A train rumbles down the track and passes beneath my feet. I’ve parked my bike under a streetlamp and am bent over the bridge’s handrail to watch it head west. Boxcars flit forward. It’s midnight, my first summer in Iowa City, and a bout of loneliness has punched me in the gut.More
“Paradise looks the same,” I tell the kids as we get out of the rental car at my Uncle Mick’s house. We’re exhausted from nearly 2000 miles of highway. The glare of lights from our tribal casino, The Paradise, is even more egregious than I’d remembered it.More
Leonard thinks he’s a bad-ass walking behind the casino, making his way over to the party. I’m the female answer to him and his Sioux style wrapped up cool in black boots.More
A news investigation put my kids’ school on lockdown. Where’s the line between keeping kids safe and scaring them?More
As a Native girl, I learned the difference between spirituality and dogma when we mourned my aunt and uncle.More
If the Catholic church survives its latest scandal — the concealment of 300 predator priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses — it will be because of the mestizo and indigenous populations of the United States and Central and South America.
I come from Laguna Pueblo and the Yuma Nation, and even in my small reservation border town ― where many of us children were Pueblo, Apache, Ute and Navajo ― Columbus Day was taken seriously by my elementary school teachers.
The Best Travel Writing 2011 is the eighth volume in the annual Travelers’ Tales series launched in 2004 to celebrate the world’s best travel writing—from Nobel Prize winners to emerging new writers. The points of view and perspectives are global, and themes encompass high adventure, spiritual growth, romance, hilarity and misadventure, service to humanity, and encounters with exotic cuisine.
St. Louis is a fragmented place. It’s physically dissected by rivers, highways, walls, and fences, but it’s also a place where one’s race, class, religion, and zip code may as well be cards in a rigged poker game, where the winners’ prize is the ability to ignore the fact that the losers have drastically shorter life expectancies. But it can also be a city of warmth, love, and beauty―especially in its contrasts.