He was arrested more than fifty times for public intoxication by various accounts, in Arizona, in Illinois, in other states where his travels took him.

The news covered the arrests.

The coverage was often condescending or worse.

He returned to the Gila River reservation repeatedly, drawn back by family and community and the landscape that was the only landscape he had ever called home.

The reservation offered little in the way of economic opportunity — the systematic denial of water rights that had defined Akimel O’odham history for decades was still an open wound — but it offered belonging.

He was not the Pima hero there.