Rita Antone

Rita Antone is a Tohono O’odham woman remembered by several names, including Hejel Wi i’thag, translated as Left Alone, and Nana Dahd. An orphaned child once called Dancing Quail, she became a skilled basket maker and a figure whose influence lasts beyond her death: in the household objects she left behind, in the stories told about her, and in the knowledge passed through her family and community. Her life links the intimate history of one family to a wider account of cultural continuity and connection between Tohono O’odham and Anglo worlds.

Identity and Naming

Rita’s name carries the mark of an early loss. As a little orphaned girl named Dancing Quail, she was given the name Hejel Wi i’thag, or Left Alone, in the early twentieth century. She had been dead for fifteen years by the time Emma Orozco spoke with Brandon Walker, yet her name and story remained familiar on the reservation. Emma recognized her as Hejel Wi i’thag, and Brandon understood that stories about Rita had become part of reservation lore.

The name endured alongside her reputation. In the Walker and Ladd household, Rita was remembered not only as a maker of baskets but as the woman who had worked for Diana Ladd as a housekeeper and babysitter. The story of Rita’s unusual loyalty to Diana, an Anglo woman, was still being told years after Rita’s death. Her presence in that family’s history was therefore more than an old employment connection: it had become a remembered relationship that crossed the boundaries of race and community.

Basketry and the Walker-Ladd Household

Rita’s work survived as part of Diana’s home. The living room held an extravagant collection of Native American baskets, many finely made and of museum quality; some had been crafted by Rita. Their long place among the household furnishings meant that Brandon Walker had grown so accustomed to them that he scarcely noticed them. When Emma visited, however, the baskets brought Rita’s history directly into the conversation: Emma knew her by name, and Rita’s nephew had directed Emma to Brandon.

One basket made that inheritance especially visible. It was a two-foot-wide medallion woven with the Tohono O’odham sacred symbol, the Man in the Maze. Traditionally, the maze was made in black fiber harvested from devil’s-claw pods against a white yucca background. Rita instead formed this basket’s maze from yucca root, which needed no dye to produce its unusual rusty-red color. The variation made the piece particularly valuable and special. Rita had explained its cost in terms of the material itself: for this basket, the yucca had to die. The object thus preserved both technical distinction and a teaching about what its making required.

Rita’s work also became a model for a later generation. Lani Walker made a sturdy medicine basket for herself, trying to make it as much like Nana Dahd’s original as she could. Lani’s basket was not as finely made as the one associated with Rita’s grandmother, Oks Amichuda, but it was respectable. Its importance lay in the deliberate act of learning and resemblance: Lani made an object of her own while orienting it toward inherited examples and knowledge.

Kinship and the Transmission of Knowledge

Rita’s nephew was Gabe Ortiz, a retired Tribal Chairman and longtime friend of the Walker-Ladd family, who was commonly known in that household as Fat Crack. The novel also identifies Rita as his aunt. Through him, her legacy enters a continuing chain of guidance: Fat Crack served as Lani’s godfather and medicine mentor, and he told Lani that Rita had spoken to him long ago about the future revealed in divination. Rita’s earlier words affirmed that Lani could become both a medicine woman and a doctor. Fat Crack presented that prediction as something Rita had told him, and as something confirmed by his own divination for Lani.

Rita’s influence also appears in the childhood history of Looks at Nothing. Fat Crack recalled that, when Looks at Nothing was a young child, he told Rita she would become a bridge between the Anglo world and the Tohono O’odham. Years later, the prediction seemed borne out in a scene of practical cooperation: Rita’s great-nephews, Brandon Walker, and Brandon’s sons worked together across generations and racial backgrounds. The passage does not make Rita the sole cause of that harmony; instead, it presents her remembered life as an early example through which the possibility of such connection could be understood.

Cultural Memory and Narrative Significance

Rita’s story is carried by different kinds of evidence: a name remembered by Emma, baskets kept in a family home, a craft practice Lani tried to emulate, and recollections transmitted through Fat Crack and Looks at Nothing. These details give her an unusual presence in the narrative despite her absence from its present-day scenes. She is encountered through what other people preserve and repeat, rather than through a single continuous account of her life.

That structure also makes her legacy more than a private family memory. The baskets move between domestic use, artistic value, and cultural teaching; her relationship with Diana joins personal loyalty to a history of contact between communities; and the predictions attributed to her and Looks at Nothing place her within a chain of spiritual and practical knowledge. Rita’s significance lies in these connected forms of transmission. The novel remembers her not simply as someone who once lived and worked in the Walker-Ladd household, but as a maker and teacher whose influence continues to shape how later generations understand inheritance, belonging, and the possibility of a bridge between worlds.