Pirolozzi, Jayna. (2009). The Resolution of Red Tears.

Daniel “Red Tears” Patterson begins this story as an undersheriff in Stake Town, Arizona. The sheriff and the other men who work in the sheriff’s office alongside Patterson are white supremacists. A man of Navajo blood, Patterson works daily beside the men he is certain killed his wife. He refuses to be intimidated until he is nearly beaten to death and his daughter is threatened.

When he is reassigned to the nearby Navajo reservation where he grew up, he leaves Stake Town, primarily to protect his daughter Jessica and the sheriff’s son Tommy who loves her. He returns to his home to face an angry brother, and a grandfather who believes Red Tears is destined to stand before the white fathers to receive their reconciliation for the First Nation People.  Two reasons he left the reservation in the first place. 

But once there, helping his friend Ben investigate a missing clansman, Daniel discovers the sheriff’s plot to raise an Aryan army and to enslave the Navajo men. All this eventually leads Patterson to stand before the Senate of the United States seeking reconciliation between the United State Government and the First Nation People.

Pirolozzi, given a heart for the First Nation People by The Great Creator, worked with Senator Sam Brownback and the people in his office when she was completing research for this project. In the epilogue she reports that Brownback presents a resolution for apology and reconciliation that was passed by the 111^th Congress in 2009, after it had been politely sidelined each year since 2005.  

In 2010 Brownback ran for and was elected as governor of Kansas after he left the United States Senate. Does such a resolution as this exists, or is this, too,  fiction. If so, surely the reporters who cover national news would have announced such a momentous occasion.

However, buried deep in a billion dollar defense appropriation bill, President Obama did quietly sign into law an apology to Native Americans. After years of seeking for bipartisan wording, the resolution states “The United States, acting through Congress … apologizes on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States.” The focus is on reconciliation rather than compensation, an apology extended to another nation living on the same land. An old, yet contemporary social, economic, and political issue, the buried apology is not even the “formal apology by the President” called for in the resolution. Probably not enough, and probably too late; it is too bad that Red Tears is a fictional character in a fictional world where "one apology can change the course of a nation."

A disabled veteran, Pirolozzi attended Bethany College and Lee University. She is a member of the John 3:16 Marketing Group. The Resolution of Red Tears was released on January 11, 2011. 

 

Her next book For God and Country will be published soon by Createspace.