SouthWest (Re)Connection

I decided to take a drive across Indian Country, across the Navajo Rez and the Hopi mesas.

I didn't know where I would end up, wasn't certain when I would return. I didn't quite know the direction I would take and wasn't too concerned when my iPhone GPS lost the signal. I figured at some point I would pick up a Hopi or Navajo thumbing for a ride and gain a bit more local perspective. I assumed I would find a safe place to camp. I expected to see a ruin in a cliff at some point and some fields of corn being dry farmed. I eventually turned right on Peabody Coal Access Road, passing many signs for high voltage, jet black mountains of coal. I listened to Hopi radio that would fade in and out, native singing and drumming mixed with NPR news of Clinton and Trump as signals crossed.

Just before arriving at First Mesa mid-morning I saw a Hopi in the wash next to the highway. He ran forward with his thumb up as I passed so I stopped. He carried with him a garbage bag full of cans and a grey hoodie sweatshirt that held more. He placed them in the back seat on top of my backpacks. Dirt streamed out of a torn corner of the black trash bag. He jumped in the front seat. "Thanks Mister, my name is Leeland. I'm just going to that double wide trailer up at the junction - that's my house. I been collecting cans for two days. I spent 12$ on propane yesterday so I been finding cans. I guy comes from Winslow Wednesdays and Thursdays to buy them- ain't no jobs out here so..." When he stepped out to the highway again a couple miles later we shook hands. He said that when I came through next time and needed a place to stay I was welcome.

At the edge of another day as the shadows grew longer I talked with Darlene. She was selling juniper bead bracelets and pottery from the back of her Ford pickup truck. I just got divorced I told her, so I didn't think I had anyone to buy for. "If you are just divorced then you probably need protection." She laughed and picked up a ghost bead charm. I bought a tiny handmade pot that told the story of the Canyon in ancient symbols and color.

What spurred this sojourn were the remembered words from a favorite but long forgotten author who said the words "It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen." NSM

Even after many years not visiting the secret folds of the Southwest these places are still alive in me. My body remembers when I return...

To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.

N. Scott Momaday

images ©Bennett Barthelemy October 2016

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…”