Don't Let The Sun Step Over You- Chapter 3 & 4

Eva Tulene Watt writes in these two chapters telling the story or when she and her family moved to area around Roosevelt Dam. This seemed to be a traveling or nomadic story of her family adapting to their new environment. She states that “the families that came from Cibecue and Oak Creek all lived together” thus forming another community similar to what we might see now of areas highly populated by other ethnic groups. For me this reminded me of Shalishan community of the Eastside of Tacoma where its it mostly populated by Cambodians and Thai people who have either grew up there their whole life, or have recently migrated from their homelands to life in the United States. It stands out to me very much when she talks about encounters with people of other ethnicities unlike her own. In her community there were a group of Chinese farmed who seemed to run everything stores, they had many crops, and they worked year round. Eva in her childhood seemed very unaware that these people were just like her otherwise she would not have referred to them as “those Chinese”. She even recounted that “their language is something like Apache, but not very much”.

In chapter 4, a disease called Trachoma took over the Apache people in Roosevelt, and they were sent to live in camps where they could receive treatment. She speaks of how everyone on the whole reservation was infected by the disease and that it infected their eyes. The disease affected her mother most in the worst way although most of her family including herself was struck with it. Watt also speaks of how people were picked up by police and forced to live in this tent city of 80 tents to receive treatment from the disease. I was just wondering if this was a type of government intervention. Speaking of intervention it just seems odd that a police officer showed up to their home saying that the children should be in school, and because her children weren’t in school and she automatically was hauled off to jail abruptly. I think that is not right that they did not give her mother a few days or a week to get her children enrolled in school. It seems that if you were a person of color or native in this case and you slipped up you should expect for the local government to find a way to involve themselves into their lives. The tent city should be looked at as government intervention and the policeman coming to their home. Are they watching every move these innocent people are making?