A Death in Summer

A Remembrance

2010 Production at Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles

Preface

When Julia and I hit the road for a year of travel in our motorhome in the late fall of 2008, blogging, especially political and cultural blogging, was at its peak. It only made sense to start our own blog to help tell the stories we sought to cover in Indian Country. We called the blog the sad red earth.* It was supposed to be our joint blog but very quickly became mine. Julia is a splendid writer, trained in journalism at the University of Nebraska, but the demands of her photography were too great for more.

I ended up blogging from 2008-15. Most intensively during those first 3-4 years, I was posting 5-6 days a week, 5-10 or more posts per week. It was like that in the blogging heyday. With the astonishing, seemingly liberating election of Barack Obama, the great recession, then Obama’s presidency and the sudden advent of the Tea Party, I was offering, in addition to our stories about Native America, a lot of other political c…