Tohono O’odham spiritual traditions and traditional knowledge

Tohono O’odham spiritual traditions and traditional knowledge form a living framework for interpreting illness, loss, obligation, and inheritance in the novel. They appear in embedded traditional tales, in the practices Fat Crack Ortiz learns from Looks at Nothing and passes to Lani Walker, and in moments when characters must decide how ancestral knowledge relates to modern medicine and forensic procedure. The narrative gives these traditions their own ways of explaining events: they are not simply decorative folklore or a substitute for scientific knowledge, but a source of responsibility, relationship, and continuity.

I’itoi and the Embedded Stories

The book places traditional tales beside the contemporary plot, giving them room to work as stories in their own right. One begins with I’itoi, Elder Brother, visiting a village after a long, hot summer to see whether his people have enough water. He watches children playing, then notices an old woman burdened with firewood and an old coyote whose sore paws keep him from joining in. The scene sets the young and the old, play and weariness, alongside one another; its attention to care begins with noticing who can no longer take part easily in communal life.

In another tale, I’itoi gathers yellow leaves, shadows, sunbeams, brown leaves, tiny white flowers, and even pieces of blue sky into his bag. He then lies down beneath cottonwoods, using the bag as a pillow, and falls asleep with the children who have come to watch him. The story presents making as an act of gathering different elements together, while its ending returns to rest and companionship. Elsewhere, a village’s struggle to drink safely from a pond leads an old man to bring a baby coyote on a string; the villagers’ laughter draws the adult Coyote from his cave. That episode, too, turns on a meeting between people and animals rather than treating the natural world as mere scenery.

The closing story offers a different kind of care. A grieving woman hears I’itoi tell her that the babies who have left their mothers are safe with him, resting in tiny cradles made from curled leaves. The babies cry because they do not want their mothers to grieve as she does; hearing this, the woman raises her head and smiles, and the sound of laughing babies surrounds her. The story does not erase her loss. It gives grief a communal and spiritual context, and imagines comfort arriving through a relationship between the living, the dead, and the natural world.

Knowledge, Healing, and Inheritance

The traditions are also transmitted through relationships and practice. Fat Crack Ortiz learned from Looks at Nothing after assuming he might be too old to begin. His sons, Baby and Leo, had already grown up without wanting to learn the teachings he later wished to pass on. Lani, by contrast, becomes a student. Fat Crack teaches her how to gather and dry wiw, the wild tobacco used in the Peace Smoke, and explains that what she receives is a treasure to keep and eventually pass to someone worthy of it. His instruction makes knowledge an obligation as well as a gift: its continuation depends on a future learner.

Lani recognizes the force of that responsibility when she holds Delia Ortiz’s newborn son, Gabriel. She understands that the patient answers Fat Crack and Nana Dahd gave her prepared her to pass knowledge forward. She sees Gabriel as a child who may welcome the teachings that Fat Crack’s sons did not want, and resolves to be there to share them. This moment turns succession from an abstract concern into a possible relationship across generations, while leaving the child’s eventual choices in the future.

The novel connects this inheritance to forms of knowing that are not always easily explained. Fat Crack once traveled to find Looks at Nothing, a blind medicine man living in a village without telephone access. Fat Crack expected to continue on foot or by hitchhiking from an unregulated crossing known as The Gate. Instead, Looks at Nothing was already waiting in the shade of a mesquite tree, having sensed Nana Dahd’s need and made his way there without being told. Lani later reflects on this story alongside Fat Crack’s confidence that she would become a doctor and her own intuition about Gabriel. The narrative presents these as mysterious forms of knowledge, not as findings that can be measured by the same methods as a laboratory test.

Spiritual Practice and Modern Institutions

The book does not frame traditional healing and modern medicine as a simple choice between belief and reason. Brandon Walker remembers that Fat Crack remained true to himself by declining the kind of medical care Lani wanted him to accept. Brandon recognizes that this choice involved a cost for Lani, who felt abandoned, but argues that requiring Fat Crack to abandon his beliefs would also have meant requiring him to betray himself. The conflict is emotional as well as philosophical: love does not guarantee agreement about treatment, and neither a spiritual commitment nor a medical option cancels the other person’s pain.

A related tension surfaces when Brandon and Ralph Ames consider exhuming Roseanne Orozco’s child. Brandon suspects that Tohono O’odham customs concerning the dead may affect what can be done, and says a medicine person would be needed along with a court order. He privately hesitates to tell Ames that Lani might fill that role, worried that the attorney would dismiss her knowledge. Ames moves readily from discussing a medicine person to arranging for DNA testing, treating both as resources the investigation may need. Brandon sees in this movement an ability to cross a philosophical divide without simply discarding one side of it.

The actual exhumation exposes a sharper conflict between community action and legal process. Emma Orozco explains that, rather than wait for permission from the tribal council, Sam Tashquinth and her grandson dug up the remains after dark. Their decision achieved its immediate purpose, but it damaged the chain of evidence needed to hold anyone accountable in court. Brandon is caught between the urgency of helping survivors and the requirements of a legally usable investigation. The episode makes clear that respect for spiritual and communal obligations does not make procedural consequences disappear; neither does procedure settle every question of consent and authority.

Community Knowledge and Institutional Failure

The novel situates these questions within a history of unequal responsibility. When Roseanne Orozco was murdered, authorities assumed she had died on the reservation and had been killed by another Native person. Brandon recalls that such cases came under federal or tribal jurisdiction, and that investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation could be cursory. The Papago Tribal Police Force, meanwhile, lacked training, equipment, and money. These failures help explain why the case remained unresolved; they also show how institutions with limited resources could leave families to carry unanswered questions for decades.

Against that history, community knowledge is both a source of insight and something that outsiders may overlook or mishandle. Emma waits years before asking for help, conscious of cultural expectations against direct questioning and of the difficulty of reopening an old loss before a white investigator. Brandon responds by making an observation rather than pressing her with a direct question, and recognizes the courage involved in her decision. Elsewhere, health records from the hospital at Sells had been digitized for a study of longevity and causes of death, making Roseanne’s 1970 appendectomy records potentially accessible; yet Brandon expects that his own request could be politely refused. The distinction between information existing and an outsider being able to obtain it points to the power that institutions retain over community histories.

The traditions ultimately give the novel a language for relation and transmission that runs alongside, rather than replacing, medicine, law, and investigation. When Lani sings a protective song four times, she follows what Fat Crack and Nana Dahd taught her: nature’s order is in fours. Her action expresses a practice grounded in inherited teaching at a moment when she fears danger, even though she cannot explain the danger to Brandon by telephone. Across the tales of I’itoi, the lessons Fat Crack entrusts to Lani, and the practical conflicts over medical care and human remains, knowledge matters because it connects people to one another and places a responsibility on its recipients to carry it forward.