By the time I turned seven, I was quite an athlete. The kids I grew up around didn't accept me, so I had very few friends. I sort of stood out like a sore thumb---white, and therefore not Diné, but brought up in their culture to such a degree that I didn't know how to be anything else but Diné. Brave Bow taught me early on that the sun illuminates the day in the hope that it will not be wasted, so he helped me fill my lonely days with work, studies and exercise. Because of my isolation from other children, I pushed myself mentally and physically, training as a long-distance runner and archer; as a young boy I was capable of outrunning any full-grown man in my tribe and was both an accomplished archer and fletcher.

Life went on pretty much the same from day to day until I was around thirteen; that's when everything fell apart for me. Brave Bow had been seeing the doctor more and more often; he seemed tired and worried but wouldn't share his burdens with me. Over the previous year I had become totally nutso over this guy I saw in a magazine---he was an archer, a hero, and he was known to hang around with the likes of The Green Lantern and The Flash! His name was Green Arrow and he protected a place called Star City, way out in California. Secretly, I dreamed he was my real dad, since I sure didn't remember anything about my father. This guy was dynamic, dashing, devil-may-care---everything I thought it would be cool to be...but I knew a poor desert rat like me could never be like that in a million years. Still, I wanted to be like him and I thought about what I would do and say if I ever got to meet him. And then...one day...there he was...right where I lived!
The Green Arrow!

There's a big annual rodeo held a few miles down the road from our reservation, and each year there's a competition for archers. In my thirteenth year, I was due for two important events: participating against other archers at the rodeo and being made a "man" within the tribe at a traditional naming ceremony. In my first naming ceremony when I was a small boy, I was given the name "Lost Arrow," though I was more often called by another Bizzad nickname which descibed me as "flame-haired pale one with eyes like cats who lives with the hataali." The other boys my age had already picked out a girl they liked and offered to make a bride's wealth for them, beginning their courtship; I wanted to do the same, so I picked a girl I had liked all my life and told her I wanted to marry her. That was the first thing I did wrong. Her brother and friends all ridiculed me, and her father, one of the tribal council members, was enraged. See, I didn't understand that as a boy who was not one of "the people," I wasn't allowed to act as the other boys had done. It didn't take long for the not-so-subtle reminders to become a daily part of my life: "bela gona," they called me, "the white man, the enemy of our people." Me? I wasn't anyone's enemy. I was Lost Arrow. I was...lost.

The day I was to compete in the archery contest, I was more nervous than I'd ever been in my whole life. The great Green Arrow, my hero, was going to judge the competition! As I lined up with the other archers, I realized I was the youngest one there; all of those men had so many more years of experience than I did, but I still figured I could beat 'em. When my turn came, Green Arrow came over and put his hand on my shoulder---just like I figure a dad would---and he told me not to be scared, to just do my best. Wow---it was like he really cared, just as if he knew me.