But Fonseca makes us look. She begins by dropping us into a Gypsy family in Albania. We live with them for weeks, learning their lives from this close, learning them as whole people with admirable traits and some not so admirable. The neighbors who complain that they don't take care of the houses they were forcibly relocated to. The Indians of the Great Plains bathed every day, unlike the stinking, foul-mouthed, lice and diseased infested soldiers who slaughtered them.
Dirt is a metaphor for a more complete alienation.
Values, not dirt, create alienation. Even the Indians who farmed, we preferred to see as worthless, indigent nomads. No accident that a famous Indian leader of the Colonial period was named 'Cornplanter,' Bill. And finally, illiteracy, which gave us a powerful weapon to use against tribe after tribe, the 'treaty' they couldn't read. In one of the most touching moments of Bury Me Standing , a Gypsy woman shows Fonseca a scrap of paper with a crucial phone number on it.