FIELD NOTES #5: ARNOLD (INDIAN COUNTRY DISPATCH PART ONE)

Yucca Valley, CA - November 11, 2025, 10:59 AM

Arnold's gone.

I'm sitting in the living room of this Airbnb in Yucca Valley with Jamaica. We haven't spoken in three hours. Arnold died 48 hours ago; they'd had to put him down. He had stage four lymphoma, there was no other way. We both knew what was coming, but it still happened too fast.

I was in Taos at Juan's photo exhibition when Jamaica called and took the first flight back from Albuquerque. Arnold was put down a few minutes before the plane landed. I wish I could have been there for his final moments, but I'm told that my canine spirit guide was in excruciating pain during his last stretch and I'm not sure I could have handled it. 

After all, Arnie was the first pup I ever really connected with. Before meeting that devious dachshund in the January of 2023, I viewed dog people like Disney Adults or World of Warcraft LARP'ers; well-intentioned individuals unable to move on from childhood. Yet after several months of observing Arnold's pure, badger-hunting existence, I came to the conclusion that we Homo sapiens are a hopelessly broken species who ought to defer to dogs in any-and-all situations. They are closer to God than the holiest of men. Real pup lovers know what I mean. 

Aside from facilitating a spiritual breakthrough, Arnold also helped me to conquer my decades-old, crippling fear of dogs, which has a lot to do with my upbringing in inner-city Philadelphia. Most dogs in North Philly are rabid and vicious, explicitly trained to defend row-homes and attack intruders. This created a formative belief that dogs – unless yours – are to be avoided at all costs. 

This broken Philadelphian logic made me seem like the ultimate pansy upon our move to Seattle, which is a place where the majority of the public tongue-kiss bulldogs in public parks. I was the kid asking friends to put their dog away during sleepovers and crossing the street when a leashed golden retriever was headed toward me. 

This sorry state of affairs continued until the day I met Arnold on January 16, 2023. While over at Jamaica’s mom’s place in Santa Monica, he knocked on her bedroom door like a person would – a maneuver made possible by ramming his nose into the door three times. I pulled the handle and swung it open, expecting to greet a human. 

Instead, it was a twelve year old weiner dog with brown fur and back stitches from a recent spinal surgery, two feet long and nine inches tall. 

As embarrassing as it is to admit, I was paralyzed in fear. 

“Jamaica, he’s barking,” I said, voice shaking. “I think he’s about to attack me, can you grab him?”

“It’s fine,” she replied, “he’s barking because he wants you to pet him.” 

And that was that. Arnie and I became inseparable. He represented the purest form of existence and most importantly, he didn’t know how much the world hated me at that time. He only knew that barks equal pets. 

As time went on, I lost my fear for other dogs as well, starting with Jamaica’s hairless dog Tico. He’s a rabid menace with a prehistoric brain who’s widely feared across Los Angeles. I mean, if Jamaica or I are within petting distance, Tico cannot lay eyes on another human being without rushing to attack them. Statues and scarecrows aren’t safe either. 

That said, after successfully befriending Tico, there is not a single dog in this world who is capable of scaring me in 2025. None of that would be possible without Little Arnold. 

Even though Arnold is physically gone, I hope his spirit is still protecting me. I’ll need it this week.

Tomorrow, I’m going to a Native American reservation for the next five days. Specifically, the Navajo Nation, where there are over 250,000 ‘rez dogs’ who live completely outdoors. Most of them are loosely owned by tribal clans who follow the cultural tradition of excluding dogs from their homes. I’m told they often roam in packs of fifty and can be hostile to outsiders. If dog heaven is real, I’m hoping that Arnie can cast some spirits through the canine-celestial realm to let the rez dogs know I come in peace. Díí bilagáana baa íiyisí yá’át’ééh.

I wish I could stay with Jamaica but duty calls. I think she’ll be alright. The high desert of California, in its silent and barren glory, is as good a place as any to grieve. She understands. 

I’ve got a loaded week ahead. More stuff for the endangered language revival series that I’ve been working on for six months now. Irish, Texas German, Cajun French, Nahuatl and Gullah-Geechee are all filmed. Now we’re moving on to Native American languages. I plan to profile a Native language that’s experiencing a revival and then one that’s on the cusp of extinction. The Navajo or "Diné" language falls into the first bucket – there are over 100,000 Navajo speakers and massive amounts of federal funding being poured into immersion schools to keep the language alive. 

The schedule is a bit grueling, but such is the trade. We have a six-hour shoot at an elementary school tomorrow near Leupp, AZ, then have to high-tail it to Gallup, AZ to interview a native-language rapper. After that, we’ll stay at my buddy Kenneth Shirley’s house in Lupton, AZ., which is physically on the rez. Kenneth is a fancy dancer and the owner of a prolific brand called Indigenous Enterprise. He set all these interviews up. We’ll talk about him in a bit. 

Thursday is the big day. Somehow, Kenneth scored us an interview with Buu Nygren—the youngest president in Navajo Nation history. 

Buu believes that our sole intention is to talk with him about the language, but that would be journalistically irresponsible. He’s currently facing a Special Prosecutor investigation over financial misconduct allegations and it’s notlooking good. 

Last year, Buu promised to build 160 family homes on the rez after receiving a $24 million grant from the federal government. His administration only built 18 homes and no one is quite sure where the rest of the cash is. Additionally, he diverted $250,000 that was allocated for investigation of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women to his own office for travel and operational expenses. 

Things have reached a serious boiling point over the past few months. In July, he walked out of a tribal council meeting and refused to deliver the State of the Navajo Nation address after being heckled by his own constituents. In fact, he hasn’t done a single interview with the press since his election in 2023. Yet he wants to talk to me, presumably because of our high subscriber count on YouTube. I’ve been corresponding with reporters from the Navajo Times all morning to equip myself with all the facts I need to go Walter Cronkite on this fool. I’ve been itching for a hardball interview after the Pete Buttigieg sit-down. I cut Pete way too much slack on a number of issues and should’ve done a ton more research beforehand. Never again.

On Friday, we are headed back to the good-ol’ Phoenix metro area for a powwow at Fort McDowell. Kenneth will be dancing, so the b-roll will be decent and we should be able to clock in at Chopper John’s if things wrap by seven. 

Then Sunday comes the big kahuna. I have an interview set up with Leonard Peltier in North Dakota, which I’ve been arranging for months. For those unfamiliar, Peltier is a founding member of the American Indian Movement who was – likely – wrongfully convicted of the assassination of two FBI agents in 1972. The agents, operating during the reign of COINTELPRO, were engaged in the extrajudicial surveillance of the Pine Ridge Reservation and engaged in a mutual gunfight with several A.I.M. members, including Peltier. Leonard’s accomplices were later acquitted in State court after a jury ruled that they acted in self-defense. Peltier, on the other hand, was handed a life sentence in prison after a federal show-trial. 

Now 82, Peltier’s sentence was recently commuted by President Biden in the final hours of his presidency. However, Leonard is not totally free. He was granted a modified form of house arrest on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota under the watch of his assistants, Dawn and Jennipher, who are big fans of the show.

They emailed me out-of-the-blue over four months ago, shortly after the release of our Hunter Biden interview. During the sit-down, I brought up the inconsistencies in Peltier’s trial, which Hunter elaborated on extensively. Apparently, this had caught Leonard’s eye and he wanted a chance to be interviewed by Channel 5. 

As his assistants explained, though, there were two factors that would make things quite difficult. For one, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons is still in control of who Leonard is permitted to talk to on-camera and the application process for B.O.P. approval can often take several months. 

Secondly, it's my understanding that Peltier is under the Brittney Spears-style conservatorship of a nonprofit organization called NDN Collective, who control all elements of his life. Our native issues correspondent, Jaque Fragua, hosted a Channel 5 “Biden’s Apology to Native Americans” and did some in-field interviews related to the ongoing siege of Oak Flat by Resolution Copper, left NDN Collective in 2023 shortly after they secured a $12 million dollar contract with Amazon.

Yes, the nonprofit dropping ‘Stolen Land’ banners off freeways in the Black Hills are funded by Jeff Bezos, and following Peltier’s release last Spring, they used grant money to purchase him a house on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. According to Peltier's assistant, Dawn Lawson, who is extremely skeptical of the arrangement, NDN has bugged the entire property with hidden cameras and microphones as they move to acquire his life rights. 

“Holly, who manages Leonard, isn’t allowing the media yet and he’s terrified to go against them," Lawson explained. 

The only interview video Peltier has conducted since his release was a thirty-minute sit-down with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now, which she was only able to pull off by operating completely above the radar of NDN, who communicate directly with the Bureau of Prisons and presumably have the power to send Leonard back to prison if he's found in violation of his release terms. 

For some reason, 'Holly' was furious about this interview, but nonetheless, it was released. Leonard's life rights haven't totally been acquired yet. 

It's all quite messy, but I'm going to figure all this sketchy shit out.

Between Peltier and Buu Nygren, we've got two incredibly important stories on our hands that can only really be broken by a non-native outsider whose large platform can open doors that still remain closed to indigenous journalists. 

I should be preparing. Going over my notes, double-checking the itinerary.

Instead, I'm just sitting here thinking about our dead dog.

He'd want me to keep pushing. 

Juan texts me.

“What time do you land g?”

“Sky Harbor at Seven.” 

***

It was a relief to be back in Phoenix, the place where I took my hiatus from the internet, got my mind right, and drew enough strength from the saguaros to break containment. 

Maricopa County is also where I learned another thing: 

Westward expansion is not complete.

I didn't learn that from Juan, but from one of Juan’s homies.

Juan's Mexican, not Native. Born in Mexico, lived there until he was three, then Fresno until seven, then Albuquerque from age seven on. Yet people from New Mexico are around twenty times more familiar with Natives than the average American citizen and according to Juan, "the most Native person [he knows," is the homie Kenneth, who I mentioned earlier.

Kenneth Shirley and I first met at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, a Native American art museum downtown. I can recall these turquoise-wearing white ladies at the door asking him for an $8 admission fee, a request which he boldly denied before storming through to show me a few artifacts. 

In a general sense, he was a Channel 5 fan, but we primarily connected through our shared friendship with a Venice Beach original named Chris Printup, a.k.a. Spanto. When I first moved to Los Angeles during the early All Gas No Brakes days, I got invited on a podcast called Powerful Truth Angels and Spanto was in-studio. He'd just beat cancer. Leukemia, diagnosed in 2013, cancer-free by 2018. We hit it off immediately due to our shared graffiti background. 

Shortly after, Spanto started hiring me as a model and actor on a couple shoots for his clothing brand, Born X Raised. The first one was an LA Dodgers collaboration, and then I played rapper YG's lawyer in a stylized music video. We'd often get breakfast in Larchmont—me, Spanto, and Lee Spielman—and Spanto would tell me about LA history and Venice history. More specifically, how the Venice he knew was destroyed by gentrification.

"Venice, now, is fucken' gay," he once said, in true early millennial form. "But I'll never leave. That's my hood."

To this day, most people in L.A. think that Spanto is Mexican-American due to his affiliation with a Chicano gang called Venice 13, but he is actually of Apache and Seneca heritage. He spent his last week on earth with Kenneth on the Navajo Rez before tragically dying in an automobile accident on Interstate 40 while headed to the Albuquerque sunport. Kenneth's grandmother was the last person to see Spanto alive. 

I felt Spanto's intensity in Kenneth when we first met. Driven. Uncompromising.

Yet truthfully, I felt a bit self-conscious about how I should carry myself during that initial meeting. I was interested in covering Native issues, but was unsure as to where the pulse of those issues actually were.

Growing up primarily in Seattle, I really only knew of Native Americans in two ways - land acknowledgments at school, or the homies at Victor Steinbrueck Park who'd buy us beer. 

For context, I went to an alternative, Montessori private high school called The Northwest School. We had gender-natural bathrooms over a decade before that sort of thing and entered the public conversation, called teachers by their first names, and had classrooms named after Fidel Castro and Cesar Chavez. During assemblies, they'd often bring in Native Americans from the surrounding Duwamish and Muckleshoot tribes to educate our majority-white student body on whose land Seattle really was. 

To my Chief Keef-poisoned, 17-year-old stoner brain, being woke-scolded about 'stolen land' by a paid guest speaker who wasn't from Seattle left me with a psychic imprint that discussing 'Native American issues' was primarily just a method of performative penance for self-hating White liberals.

Additionally, every day after school, we'd walk down to Pike Place Market and chill at Victor Steinbrueck Park, which everybody called Native Park. Actually, park is a stretch. It's a giant grass hill that overlooks the Puget Sound. Back then, it was territory of a mostly-Native gang called D.A.P. (Down Around Pike), who are cool with BTM, 3A, and a couple other crews I grew up around. 

To this day, Natives make up less than 1% of Seattle's population but 10% of its homeless population and at least forty of them can be found drinking at Native Park at all times. As teenagers, this was great because they had no qualms with buying us beer as long as we could pitch them a few tallboys. However it wasn't always safe to get shit-housed with them because their blackouts were quick, unpredictable, and sometimes violent. Still, none of them ever mentioned 'stolen land' or anything like that. They just wanted beer.

These two, very different perceptions of Native Americans had colored my perception up until meeting Kenneth. But he made himself quite clear, and his proposal was simple: 

"We fuck with you, and you should come fuck with us." 

So that was that. A few weeks later, I found myself at Kenneth's grandma's house on the Rez, rolling around in freezing snow as part of the 'Navajo Snow Bath' ritual, which is said to protect the immune system during the Winter months. 

My introductory experience on The Navajo Nation totally transformed my perception of the ongoing Native struggle. 500,000 people. Tribal courts. Tribal police. Rich families, poor families, elected officials. A whole government. I had no idea any of that existed. Native society is just as complex as multifaceted as ours is. Part of me thinks that the national news-media has deliberately sheltered us from more contemporary depictions of Native life. 

I believe it's because the process of colonization is ongoing. The West has not been settled. Navajo sovereignty - though limited - is real, and it's gradually being stripped away through the sinister and creative tactics of mining and energy corporations, who are actively trying to steal resources from Native land. Almost every tribe is totally under siege. Yet all of this is algorithmically buried by documentaries about now-closed Boarding Schools or films like Killers of the Flower Moon, both of whim deliberately emphasize atrocities of the semi-distant past while media coverage of ongoing land grabs remains virtually nonexistent.

After having some of these realizations, wanted to help in a real way. 

And now it's time. We're hitting the Rez with a plan. 

It's 4:30 PM now. I should get to the airport.

AC