I was born at the Kiowa Indian Hospital in Lawton, Oklahoma, then taken to my grandmother’s place. They lived in conditions of dire poverty. I didn’t know it at the time. We didn’t have any electricity or plumbing. I grew up on Indian reservations. I was born during the Depression. My parents were looking for work; they found it with what was then called the Indian Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I lived on the Navajo reservation when I was little, and I lived on two of the Apache reservations, and lived at the Pueblo of Jemez for the longest period of time. So I had a pan-Indian experience before I knew what that term meant. And it turned out to be fortunate, I think, in terms of writing, because I had an unusual experience — and a very rich one — of the southwestern landscape, the Indian world. And that became for me a very important subject.