Living as a Navajo
People in different cultures have different ways of life and different value systems.This essay captures the essence of the Navajo culture viewed from an American perspective.
I grew up hearing about Indians from my father, who was born in 1860, when we still called some of the United States "Indian territory. " My father fought and killed Indians; he thought it was his duty to win the West: He later told me: It was their land. We took it. We gave the Indians a choice: be bleached white --- or die.
The Navajos were pushed back and put on a reservation (another word for prison) on lands that the whites deemed worthless.
And there they have remained, until now quite isolated .
I went to live with the Navajos in early 1972. The reservation is a vast land, stretching west out from Albuquerque to
the Grand Canyon and from near Tucson and Phoenix on the south to near Salt Lake City on the north. Once you are on the
reservation, you are at least 200 miles from any place you've ever heard of.
I became acquainted with a young woman, Bessie Yellowhair, and l lived with her family, in a hogan---shaped like an igloo and made of mud and sticks. Bahe Yellowhair, the father, and the entire family are
shepherds. The Navajos build their entire way of life around sheep : they eat the meat from sheep, they make their
clothes and their beautiful Navajo rugs from sheep. But it is a hard life: It can take as many as 40 acres to graze
only one sheep. The land, however, is spectacularly beautiful. It is not land so much as high mountain ranges, canyons,
gorges, all rock and sand. Seeing it, you feel awed, shocked by its magnitude. It is like being alone in a small boat
on a vast ocean: It is a spiritual experience .
When I lived with the Yellowhair family, I was one of the 14 people living in an area about the size of your bedroom. There is no furniture in the hogan: only one stove used for cooking, for heating.
You sleep on dirt floors, on sheepskins. When you wake up, you don't need to get dressed, because you have slept in your clothes. There are no windows in the hogan; it's dark as a dungeon.
When you wake up, you want to start turning things on: you want to turn on some lights, you want to turn on some heat. But there is nothing to turn on: no gas, no electricity, no phones, no running water. To get water, you go by horse-drawn wagon 30 miles to the nearest windmill.
Suppose you are Bahe Yellowhair, a man, or Bessie Yellowhair, a young woman, and you get sick. You never say: my head hurts, my feet hurt, my stomach hurts. The Navajo never separates the mind from the body. He says: "I feel bad all over. "
First you call in a Hand Trembler. He puts himself in a trance, his arm shakes un-controllably----and he diagnoses your case.
Maybe you've stepped on a snake or got too close to a tree struck by lightning. He prescribes a certain healing ceremony.
Then you call in a Medicine Man, who is priest, psychologist, doctor. Your family sits in a circle inside the hogan.
The Medicine Man prays, chants --- he partially undresses you, stains your face with paint, he paints snakes on your feet.
A group of old men keep praying and singing --- and this can go on for nine days. The visitor feels mesmerized,
taken back a thousand years in time.
The Medicine Man prays to the Holy people --- the good and the evil --- that you will be put back in harmony with nature. The Medicine Man knows that he must cure the whole person --- mentally, spiritually, physically.
Being an Indian is not having a certain skin color: It is not anything on the outside, but rather a way of viewing life.
Bessie Yellowhair told me she had gone to work for a white family in California. It had been difficult for her: She missed the birds, the plants, the animals of Navajo-land. City noises and dirt and smog and pollution attacked her violently. I wanted to understand what it means for an Indian, who is quiet, passive, peaceful, to enter into our aggressive, loud, materialistic world. One day I saw an ad, such as the one Bessie Yellowhair had answered ."
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