Payacita - Jeanne Follett

Payacita is the epic story, fiction/nonfiction, based upon the life of a Navajo woman who was born in autumn 1888. The story opens with her age beginning at five years old and ends with her death at sixty-seven years old.

The story is based upon the testimonies of individuals who really knew her. Her life struggle is exemplified through the many years in which she lived with her family and her coexistence with the "white man."

Her journey is one that drives her with the desire to survive and the will to persevere in who she was as an individual. As you will see in the story, her whole life was based upon the struggles in which she would be subjected to in all emotional aspects of life. She eventually achieves the status of becoming a respected businesswoman who had the foresight-learned from her grandmother-as to the value of transplanted apple seeds in order to grow an orchard.

She was renowned for her sense of humor and for the beautiful apples that her apple orchard produced. The Spanish villages established in the four-corner area, specifically New Mexico, depended on her visits to the trading posts. She was a woman who not only survived the changing of the old world's transportation to the new world of the automobile but lived to see the dream of the blue butterfly who, since her birth, gave her the enlightenment to find hope and peace in a world often known for such cruelty against the Native American people.

Dedicated to all the Payacitas of the world!