It is a place of order and solemnity, maintained to a high standard by the federal government, visited by millions of people every year who come to honor the dead.

The Gila River Indian Reservation is in the Sonoran Desert southeast of Phoenix.

It is a specific kind of landscape — flat, dry, ringed by mountains that seem close in the clear desert air, hot in summer and cold at night in winter, a landscape that demands adaptation and rewards intimate knowledge.

The Akimel O’odham have been adapting to it and accumulating knowledge of it for longer than the country that buried Hayes at Arlington has existed.

He was born on the Gila River land.