In Their Shoes: In Their Shoes

13: Living as an Indian on the Navajo Reservation

13: J!ivinr as an .inian on Ihe ~va/o ~eservahon CCThere is really a valid reason to consider oneselfas an Cother) tone 15 an n tan.... if 'I:d' » - Vine Deloria) Custer Died for Your Sins clee I grew up hearing stories about Indians from my father, I always wondered what it would be like to live as an Indian. Would it be easier or more difficult to live as an Indian than as a black? To pass as a black, I had only to change myself, cosmetically. But are not Indians different from whites and blacks, psychologically, more attuned to Mother Nature? How could I enter into their world, their psyche? In 1972, I left my comfortable apartment in Washington, D.C., to live on the Navajo reservation. To get there, I boarded a TWA plane. After a couple of hours I heard the pilot saying, "There is Dodge City, Kansas." And later, "There is Santa Fe on your left." I spotted the Rio Grande, which, from its headwaters in Colorado, flows south past Santa Fe on its way to the Gulf ofMexico. Most of what I saw from the air, however, was space with no signs of people. Landing in Albuquerque, I rented a Volkswagen and soon was on a narrow ribbon of cement in a vast desert, with a howling wind threatening to blow me and the little "bug" car into outer space. I felt diminished, as if there were nothing between me and eternity. Yet, I had thrust 135 136 In Their Shoes myself into this vastness. I had sought to expose my loneliness , not to deny it. At Gallup, New Mexico, I turned north. After another hour's drive, I arrived in Window Rock, Arizona, where I checked into a small motel and began to orient myself. I was in the capital ofwhat is called Navajoland, a "nation" inhabited by Indians that stretches west from Gallup to the Colorado River and from Flagstaff in Arizona on the south to Utah and the Four Corners on the north. Once inside Navajoland, I was at least two hundred miles from any place I could find on my Anglo map. The reservation, set aside by an 1868 treaty, sprawls across twenty-five thousand square miles, about the size of West Virginia. In this "nation" the Indians have their own legislature, police and courts. Yet Navajos are also American citizens, and tribal members have served in state legislatures. With a population of one hundred fifty thousand when I went there, the Navajo tribe is the largest Indian tribe in North America. They call themselves Dine, meaning The People. Driving throughout the reservation, I began to meet native Americans. In time, through one Indian woman, Evelyn Silentman, I came to know Bessie Yellowhair, twenty-four, bright-eyed, enthusiastic, energetic, with a sturdy, straight, ample body. Bessie said if I wanted to know more about a typical Navajo family, I would be welcome to stay awhile with her family. I readily accepted the invitation to move in with her family, who lived in a hogan, a circular home made of mud and sticks, about forty miles out from Tuba City, Arizona. After I moved in with the Yellowhairs, I was one of fourteen people, eating and sleeping in an area about the size ofa bedroom in the average white family's home. The hogan had no furniture other than one stove used for cooking as well as for heating . We all slept on the dirt floor with sheepskins beneath and above us. And all of us slept in our clothes, for the warmth they provided. Since there were no windows, the Living as an Indian on the Navajo Reservation 137 inside of the hogan usually was as dark as a dungeon. When I waked each morning, I wanted to start pushing buttons to turn on some lights, to turn on some heat. But in the hogan, there was nothing to turn on-no gas, no electricity, no phones, no running water. To get water, we went by horse-drawn wagon thirty miles to the nearest windmill. Bessie Yellowhair's father, Bahe, and her mother, Harriet, were shepherds. Indeed, the Yellowhairs, like most Navajos, built their entire way of life around sheep. They ate the meat from sheep and made clothes and their beautiful Navajo rugs from the wool. But being a shepherd in Navajoland, as I learned by...