In 1968, when I took a job as school librarian on what was then referred to as the Papago Reservation, my parents were mystified. They were both born and raised in South Dakota. With birthdays in 1914 and 1916 they started their lives at a time when the so-called Indian Wars were a whole lot closer at hand than they were for someone like me who was born in the forties.

My mother’s older sister, a nurse, spent years working at the Sioux Sanitarium in Rapid City. I remember her telling me once that when “those kids come in, I can’t wait to cut off their hair.” At the time she said that, I was already working on the reservation, and I was appalled. By then, I understood that cutting off their hair was as much a way of “un-Indianing” her patients as was the common boarding-school practice of forbidding students to speak their native tongues.

One of the students who worked as an assistant in the library at Sells was a girl named Judy Allen. Her dad was an Anglo who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Her mother was Sioux. Like me, Judy had been born in South Dakota and had spent time going to school in Rapid City, a place where one of my cousins had spent years being the star of a locally produced country/western music show. I thought South Dakota would be something that Judy and I shared in common, but whenever the subject came up, I could tell there was some kind of disconnect. Then I learned that while Judy was attending school in Rapid, her cousins wouldn’t speak to her because they didn’t want anyone to know that they had a cousin who was half Sioux.

Later that year, Life Magazine did a whole issue on Native Americans, featuring photos from all over the country. One of those photos was of a tumble-down, crappy looking building in a town on the Rosebud, the same town where Judy had been born. The hand-painted sign next to the ramshackle door said: NO DOGS OR INDIANS ALLOWED INSIDE.

That’s what South Dakota meant to Judy Allen!

While my husband taught on the reservation, we lived in a house off the reservation which was located at the end of a two-mile long dirt road. We didn’t have a phone, but as soon as someone turned off the highway, the dogs would start barking, giving us approximately ten minutes of warning before the arrival of unexpected company. One particular Sunday my folks came by for lunch. We were about to sit down to eat, when the dogs began barking their in-coming guest warning. By the time the new guests showed up, we had managed to put together enough food for everybody.

One of those guests happened to be a thirty-something guy named Fat Crack. (Sound familiar? It should. I borrowed that name and used it for one of the characters in my Walker Family books.) The real Fat Crack was hilariously funny and could have been a stand-up comedian. All through the meal, he kept my father in stitches. After the Indians left (Yes, we called them Indians back then!) my father turned to me and said, “Why, they’re really intelligent, aren’t they!” Duh!

But I was shocked enough by his comment that, the next day at school, I reported it to Pauline, my aide in the library. “Oh, Judy,” she said, “you should hear what old Indians say about Anglos.” So there you are. Prejudice works both ways.

One weekend I took one of my Tohono O’odham friends, Rita Pablo, to visit Bisbee. Rita Pablo, a worker in the cafeteria at Topawa Elementary, was also a skilled basketmaker. Does that sound a bit like Davy’s nanny in Hour of the Hunter? Yup, you’ve got me there. The fictional character of Rita Antone was patterned after Rita Pablo.

Tohono baskets are woven using a combination of yucca and bear grass. The yucca has to be picked in the late spring before the summer rains come. Since both grow abundantly on the hills around Bisbee, I took Rita there to collect some, and when Rita and I went out to do so, my mother, Evie, came along. One of the most memorable moments of my life came as I watched those two women, both of a certain age, but one a red-faced Scandinavian and the other a brown-faced Tohono O’odham—gathering cactus together under a hot Arizona sun. Seeing them working together made me feel as though I’d brought a tiny bit of peace and harmony to the world, and by the way, later when Rita sent my mother one of her baskets, Evie treasured it.

My five years on the reservation taught me many lifetime lessons, and I left there a far different person than I’d been when I first arrived. I learned things about real poverty and injustice that I’d never encountered before. I formed lasting friendships with the people I met there, and was struck by their kindness and generosity. I was also captivated by the wisdom to be found in the Desert People’s legends and stories.

By the way, that’s what the words Tohono O’odham mean—The Desert People. The reservation was still called the Papago when I worked there. Years after I left, they took back their traditional name and the Papago is now the Tohono O’odham Nation.

When I set out to write the Walker Family books, I wanted to communicate something of what I’d learned to some random little old lady from upstate New York who would never visit Arizona much less travel to the reservation. And that’s exactly why we’re talking about this week’s mailbag.

The first email in question arrived this week from a fan in Johannesburg, South Africa, who said that Hour of the Hunter was “not only a suspense thriller, but a cultural tour de force of American Indian culture and folk tales.” Whoa! That one felt good!

Another came from a man who lives in Wyoming, New York. (Who even knew that there was a Wyoming, New York?) He had just read Blessing of the Lost Girls, and although he almost never reads Afterwords’ or even After Afterwords, this time he’d made an exception and read both. He told me that when he’d read the book he had skipped over the legends the first time through, but at that point he went back and read them all and really enjoyed them.

Thirty years after the fact, email comments from those two individuals let me know that, in writing the Walker Family books, I had succeeded in accomplishing exactly what I set out to do. I made the Tohono O’odham Nation come alive for people who will never go there in person.

And that, boys and girls, is what the job of writing is all about.