The Road Through Dinétah

“Thank you mister. Now you know someone from the reservation.” Lester Tall Rock smiled and shook my hand through the passenger window. Two dogs then walked across the red dust to greet him as I backed the car away from the Hogan his grandfather had built. Lester was returning from a tech school in Flagstaff for his great Aunt’s funeral. When we drove up he was momentarily distraught. “I missed it, they had a ceremony last night for Father’s Day. I missed it.”

When I picked him up, he was standing on the side of the quiet highway just east of Tuba City. It was 6:30 AM. He had only a small black backpack. As I made room in the front seat he asked, “Kayenta?” Lester had not been drinking, something I was a little worried about at first. The Reservation can be a rough place. He was short for Navajo and had dark green tattoos visible beneath his shirt cuff climbing the inside of his wrist toward his dark leathery hands. His hair was short and I guessed he was in his mid-twenties. He told me his mother’s clan came from the intermarriage of a Navajo and a Hopi, “That’s why I’m short.” Lester had been hitchhiking since he was 13.

He was a reader. I told him that I first learned about the Dinetah, the Reservation, from Tony Hillerman books. He grinned. “Joe Leaphorn! Those are good books. You know the author lived in Kayenta. I read all those books. I like Sherman Alexie too, and James Patterson. As we were driving Lester told me one of his grandfather’s just drove by. 68 and still works for Peabody Coal on Black Mesa that flanked the south of the highway.

Lester pointed out Skeleton Mesa, the Toes – a formation he had climbed to the top of. He pointed out the Gorilla (El Capitan) and said he wanted to climb it too, but he knew some Navajo friends that got thrown out of there from the other Navajo that live there. He told me about finding pottery shards on one rock face. “We leave them alone when we see that. It might be from a burial or something so we just walk away.”

We passed a sign that said Revival. I asked him if he went to them. He shook his head. “They don’t really like us, they are some kind of Christians or Mormans and don’t like that we use fire or something, they think fire is bad.” Lester was part of the Azée Bee Nahagha. The Navajo version of the Native American Church (NAC). I knew just enough to know it was somewhat popular in the Southwest. I asked him if they grew the Peyote on the Res. “Now we go to Texas to get Peyote. We used to go to Mexico and bring back a whole truck full but you can’t do that now.” I aksed if anyone abused it. “No. You don’t take too much, but sometimes you get high and see things. But we only take it during the ceremony.”

Lester said the old way of making sand paintings and doing sings for people was starting to go away. But part of the Blessing Way ceremony is now done in Dine NAC ceremonies. “It [NAC] was started by Quanah Parker, like a 100 years ago. Some Navajo went to Oklahoma and they gave it to us but said to make it our own. The young people they are not learning the old ways like they used to. It’s hard to do sandpainting and the sings. You have to get them perfect. A lot of time to learn.”

"This white guy from New Mexico was at the last ceremony I went to, he was pushing the logs around the fire. He sang good too, some Cheyenne songs. I want to learn some of them songs, they are really pretty and similar to Navajo. Cheyenne is another Athabasca language, like Navajo. I'd never been to a ceremony with other races. The Cheyenne, they allow that so my uncle let him come. Women, they can sing too, but not the Kiowas or the Apache. They don’t let women do that.”

Lester had been coming back to the Res every week for ceremonies but said his school work was suffering so he had to scale it back. I asked if one day if he wanted to be a roadman. “My uncle says learn these songs because one day you will sing them. He thinks I will. But he wants me to learn from my Grandfather. He has been all over, Alaska, Hawaii doing ceremonies so he wants me to learn from him. But when I’m not working I have the songs downloaded on my phone so I just put my headphones on so I can learn them." His uncle seemed worried about Lester moving back to the Res, a dangerous place for him I gathered, so being a roadman would be a challenge for Lester because he commutes from Flagstaff without a car. He said the reservation would always be home, but said he wanted to move far away.

Lester told me about his daughter whom he had not seen for five years and finally saw last week. He was just 17 when his high school girlfriend got pregnant. She said she was from over in New Mexico so I was sure we weren’t related. Then we went to visit her grandmother after she was pregnant. And we kept driving and driving and I said, You sure its over here? We were on the other side of Kayenta we stopped. I said my grandfather’s mom lives over here too. So we are related. By clan. Not second or third cousin, like tenth. But some say the kid doesn’t come out right if you are related but I don’t think so - and some say it doesn’t matter. She says my kid is doing good in school.”

Lester still cared about her. "She wanted me to come back the next day but I said I got school, I gotta go. Navajo women are pretty, but I want to go to Oklahoma and find me a Ponca woman. We could run from the tornados together on the prairie. Nah, we would move somewhere else…”