22. 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 I 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 uncontrollably—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.

"WANTED," the ad said, "loving Navajo babysitter for three children, six, four and two."

I asked Bessie Yellowhair if I might borrow some of her clothes—even her name. I rode a bus out to Irvine, California, and the woman who hired me met me. When we arrived at her large home she gave me her first rule: The children, she said, are never allowed in her bedroom.

On the reservation I had seen an almost complete absence of things. But in that large house I saw an abundance of things, an absence of love.

Sometimes people ask, what was more difficult—living for a moment in time as a "black" woman or as Bessie Yellowhair? The Indian experience was more difficult. For my "Soul Sister" experience, I had changed myself with make-up. I had changed the color of my eyes, the color of my hair, the color of my skin. But I was always me, raised with the same values and judgments all of us—black and white—have grown to share in this country. We've been taught the work ethic; we've been taught to want the good things in life, as we define them: good salary, good house, good car, a good carpet on the floor. None of us really wants to go back to sleeping on dirt floors.

But the Indian, if he remains Indian, is tied to the land. He worships the land, which he calls his Mother Earth. He never attempts to conquer nature, but to live in harmony with it. He wishes to be like a fish in the sea, a bird on the wind: to pass by without leaving a trace of his existence. Being, not achieving, is important.

The Indians have not lost what is basic: They have a "connection" to all of life. They see, smell, hear, taste—with a directness of perception.

Many young people are saying: let's learn from the Indians, let's look at their values, let's respect nature. They see that in our attempt to conquer nature, we have polluted our streams, our air.

The Indians have stressed cooperation, and we have stressed competition and look at our waste: those sent to homes for the mentally ill, those sent to prisons, the old who are sent to nursing homes.

Should you ask Bessie Yellowhair, What is your religion? That would be the same as asking, What is your life? Religion is all of life. Religion is being in harmony with nature. A church, then, can be as little as you want it or as big as all humanity.

Let me share with you My Truth. It is this: I try to abandon myself—to my life. I know that no one—on one church, no one creed, no one government—has Truth for me. I have to find my own. I do not assume that Life has a meaning. Already written out. For all of us. I do not ask: What is the meaning of Life? Rather, what is the meaning of my life?

Out in the vastness of land and sky, you can look out infinitely, into space, and somehow you can see so far that you begin to see—inside of you. And there is your happiness.

From Human Dimensions in Nonfiction,

ed., Woolf, New Jersey, 1979.