Lani Walker—Fat Crack Ortiz

Lani Walker and Fat Crack Ortiz share a close godfather-goddaughter bond that becomes a relationship of practical care and spiritual guidance. When Lani faces the consequences of killing Mitch Johnson in self-defense, Fat Crack stays beside her through a sixteen-day purification rite, helping her understand the act and her life afterward. Their closeness also makes his later illness personal to her: she fears his death not as an abstract possibility, but as the loss of a beloved guide.

A Bond of Family and Trust

Lani was a Tohono O’odham child adopted as a toddler by Diana Ladd and Brandon Walker. Fat Crack and his wife, Wanda Ortiz, became her godparents, and Fat Crack and Lani were especially close. Their connection is presented as an established family bond, not a relationship formed only when she needs help. That trust allows him to guide her through painful experiences with an authority that is also intimate: he is a respected medicine man, but also someone she loves and can confide in.

At the University of North Dakota, Lani speaks to her friend Leah Donner about both her own cultural and spiritual inheritance and her worry about Fat Crack’s deteriorating health. She wears a charm and has woven a medicine basket modeled as closely as she can on Nana Dahd’s original. She also tells Leah that Fat Crack is very sick and that she needs to go home to be with him. Her decision to return to Tucson rather than keep a plan to volunteer with Doctors Without Borders after graduation shows the force of that attachment. Leah questions why Lani should give up their plan for a godfather who is not her blood relative; Lani’s choice makes clear that kinship, for her, is not limited to biological ties.

Care Through the Purification

Fat Crack’s guidance is most fully expressed after Lani kills Mitch Johnson while defending herself. When Brandon reaches Ioligam, he expects to take his daughter home, but Fat Crack blocks him. He explains that Lani must remain apart, fast, avoid salted food, and pray for sixteen days. Brandon objects to the conditions she will face, including the heat and cold, but Fat Crack promises to look after her. He frames that responsibility as part of his work as a chief medicine man toward another medicine man. His intervention places Lani’s spiritual and cultural recovery ahead of the immediate wish to bring her home, while assuring her father that she will not be abandoned.

During the rite, Fat Crack visits Lani every day. He brings a soothing salve and the salt-free evening meal required by the ceremony. She uses the salve, though the two do not discuss the scar she keeps secret from others. Their conversations cover many things, and the care he provides is both material and attentive: he sustains the discipline of the rite while remaining a familiar presence during her solitude.

On the final night, he brings the fringed buckskin medicine pouch entrusted to him years earlier by S’ab Neid Pi Has, also known as Looks at Nothing. After sharing the evening meal, Fat Crack draws a circle around them, takes wild tobacco from the pouch, and lights it with Looks at Nothing’s old Zippo lighter. Lani smokes the traditional peace smoke for the first time. The scene makes their relationship a passage between generations of medicine knowledge: Fat Crack shares an inherited object and practice with his goddaughter at a moment when she is trying to understand what her own survival and future mean.

Guidance About Identity and Purpose

Lani questions why the purification is necessary and why she has had to spend so much time alone. Fat Crack turns the question toward what she has done with that time. She explains that she made a medicine basket of her own and gave Nana Dahd’s basket to Davy Ladd, who wanted it. He treats this work as evidence that the period has not been empty or wasted. The basket is more than a possession in their exchange: it shows Lani making something for herself while also passing along an inherited object.

Fat Crack explains that taking a human life remains a terrible experience for Lani and her soul even though the killing was justified as self-defense. He urges her to come to terms with why it happened and to consider I’itoi’s purpose in her survival and Mitch Johnson’s death. When he asks who she is, her first answer is her name, Lani Walker; he presses her to remember the other name Nana Dahd gave her. His instruction does not erase the event or reduce it to a simple moral judgment. Instead, it makes the rite a process of facing the act, locating it within a spiritual understanding, and recognizing a larger identity.

Fat Crack also tells Lani that he has performed the duajida for her, a nighttime divination ceremony. Its repeated message is that she will be two things at once: Kulani O’oks, a medicine woman, and a doctor. The prediction joins the traditions she is learning to her medical studies. He presents it not as a new possibility invented for her alone, but as a message consistent with what Rita Antone had told him earlier.

Illness and the Prospect of Loss

The relationship’s emotional stakes become unmistakable when Fat Crack is diagnosed with diabetes. He declines care from Indian Health Service physicians, objecting to the prospect of being subjected to repeated medical procedures, and instead manages the condition through diet, exercise, and a regimen combining Christian Science with Native American healing. Lani, home for Christmas from her pre-medical studies, is distressed that he refuses a doctor’s care. Her fear is sharpened by her own medical aspirations: she believes treatment matters, but she cannot make him accept it.

Brandon counsels her that Fat Crack must deal with his illness in his own way. Lani’s tearful response is that he will die and leave them, though he does not have to. The exchange reveals the limits of her ability to repay his care. She can choose to return home, worry, and urge him toward medical help, but she cannot decide how he will confront illness. Their bond therefore carries both mutual closeness and a painful asymmetry: Fat Crack has guided and cared for her, while his refusal of treatment leaves her facing the prospect of losing him without being able to control the outcome.

Significance of the Relationship

Fat Crack’s role in Lani’s life joins affection to responsibility. He protects the conditions of her purification when her father wants to take her home, attends to her daily needs, shares a ceremony and inherited medicine pouch, and offers a spiritual account of the life she must continue after killing Mitch Johnson. His care does not make her choices for her; it helps her interpret them and sustain a future that can include both medicine and formal medical practice.

Lani’s decision to leave her post-graduation plan and return home when Fat Crack is ill echoes the care he gave her during the rite. Across these circumstances, their godparenthood becomes a form of chosen family grounded in presence: she wants to be there for him as he was there for her. The bond also connects personal attachment to the continuity of Tohono O’odham healing knowledge, carried through instruction, ritual, objects, and the possibility that Lani will become a medicine woman without abandoning her goal of becoming a doctor.