Somehow, here—before the picnic ramadas and megaplayground and volley and basketball courts near a man-made lake with knolls bristled with grass—stood, for ninety-nine years, a residential boarding school named Phoenix Indian School. But no more. This acreage is now…
“Residential School Requiem” is an excerpted chapter from my memoir-in-progress One Pima Pilgrim, which follows my turbulent yearlong journey to my reservation—the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona—as I confront the memory of my flawed, blue-collar father. One Pima Pilgrim bridges the emotional void between eccentric sons and their imperfect fathers and confronts postcolonial hardships of Native addiction, homophobia, and grief.
My memoir draws from other literary pilgrimages similar to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And like those titles, my knack for nature and lyrical writing allows me to tell a “holy journey” set on an Indian reservation—including at a former Indian boarding school where “Residential School Requiem” is set—but as I explored the seasons, it was as if the landscape was exploring me, resulting in this chapter (and my entire memoir) written without the pronoun “I” (save for direct quotes of others) to represent a sacred but flawed tribal norm that the village is more important than the individual. The removal of “I” exemplifies the tension between tribal expectations and my own needs—emotional, intellectual, sexual—that the reservation and my family were unable to meet.
“Residential School Requiem” is how culture, memory, and desire ping-pong off each other, or as I interrogate in the essay: “Hear it—history?” Listen closely. Otherwise, the story withers, and thus the arid desert wins—again.
D. A. NAVOTI is a multidisciplinary storyteller, composer, and writer of the Gila River Indian Community. He won the 2025 Nonfiction Literary Award from the Tucson Festival of Books and was the 2023–25 Indigenous Community Liaison for 4Culture’s Poetry in Public program.
