Dine Bikeyah Calling...

I was 16 years old the first time I heard the words, "I hear Dine Bikeyah calling..."  I was sitting on a chair in Wichita, KS watching Rich Mullin's musical, Canticle of the Plains.  Then I learned, "Dine Bikeyah is a real place, its the land of the people, the land of the Navajo."  Right there at the edge of my seat, I felt some how Dine Bikeyah and the Navjao people were to be my future...

Now I am 29, and I have been living in Dine Bikeyah for over 2 years.  I am still just a beginner in the beautiful Navajo language, and I live just off the rez in the town of Thoreau.  Yet my heart is pulled there deeply, especially when I have been gone for a while.  I get homesick when I leave Dine Bikeyah.  I have found my home among a people not my own.  I have found a place to stop wandering, in a land not my own, and I am home, at last.

~ Michelle