Nana Dahd

Nana Dahd, also known as Rita Antone, survives in the novel chiefly through the lessons and stories carried by Lani Walker and Fat Crack Ortiz. She is remembered as a loving but exacting elder who taught respect through everyday conduct, and as the person whose need for a medicine man set in motion an encounter that later became a story of traditional knowledge and mysterious forms of knowing.

Identity and remembered presence

Nana Dahd died on Lani Walker’s seventh birthday, but Lani vividly remembers her and the many lessons she taught. Those lessons were gentle in manner and firm in expectation: Lani was to behave politely and respectfully. Nana Dahd’s influence is therefore not presented as abstract wisdom; it is attached to a child’s remembered experience of being taught how to act toward others.

The memory also serves as a standard for later family life. When Lani worries about Tyler’s permissive upbringing, Brandon Walker recalls Nana Dahd’s approach and suggests that Lani is the closest thing the family has to her. Their exchange connects Nana Dahd’s authority to a wider practice of aunts and uncles helping to discipline children, while Lani questions whether she should assume that role with a child who is not Tohono O’odham.

The journey to find Looks at Nothing

Lani has heard throughout her life how Nana Dahd once needed the help of Looks at Nothing and sent her nephew, Fat Crack Ortiz, to fetch him. The episode took place against the division of Tohono O’odham lands by the 1852 Gadsden Purchase, which left part of the community in Mexico and part in the United States. Fat Crack expected the errand to be futile: Looks at Nothing lived in a village without telephone access, and Fat Crack thought he would have to park on the United States side of the border and then walk or hitchhike to reach him.

Instead, at The Gate, an unsupervised crossing on the reservation that allowed tribal members to visit relations on either side of the international border, Fat Crack found the blind old medicine man already waiting beneath a mesquite tree. Looks at Nothing had somehow sensed Nana Dahd’s need and made his way to the crossing, expecting that someone would come to take him to her. The remembered story makes Nana Dahd’s need the starting point of the encounter, while its striking reversal lies in the fact that the person Fat Crack had set out to find had already anticipated the summons.

Teaching and transmission

Nana Dahd’s significance continues through what others carry forward. Fat Crack tells Lani that Nana Dahd recognized her special qualities and believed she could safeguard what she knew. The gifts and knowledge passed to Lani were not meant to end with her: she was to keep them and pass them on to someone worthy. Nana Dahd is thus remembered not only as a teacher to a child, but as an elder who helped identify a future custodian of knowledge.

Later, Lani connects this inheritance to Fat Crack’s confidence that she would become a doctor and to her own sense that Fat Crack’s new grandchild would be willing to learn what Nana Dahd and Fat Crack had taught her. The movement of knowledge is generational rather than static: Nana Dahd’s lessons reach Lani through memory and instruction, and Lani imagines carrying them onward. In a further moment of interpretation, Lani understands Fat Crack’s role in bringing Brandon Walker and the dead girl’s mother together as part of a chain of events moved, ultimately, by I’itoi.

Narrative role

Nana Dahd is characterized through recollection rather than through an extended present-day role. The brief scenes and repeated family story give her influence two complementary forms: the direct, practical discipline Lani remembers, and the larger inheritance associated with healing, recognition, and the transmission of knowledge. Her absence is marked by the persistence of both forms. The family’s account of Looks at Nothing’s unexpected arrival also leaves the means of his knowing unexplained, allowing the story to preserve mystery without separating it from the concrete acts of need, travel, and care.