My name is Jonathan Edward Smith Chacon Hernandez II. I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico Territory in the year 1882. My father was the descendant of Spanish immigrants, my mother the child of English aristocracy. At the start it seemed I was destined to live the life of a poor desert ranch hand, as the Victorian era drew to a close and the trend of advancement had just begun to sweep its mechanized tendrils over the dusty horizon.

I earlier mentioned, I was given birth in Albuquerque, a village of old Spanish families, long remembering their noble heritages. From there I moved Nothwest to a desolate frontier in the uppermost corner of the territory. Ah, to think of my life within the sacred land of the Navajo, a hopeless outsider and a reminder to the secretive people of their own tortured relation with non-natives. Every desert has it's secret places and restless dead, and the desert of the Navajo is no different. Its hollow canyons howl the memories of ancient ritual and neglected superstitions. Spirits lost in the desert are dangerous, and those who were still scared from their imprisonment at Fort Sumner were the most restless of all.

"Bida'didiidloh,." I was sitting in on a medicine ritual long ago. An old man who lived at Bosque Redondo singled me out and blew upon me the smoke of burning peyote. The puff was quick, but its effect was immediate. Either by accident or by design, the noxious vapours affected me in a most queer manner.

The smoke was foul and acrid, and it filled both my lungs and brain with blackness, like inhaling the ashes of a burning carcass. I don't recall quite what I saw or felt while under the grip of the Indian's peyote, but the feeling of it's toxin infected my body, and I suffered long agony, while my then cursed soul wrenched itself free from my dying body. I don't know when exactly I passed from the realm of human kind, but I know my remains were buried unmarked, unmourned but not unmolested upon the grounds of the 'White man's school,' apparently the only place fit to dump a bilagaanaa.

These were in the days before the great wars in Europe, and I think it was just before the turn of the century when I rose, and left Dine'tah graveyard and crossed over the great ocean that divides the 'New World' from the Old. The year I believe then was 1897.Read Parts 2 and 3