, most hard-scrabble part. Only now they had a new name for it. They called it ‘the Indian Reservation’. They herded us on to it like prisoners, and told us we weren’t allowed to leave.”
    “Navajo people didn’t win the right to travel outside the reservation till 1924!” Aunt Jeannie chipped in.
    Cody looked as if her head was spinning. “I don’t get it,” she said, bewildered. “The land belonged to you.”
    “You got that the wrong way round, honey,” Aunt Evalina corrected. “That’s how white people think. This land doesn’t belong to us. We belong to the land. When we go away, it suffers. When we return, it welcomes us like our mother.”
    “Look out of the window, Cody,” Aunt Jeannie said softly. “Dinetah is welcoming you now.”
    Maybe it was Aunt Jeannie’s absolute belief that what she was saying was true, but I suddenly seemed able to see this barren landscape as the aunts saw it. This empty desert was alive! The waves of heat rising off the road, the cries of birds, the desert wind bending back thousands of feathery wild grasses; everything sang, Welcome home !
    We drove on the dusty back roads for hours. I was just starting to think we’d never get there when the aunts raised a loud cheer as a sign loomed up at the side of the road.
    YOU ARE ENTERING NAVAJOLAND - KEEP OUT!
    The aunts started chatting and laughing, pointing out landmarks to Cody. They hung out of the windows, sniffing the dry, pine-scented air like wild ponies. Relief shone from their faces. I realised some of their sniping had been pure tension. Away from the reservation, they’d been fishes out of water. Now they were home.
    The sun was almost setting as Aunt Jeannie turned off the main road and we went bumping and bouncing down a rutted dirt track. On one side was a shallow creek reflecting the fading pinks and golds; on the other a canyon wall rose up like a fortress. Unfamiliar birds called from perches too high to see. An owl, silent as a cloud, swooped across the truck, making Cody jump. We passed another sign: GHOST CANYON.
    Ghost Canyon was basically a stretched-out string of scattered dwellings. Some were just ramshackle trailers apparently parked at random. Some were those wooden houses that arrive all in one piece on the back of a truck. Almost all these homes had additional roundish, earth-coloured