In the desert, deep inside the spiny center of the cactus, nests a bird no bigger than my finger. While the sharp thorns fend off animals that would eat the eggs, the parent birds come and go at will. And this was my mother's name, "living at the heart of the spiny cactus," Chiri, what others would call Hummingbird. The last time I saw her was on the way to Casas Grandes.

In Sonora is a river called Moctezuma, and a village there was our home, just before the Moctezuma meets the Yaqui River. My mother and her sister owned rancherias, and their husbands and sons raised corn and wheat and cotton and many good things to eat. The soil was good and the water from the river was sweet, the sweetest I ever tasted.

My name at that time was Shark's Tooth from the Sea, which means "something precious." The Opata used to trade good baskets to the Seri for shark's teeth to decorate their clothes and baskets, and when I was born, my mother's family named me after this rare and beautiful object. It meant that I was strong and fierce and wild and beautiful, all things that the Opata wanted in their baby girls. My name also held the promise of water, which made it even more precious.

The women wove baskets and ground corn and carried babies and sang songs. And the chiefs of peace would gather the people in the center place each evening and tell the stories of the place where we lived, of sacred mountains and rivers, of the miracles of Saint Francis, and the lives of good men. The story of the life of a good man, they used to say, is worth as much as a good rainstorm.

This is what we left. We left all of this behind when the fighting got too bad, when the crops were burned, when the villages were burned and the cattle stolen, when the young girls were kidnapped and the men were captured or shot. All of this we left behind when the fighting between the Mexican Army and the Yaqui got too bad, and the Mexicans couldn't tell the Opata from the Yaqui, and treated us just as bad as they treated the Yaqui, who had a vision of their own country, an Indian country separate from the rest of Mexico, where the Yaqui and the Opata and the Mayo and Pima and all the others could own their own land and live in peace.

This is what my people left when they picked up their feet and put on their bundles and their babies and walked north to Tucson and Nogales and the northern Opateria.

I did not know if I could do this. I did not know if I could pick up my feet, put on my sandals, and walk the long, long way, the singing way, north to the river people of the Santa Cruz. My mother and brother and sisters stood, bundles on their backs and their heads, and looked at me. If I stayed, here where the desert sang for me, where the trees grew and the birds lived and every rock and lizard was a companion to me, if I stayed, they told me, I would die. They will come for us again, and this time, they said, they might do more to me than before. The Spanish/Mexicans would kill me for being a Yaqui, or the Apache would kill me for not being one of them.

We had no choice. We had to pick up our feet and put on our sandals and walk. Away from our homes, our fields, away from our mountains and valleys, away from our rivers and sacred places, away, even, from our sky. We walked to where the Pima and Papago lived, where the Apache had fought and lost. We walked to where the Americans lived, and hoped to live in peace. We were not fighters, we were not horse people, although we loved our horses. We were river people, and just needed a little land and water for our milpas.

There was room here now, and Mexican and American ranchers who needed help, because the Apache had been killed or sent far away. Much of this land had once belonged to the Opata, had been where they grew corn and cotton and squash and beans, but because of the Apache and their appetite for blood, white and Indian alike, the Northern Opata had abandoned their rancherias and fled south to join their brothers in the mountains.

Now the Opata returned - no longer owners of their own rancherias, since they had no papers to prove such things, but as hired hands on the same land. All we had were our strong backs. And this was because the Mexican Army had become worse than the Apache, or at least not much better.

This is the story of my journey to Tucson, where I would find both happiness and sorrow. This is the story of my people, the Opata, who once numbered as many as the saguaro of the desert, and who once farmed many rancherias and had many villages, but are now just a few, and scattered far and wide from their home and the constellations that knew them.

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