But Hayes’s use was sharpened by race, and he felt it.

The Specific Texture Of The Post-War Struggle

After the bond tour ended and Hayes returned to the Gila River reservation, he entered a period that has been described in many accounts as a decade of drinking and arrests, and that is accurate as far as it goes.

But it doesn’t go far enough.

He tried, repeatedly, to build a stable life.

He worked in cotton fields — the same kind of agricultural labor his family had always done, now that the Akimel O’odham were farming on land that had been substantially reduced from what their pre-contact territory had been and without the water systems that had made their traditional agriculture flourish.