Don't Let the Sun Step Over You: Chapters 3 & 4

These two chapters tell the stories of Eva Tulene’s life while her family was working on the Apache Trail around the Roosevelt Dam to the Mormon Flat Dam. During this time period, her family moved around as they built the road. These chapters also include the stories of her mother and brother’s illnesses and the death of her father and sister. In another important story in these chapters tells of a census in which the family lost their name “Tulene” and became know to the state as “Case.”

It is important to note that through these stories, you can see the evidence of government pressure to assimilate into the white Euro-American culture. There are three cases of this. The first is when the census man records them as “Case” instead of their preferred family name, Tulene. This shows blatant disregard for their personal history. With out a constant last name, in the current patriarchal society it is hard to trace your lineage and find your ancestral roots. In the story of her sister’s death Eva gives two more examples of her forced assimilation. The first is the fact that her mother gets hauled away to jail, basically just because of a power trip by a local cop, who was demanding that her children go to one of the assimilation schools even though they were already attending the St. John’s school. The second example in this story is at the end when she doesn’t realize that her sister is dead, because the only way they explained her death to her was that she had gone to heaven.