Diné runner Edison Eskeets commemorates the Long Walk in author Jim Kristofic's book Send a Runner. Photograph by Inga Hendrickson.
IN 2018, 59-YEAR-OLD DINÉ RUNNER EDISON ESKEETS commemorated the Long Walk by running 330 miles in 16 days, from Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, to Santa Fe. Author Jim Kristofic accompanied him, and in Send a Runner: A Navajo Honors the Long Walk (UNM Press) he gives poetic voice to Eskeets’s journey and the 1860 atrocity that forcibly relocated Navajo people from their Four Corners homeland to eastern New Mexico. “As I make this run,” Eskeets says in the book, “I think about all the pain, the homesickness, the agony those Diné people were feeling.” Readers will share that pain—but also marvel at the miracle of Navajo resilience.
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