Word: deserting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Today the seemingly peaceful worlds of the Navajo woman and the Hopi dancers are colliding, and bloodshed is possible. In the northeast corner of Arizona, a century-old conflict between the neighboring Hopi and Navajo nations over an area of mesa and desert land the size of the state of Rhode Island is finally approaching its sad conclusion...
More than 1,000 years ago, the Hopis (the word means "the peaceful ones") settled in the mesa-dotted desert farm land of northern Arizona. Passive and communal, they built stone and adobe houses on the tall mesas for protection against raiders, and farmed, hunted and gathered herbs on land that stretched away below them like a vast...
Navajos arrived from the north 500 years later. Proud and aggressive, they formed a fierce nomadic warrior culture, herding sheep and patrolling the desert on horses first introduced by Spanish explorers. Then, as now, the Navajos had little use for village life. Each family ranged over miles of grazing land, adding easily built mud and cedar-log hogans as new generations arrived, and moving the sheep when grazing areas played out. If they used the land differently from the Hopis, they attached equal mystical significance to it, dotting the hilltops with shrines attesting to its power to provide...
California's Imperial Valley, just above the Mexican border, is one of the world's lushest agricultural areas, a cornucopia of fruit and vegetables, where several crops are harvested a year. What helped make this former desert bloom is a bountiful supply of federally subsidized irrigation water. Last week, in a victory for the valley's large landholders, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Government must continue to provide them with low-cost water...
Slowly she disabuses herself of this notion. The final link in her chain of reasoning is her youngest brother. Facing the draft, he enlists in the Navy, prepared to desert the moment he is required to inflict pain or death. He goes to Viet Nam and sees the Orient for the first time, reversing the trip made by so many of his forebears. And he comes home, not to China but to California, where, as an uncle had once shouted, "we belong." At the very end, Kingston resolves to "watch the young men who listen...