Zia Read Free

ground the acorns to flour. We made many sacks of this flour.
    With this flour and the abalone and fish we had gathered and the deer that our hunters ran down and killed, we lived through the winter. Our food sometimes ran low late in the spring. Then we dug roots and lived on those until it was summer and time to go to the sea again.
    As we stood around our chief listening very carefully, he said, "They have a home there in a place they call Santa Barbara. It is cool in summer and warm in winter. They have fields where they grow things like melons and the sea is not far off. They want us to come and live with them."

    "What if we do not like this place?" the chiefs son asked. "What if the sun does not shine like they say? And the sea is far away and has no fish in it?"
    "We will come home then," the chief explained. "If it does not suit us we will take the trail and return."
    One of the padres said, hoping to persuade us to leave, "The time has come for us to gather together, the Church and the Indians—both of us. And we must gather about the Missions, which, as you know, are many, a day apart on horseback from San Diego in the south to San Francisco in the north. They were meant to be forts, if need be, and so they are."
    The other padre said, "First, the Mexican government took thousands of acres of our Mission lands. Then a war came between Mexico and the gringos, which the gringos won. Then the gringos took your lands and much of what was left of the Mission lands."
    "The time has come for us to join together against the gringos, and the greedy Mexicans, and Spaniards," the first padre said. "Otherwise, there will be nothing left, not one acre, for any of us. Nothing! The white men and the Spanish women they married will have it all. They and the rich Mexicans and Spaniards. You will have nothing. Even less than you have now."

    After that the two men talked for another day and on the third day seven of us went with them. We took everything we owned, some even took their dogs, though the padres said that it would be better if we left them behind in our village.
    Mando went because he liked the sea and fishing. My friends Rosa and Anita went because they thought it all sounded adventurous and they would meet many boys. Everyone had a different reason for going, different from mine.
    Mission Santa Barbara, where the padres were taking us, was near the Island of the Blue Dolphins. People, after my mother died, told me about my aunt who lived on this island and that she had lived there for many years alone. That was when I thought of going to Santa Barbara. I knew that there were Indians close by the Mission who owned canoes. Perhaps if I went there I could find one who would help me reach the island and bring Karana back. It was a wild thought, but it was why I left my home in Pala and followed the padres to the Mission at Santa Barbara.
    I had never known my aunt, Karana. I was very young when my mother talked about the sister she loved, so I have forgotten most of the things she said.

    But from what people said I did remember that Karana had leaped from the ship that had come to rescue our small tribe from the Island of the Blue Dolphins and take it to the mainland where it would be safe from the Aleuts who sailed down from far in the north and killed our people. She had leaped from the ship because in all the excitement of leaving, their brother had been left behind and she swam back to search for him.
    But the captain of the ship would not wait. He was afraid of a storm that was coming and would not stay until Karana found him. It was in this way that she had been left behind on the Island of the Blue Dolphins.
    And yet I wondered sometimes if Karana would want to live here at the Mission, although it seemed to me that she must have yearned for the place where her people had gone. I wondered because some days I liked living at the Mission and there were days when I longed for our village in the mountains, far from the