Not many people could fathom running close to a marathon a day for 16 days, but in the summer of 2018, that is exactly what Navajo ultrarunner Edison Eskeets planned to do, to honor the survivors of the Long Walk, the period that saw the Diné forcibly removed from their ancestral lands to a military-run reservation and ended only when they were able to return to their homelands. Send a Runner: A Navajo Honors the Long Walk weaves together the chronicle of Eskeets's 330-mile route from Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, to Santa Fé, New Mexico, with a history of the conquest of the region that encompasses Diné ancestral lands. It begins in 1540, and ends with both the historical signing of the Navajo Treaty of 1868 and Eskeets's arrival in Santa Fé on the 150th anniversary of the signing of that treaty.
This book bears witness to Eskeets's journey and the message he carries--that "We are still here. We have survived. There will always be Diné. We will always be here"--and also to the brutality and the lies of colonization, and the violence visited upon the region in the quest to own it. It also highlights how running is a form of survival and persistence, referencing other runs such as the 1,800-mile Hopi trek from Arizona to Mexico City to honor water and protest the Peabody Coal mines. Both Eskeets's run and the Long Walk itself are given greater context here so that these peoples' stories might not be lost. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer