In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Debra Haaland Laguna Pueblo Mother’s Love I would take her back if I could. She used to be strong, and she used her weight to get her way with my dad so many times. With us too. But now I try not to remember that too much. As I see her lying here, small and helpless, I wish we could go back. I’d probably be more understanding. My shift is the swing plus graveyard. My sisters-in-law and nieces come during the day and once in a while in the evening to give me time off, but I don’t mind if they never give me time off. I’d move into this hospital if I could. I love my mother. The only complaint I have is that the nurses wake us up in the middle of the night to take blood samples and her temperature. But I guess it’s a good time for me to rearrange her pillows and give her a sip of water. They all say what a good patient she is. I have to agree. She has more patience with the staff here than she ever had with us. But right now it’s easy to remember more of the good things about her. My mother was tall for a Pueblo woman—before she began to shrink under the weight of her years. We can now probably see eye-to-eye. She always dressed in loose cotton dresses which she kept covered with full bib aprons. Her clothes were never dirty until her eyesight began to fail. Her black leather lace-up shoes looked new for years; in fact I thought they were new for the longest time. When canvas shoes came out, she thought them more comfortable but harder to keep clean. I was an eager student when she decided to teach me to sew and cross stitch. She taught me how to skin a deer and how to slice the meat paper thin for jerky. “Never use a dull knife,” she’d say with great expression in her voice. What a chore it was to hang the meat up when it was wet. I had to use a stepladder to reach the lines my dad strung from our boxcar home to the light post. And for the first several days 84 the meat was so heavy. We had to take it down every night and put it up every morning before I went to school. When it finally dried, we were careful to use only what we needed, making it last as long as we could. The wonderful sweet smell of deer meat cooking in a pot with rice or hominy made my mouth water, and I felt all my hard work was worth it. I was the only girl in my family, so I had to learn all the things about Laguna domestic life by myself. My two brothers had to find women whose mothers taught them as much as my mother taught me. They have many good points, but being here with mom right now isn’t one of them. My mother also taught me how to cook. That was the best thing I learned from her. There was no end to her love of being in the kitchen. I too grew up preferring the kitchen to any other room in the house. She never liked me getting in her way when she was busy but she’d assign me tasks that I could do out of her way. One task was to chop very small pieces of wood to use for making piki. She had a beautiful flat stone that had turned glossy black like the obsidian arrowhead my dad kept in his top drawer. The stone was placed above a fire pit in a little piki house he built for her out in back. She wasn’t the only one to use it; the other women used it too, but I only had to chop the small pieces of wood for her. She was an expert at making piki. She’d spread the corn batter so thin on the hot stone without ever making a face. I don’t think she ever had one blister on her hand as a result of it. After mom rolled the piki bread up, it was my job to put each one in the special cardboard box she kept them in. I put sheets of newspaper between each layer. When...

Share