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Navajoland: I
In the American Southwest nothing looks to be of a
piece but the landscape and the infinity of sky overhead. The vast
frame of the earth and the geomorphic scheme that shaped it lie
plainly revealed through a scrim of sparse vegetation so that a single
landmark is sufficient to supply, organize, and integrate in the
imagination a multitude of associated topographic features enabling it
to reconstruct the sweeps of geological space that both separate and
connect them. The Southwestern landscape is not only recognizably of a
piece, it can be held as such within the mind.
The Navajo Reservation, home of the Dineh (meaning
"Earth People"), comprises 26 million acres located in three states
between four peaks rising from the four points of the compass:
Debentsa in the La Plata Mountains of Colorado; an elevation between
Colorado's Blanco Peak and Pelado in the Jemez Range in New Mexico;
Mt. Taylor near present-day Grants, New Mexico; and the San Francisco
Mountains north of Flagstaff, Arizona: all of them believed by the
Navajos to be formed of earth brought from the underworld by the Dineh
and their elder brothers, who in ancient times wore the shapes of men,
after their emergence into the upper one in the vicinity of the modern
town of Silverton, Colorado. The Papago Reservation is as lovely but,
being much smaller, offers far less variety of terrain and vegetation.
As the highway north from Flagstaff descended the
forested benches that pedestal the San Franciscos, the heat increased
with the stony aridity of the country. Dust devils spun beside the
road and a column of pink dust, incandescent in the afternoon sun and
taller than Elijah's whirlwind, rose thousands of feet into a cyanic
sky. At intervals a trailer home appeared or a modest house built of
cinderblock, each surrounded by a brush corral and the sacred hogan
built as a representation of the cosmos, its door facing toward the
rising sun. Some of these hogans were no more than poles covered
with dirt and resembling gigantic anthills, others octagons of
carefully fitted planks and logs, a few sheeted over with tarpaper.
Late model pickup trucks stood parked on the packed dirt around the
front doors, and beside every third or fourth house a satellite dish
cupped itself to the clairvoyant sky like a patient attentive car. Few
sheep and range cattle wandered in this country the color of blood,
half submerged in the pink drifting sand of its own pulverizing rock;
a single pitiably starved horse stood along the right-of-way with its
penis extended, looking near death. Where booths of brush and board
painted with the word "Jewelry" leaned against the fencelines, the belagaana
tourists (some students believe the word represents the Navajos' early
approximation of "American") in play clothes pawed among silver and
turquoise trinkets under the deadpan faces of the traditionally
dressed Indian women.
Tuba City had been described to me as "the biggest
Third World City in the Southwest" by someone who obviously had never
visited the place. The town was founded in the latter part of the 19th
century by Mormon pioneers invited to the site by a Hopi from the
village of Oraibi named Tuvi (meaning Outcast) who wished to
make his own settlement at nearby Moencopi secure against the Paiutes.
It was originally called Koechaktewa (White Sands), but the Mormons
changed the name to Tuba City in honor of their good friend Tuvi.
Today Tuba City is a collection of mobile homes arranged irregularly
among the sand dunes along a four-lane highway with turnouts to the
shopping centers, gas stations, and nationally franchised eateries
patronized by the hordes of Illinoisans, Californians, and Virginians
who pass through every summer on their way to visit the Grand Canyon,
which appears in cross-section on the Western horizon. With 5,000
residents, Tuba City is slightly larger than the Navajo capital of
Window Rock at the opposite, eastern end of the reservation. At the
Ya-Tah-Ay chain store close by the city dump I placed a call to George
Hardeen for directions out to his trailer at the edge of town.
George Hardeen said, "I'm really hooked on this
part of the country. Everybody's poor here, nobody has any money. And
I like the isolation of the res." George had on biking shorts and
shoes, and his backpack lay on the carpet with its contents spread
around his feet. The bay window in the side of the trailer faced the
Tuba City Airport's single runway where an incoming ambulance plane
had recently crashed after hitting two horses (in Navajo "those that
men live by") and decapitating one of them. George explained that the
Navajos are uncooperative in keeping their livestock off the runway,
but expert at shooting out the landing lights along the strip. Before
moving onto the reservation to work for the Navajo Times in
Window Rock and later for the Gallup Independent in Gallup, New
Mexico, he'd been a newspaperman in Page, Arizona, whence he had
migrated from a previous newspaper job in Missoula, Montana. By birth
he is a Connecticut Yankee. His parents came out from Connecticut for
his wedding in Tuba City and have not been back since: "on account of
the heat," they say.
It was not, in late June, very hot yet but a hard
wind out of the stretched blue sky beat against the tin skin of the
trailer. While Lena Hardeen washed the breakfast dishes her cousin, a
tall keen-faced young Navajo, put aside the books he'd been studying
in preparation for his college examinations to sit at the dining table
with the baby Christopher on his lap. The framed photograph on the
wall behind him showed Annie Dodge Wannetka, a Navajo stateswoman to
whom President Kennedy awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom and
for whom Lena had once worked as an intern.
George and I were trying to get away together on a
hiking trip, but there had been delays. Another of Lena's relatives,
also a young man earning college money by working construction on a
chocolate factory going up in Las Vegas, had stopped by; finally a
slim and pretty woman named Bette-tbe journalist who had broken the
Big Boquillas Ranch story that launched the payoff scandal that forced
Tribal Chairman Peter McDonald from office--showed up, and Lena brewed
a pot of fresh coffee. George had begun to refill the pack with the
items we needed for the trip when a shabby brown Toyota sedan pulled
in beside the trailer. "It's Lena's mom," he said around the bungee
cord he held in his teeth.
"Don't you have to be somewhere just now?"
"What do you mean?"
"The mother-in-law taboo."
In traditional Navajo culture mother- and
son-in-law are not permitted each other's company, or even vicinity,
and they are not supposed to look at one another at all. George
laughed. "We like to kid each other about that."
The old lady entered from the little porch followed
by a tall slender boy with very long bare brown legs. She was dressed
in traditional style, wearing the many-layered skirt of pale gray
silk, green velvet blouse (worn, as the men wear the black felt
reservation hat, through the hottest days of summer) pinned with a
large silver and coral brooch, and white leather moccasins. Lena came
with the baby from the kitchen space to introduce us. Her mother had
almost no English but her manner was extremely gracious, and the boy,
whose name was Shane, seemed friendly. She sat on the center cushion
of the sofa, Lena taking a place to her right and Shane to her left,
and crooned to her grandson while she stroked his head.
The Navajo language is considered almost impossibly
difficult for outsiders to master; during World War II American
intelligence used Navajos speaking in their native tongue as an
alternative to code language. It is also supposed to be unpleasant to
listen to, but as spoken by Lena and her mother it sounded soft and
sibilant. George attempted to learn Navajo after he and Lena were
married, but she always ended by laughing at him and after a time he
quit trying.
The boy Shane leaned across his mother to speak to
the baby, also addressing him in Navajo. He'd been grinning all the
time since his arrival, displaying his strong white teeth more broadly
until his dark Mongolian eyes almost disappeared behind his round
cheeks. He had on a black T-shirt with the legend "We are the
Overlords" printed across the back, and from under the black beanie
cap his black glossy hair fanned across his shoulders. Lena's mother
had nine children, the youngest of whom was ten years old while five
were already married. She owned a house in the government development
at Red Lake, in addition to the ranch at White Mesa where Shane had
spent the past nine days herding sheep and sleeping out on a high
wooden scaffold to be away from snakes.
George slapped him on the leg. "Good for you,
Dude," he said. "Looking after sheep is a big responsibility." Shane
gave me a sideways look, still grinning. Then he stretched his long
legs on the carpet, pulled the bill of his cap over his eyes, and
leaned back in the cushions. "It's boring, man," be said above folded
arms. "Nine days without seeing nobody, without nobody to talk to,
without no shower." He pushed the cap back from his eyes again and
went on grinning at me.
"It doesn't sound boring to me." George bent to
lace his boots. "As a matter of fact, we're getting ready to go
climbing on White Mesa right now." Lena was carefully tying
Christopher onto the cradleboard of a type used by Navajo mothers
since the tribe's nomadic days some hundreds of years ago. "Why don't
you guys take Shane with you?" she asked, glancing at her brother. "I
think he could probably do with a change."
We stopped at the Yah-Ta-Ay, where bland impassive
faces stared through the stranger and floated past him with as little
human recognition as if he were invisible, for the mail, beer, and
soft drinks. The store was stocked to satisfy a Westchester County
housewife, and the video shop crowded with adolescent Navajos in
belagaana dress picking through the latest Hollywood films. Then
we drove on to the landfill where George deposited a bag of trash and
Shane called my attention to Avon Lady, a very old woman seated in a
folding chair and huddled under blankets in the hot sun while she
sniffed fingernail polish from a discarded bottle. Around her a man
scavenged in a painstaking way from one pile of garbage to another;
Shane said he was looking for copper to trade for liquor at the
bootlegger's. Trash blew out of the dump, across the road, and into
the desert beyond it. George said that Tuba City had been a very clean
place before it started to grow, but that nobody wanted to take the
time anymore to fill in over the garbage. "It's interesting that
people who consider the land to be sacred should be guilty of trashing
it this way, but it's a real problem here."
Shane sat with his knees drawn up on the foldaway
seat in the back of the Datsun pickup's cramped cab as we drove north
on Highway 160 toward Red Lake. The morning was clear and warm, but
filled with the same hard wind driving unremittingly from the west.
Ahead the tilted bulk of Black Mesa lifted away to the northeast,
while in the northwest White Mesa gradually clarified itself in the
dusty desert light. Old women shrouded in their long skirts and heavy
blouses herded sheep on foot and on noisy fourwheelers; a hundred
yards from the highway men wearing black hats and sunglasses struggled
to raise a canvas tent on the booming wind beside a sign handlettered
with the words REVIVAL MEETING. George drove very fast on the shoulder
of the washboarded reservation road, the truck canted at an angle of
nearly 15 degrees and towing a long parachute of pale bentonite dust.
As we approached White Mesa he called my attention
to the great buttressing arch outstanding from the cliff. Lena, who
grew up out here, had been taught as a girl to avoid arches. She is of
the last generation to have been raised in the traditional Navajo
life, including its rituals and beliefs: without television,
telephone, or radio; barefoot, lacking motorized transport and
store-bought groceries with the exception of a few canned goods.
"Everybody was poor," George said, "nobody knew what poverty
was--nobody had so much as heard the word. Of course, there was always
some guy around with 4,000 head of sheep, but then, next to him there
was you, and everybody else." He turned abruptly from the clay road
into a dusty trail running straight at the mesa, twisting among the
juniper trees before it began to climb the chalky walls where cliff
swallows swooped and darted into a sky that appeared purple at the
zenith.
The juniper forest crowded the road, the dark
boughs brushing the truck with an odorous rub, and presently clearings
appeared in it where people from the summer hogans had been
cutting firewood. When George could maneuver no farther he halted at
the crest of a steep sand dune and set the hand brake.
"Wait until you see this," he said. His voice was
almost a whisper. In silence we unfolded ourselves from the truck,
drank from the water bottles, shouldered the packs, and walked off in
deep sand among the stunted, twisted trees. |
