Christine Lester’s body returns home with somber escort
Navajo Times | Holly James
Judith Yellowhair, Christine Lester’s aunt, weeps as she tells stories of her niece at the burial in Indian Wells, Ariz., May 5. Yellowhair picked out a cross to place on Lester’s grave, saying that she knows her niece is at peace in heaven.
INDIAN WELLS, Ariz.
She’s finally home.
Escorted by her loved ones, Christine Lester returned home to Tó Hadadleeh, where she was buried alongside her mother and grandmother, who never stopped looking for her.
Navajo Times | Holly James
Tarah Weeks and her husband, Warren Grant Weeks, from Medicine Wheel Ride, escort Christine Lester’s remains back to Dinétah May 5.
Lester, a daughter, sister, aunt, and granddaughter, was once a vibrant young woman. Her family told many stories of her adventurous and kind heart, often being the center of life to all her siblings and cousins.
Lester attended Toyei Junior High Boarding School and graduated from Tuba City High School. She was studying to be a nurse at Haskell University and was home for a visit when she went missing.
Missing for 36 years, Lester was finally laid to rest on her family’s land. She was buried on the anniversary of her disappearance and, coincidently, on the National Day of Awareness of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.
Read the full story in the May 11 edition of the Navajo Times.
Highway 264,
I-40, WB @ Winslow