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I am 1/4 Native American and have a strong Native American influence from my youth. This old Native American with skin like leather, used to visit my dad and they would sit around the table, smoke, and drink. He wore a bandana around his iron-grey hair, with a braid falling to the middle of his back. He wore whiskey-stained khakis, a colorful Native American shirt and high-top tennis shoes. My dad would sputter words of drunken wisdom, and the old man would grunt. He would then wobble to the end of our street where he worked as a live-in summer gardener for my aunt. He perspired in a one-room shed with a cot for a bed. He is the inspiration for the character Grandfather in Return of the Bones, which won best Historical Fiction for the New Mexico / Arizona Book Awards.