“Mom, we're deploying tomorrow.”~Lori Piestewa, call to her mother from Fort Bliss, February 16, 2003 Born in Tuba City, Arizona, in 1980, Lori Piestewa was the daughter of a Hopi Native American father and a Mexican-American mother. Her family had a…

"My people honored me as a warrior. We had a feast and my parents and grandparents thanked everyone who prayed for my safe return. We had a "special" [dance] and I remembered as we circled the drum, I got a feeling of pride. I felt good inside…

“Well then after I got out of the service I was discharged from the WAC in Manilla, and I took a War Department Job in Tokyo. That’s when the occupation had just started there. As a matter of fact, I was in the first plane of women going into…

"After about a year some trouble arose between them and the Indians, and I took the war path as a warrior, not as a chief. I had not been wronged, but some of my people bad been, and I fought with my tribe; for the soldiers and not the Indians were…