I’m listening to the Code Talkers. They tell a story about America that I want to hear. "My name is Peter MacDonald," said a righteously proud, now ninety-year-old leader of "the thirteen surviving Navajo Code Talkers" at the White House recently. In a ceremony that should have focused on the pivotal contributions of these Diné/Navajo …

Continue reading Listening to the Code Talkers: Whose Story-telling? Whose Artifacts? Whose Spaces?

I happened to be in New York the weekend after yet another auto-as-weapon attack—this one on Halloween, timed by the (alleged) perpetrator with a pernicious goal of turning a date that youthful city-dwellers cultivate for playful-pretend horror into a gruesomely real day of death. I flew into the city the next day, November 1. Initial …

Continue reading Come from Away: Answering Moments of Terror with Artful Living