The Gila River Indian Community in January is the desert in winter — dry, cold at night, the light hard and bright in the daytime.

The land that Ira Hayes was born on and died on stretches flat in most directions, the mountains visible in the distance, the sky enormous in the way that only desert sky can be enormous.

It is the land that his people had been farming for centuries before anything called the United States existed.

It is the land from which the water was taken.

It is the land to which the water has begun to be returned, slowly, through the legal and political processes that move at the pace of institutions rather than the pace of human lives.