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I was a second grade or so.  I would go into my mom’s room and watch her bookshelves full of variety in colors of the book covers.  Then, every day I would pick out the same book and would read it.  The story was about a little girl cajoling her mother to make strawberry cake.  The mother says, “I’m busy with talking to this new neighbor, go into your room and do not disturb our conversation.”  The daughter gets disappointed and cries. The ending of the story is like that of Waithea’s story in which the little girl drowns herself.  Not that in the story I read, the girl died, but there was nothing satisfactory or moralistic so that it would give readers nihilistic sense.  However, that’s the story I always read every time I entered my mom’s empty room.  I guess my sentiment as a child was similar to the girl’s, disappointed at her mom who does not explicitly give her daughter motherly affection.  My mom was never home because she had to work.  Being in an empty house alone was not a good memory.  I felt not cared enough.  I read the story over and over again because I could sympathize the little girl’s disappointment.

From this experience, although several people might say they did not understand the nihilistic ending of the Pueblo story, I could grasp that however the ending is, the indescribable sentiment embedded in the story is closely related to the Pueblo culture, and that net fact gives a genuine story even though there is no explicit moral.