Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

by Glenn Dixon

  He looked up quickly. “How did you know that?” I sensed a little edge in his voice now, and I thought for a moment that this was something I shouldn’t have asked about. This time I really was parking, so to speak, on sacred land.

  “Those are words we use in our ceremonies,” he said. He didn’t correct my pronunciation and he didn’t seem as if he wanted to say more about it. On the other hand, he didn’t seem ready to grab my hamburger and tell me to get lost. I changed the subject, and we chatted about things that were a little less personal … a little less sacred.

  Later I watched their Winnebago trundle off across the field, throwing up a cloud of dust behind it. They had a long way to go home — three or four days of straight driving. Now they could follow the blacktop all the way down, but a thousand years ago, more or less, the Navajo really would have moved south from here, right through here. It might have taken a few hundred years to get all the way to Arizona, stopping here and there, adapting to new ways of life. But something kept the Navajo pushing farther and farther down the continent. Something made these Dene speakers finally lose the ways of the ice and snow, lose the ways of the buffalo and come, at last, to the canyon lands of the far south.

  I should say here that most Navajo, and I suspect a fair number of Dene and Tsuu T’ina people, won’t be happy with all this talk of migration. It doesn’t help with legal land claims. Many First Nations peoples have oral histories and creation stories saying they’ve always been in the same place, and they surely have for many hundreds of years. I’m just saying that the linguistic records — and a few of their own oral histories, such as Helen Meguinis’s lovely story — point to a long, slow movement down the continent. Again we’re talking slow here, over hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of years. So the point is kind of moot.

  An even longer record, the DNA one, shows that all peoples move, given enough time. People travelled from Africa into Asia. Some looped from there into Europe. Others, out on the far edges of Asia, moved at last into the new continents of North and South America. And so it goes. We’re a wandering species. We go where the food is cheap and the weather is bearable. We just don’t go very quickly.

  The Navajo are now the largest First Nation in the United States. Dinétah, or the land of the Diné people — the Navajo — stretches over the four corners between Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. It’s a reservation as big as some states.

  Navajo is thought to be a Spanish term, possibly from the archaic Spanish word nava, meaning “secluded valley,” something like the Old English dell or vale. A document from 1620 refers to the Navajo as the Apachu de Nabajo. Their lands now encompass about seventeen million acres, covering most of the so-called Colorado Plateau, a high desert of red rock canyons and waterfalls, of rattlesnakes and sandstone arches under a brilliant deep blue sky.

  The Navajo language has somewhere between one hundred and twenty thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand speakers, making it one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in all of North America. It’s also one of the most carefully documented. One of its early proponents, in fact, was Benjamin Whorf.

  “The world,” Whorf wrote, “is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.”

  Like the colour studies, many tests were done on Navajo speakers, but pretty much all of them failed to show that a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can exist. After all, Noam Chomsky and his crew have pretty much shown that grammars — all grammars — are simply variations of something fundamental, something that’s hardwired into the brain of each and every human being no matter what language they speak.

  But there’s much more to language than grammar, and there’s got to be something in the ideas of Sapir and Whorf. It’s just a matter of common sense to believe that when we think in a language — English, say — the peculiarities of that language may serve to shape our thoughts … or if not our thoughts exactly, something about our way of being in the world. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says we can’t think outside of the box that is our language. A more acceptable theory is simply to admit there is a box, whether or not we think outside of it.

  And that’s the essence of linguistic relativity.

  From the town of Santa Fe in New Mexico you can see a silver line of mountains — the Sangre de Cristo range. These mountains are the southernmost spur of the Rocky Mountains. It’s here that the spine of the continent finally peters out.

  I’d come down in January, hoping to escape winter. The photos I’d seen of New Mexico showed a red rock desert with stunted spruces and cactus-like shrubbery. It was a pretty, sun-splashed place, so I was a little surprised to step off the airplane and into an icy blast of wind. What I hadn’t counted on was the altitude. Sante Fe is more than two thousand metres high. While the afternoons at least approximated warmth, the mornings and evenings were bone-crackingly cold.

  I’d come down to meet up with an old friend once again. Lesley, the English doctor, the one I’d travelled through Italy with, was here visiting her father. He was a physicist from Oxford University, and he, too, had his reasons for being here.

  Lesley picked me up at the airport, and we drove down into the centre of the old town. We walked into the central plaza. At one end is the Palace of the Governors, an old adobe structure that dates back to 1610. Out front, under a colonnade, a long line of women hunched under blankets, selling copper and turquoise jewellery. Most of them were Pueblo Indian, but a few were Hopi, and a couple of the women at one end were Navajo.

  We shuffled along, looking at their wares. I bought a few things, and we chatted merrily with the old women. They all had faces that were darkened and cracked by the sun, but their nimble hands darted over the blankets, offering up this or that piece of jewellery. I asked them about the designs and found out that many of them were hundreds of years old, shapes that were carved into the rock in the surrounding canyons, petroglyphs of strange humpbacked stick figures, of turtles and rabbits and eagles. One set of earrings had a spiral pattern that was the Hopi symbol of migration.

  Lesley and I pored over the stuff, buying bits and baubles for the people back home. A man in the square was roasting corn over a brazier, and that got me thinking again. The Navajo root word for corn is . It’s a word that didn’t exist for the Northern Dene or the Tsuu T’ina. The entire concept of agriculture simply didn’t exist on the northern plains, but it’s central to the Navajo (and to the Hopi, of course), so here was another little litmus test for language. Corn is as basic to these people’s lifestyles as the buffalo were to the Tsuu T’ina. It’s the very building block of their culture.

  The Navajo still have a word for buffalo — ayání — a term closely related to the old Tsuu T’ina. Evidently, it’s a word that followed the southward migration of the Dene people, even though there are no buffalo in the Navajo lands.

  Lesley and I went over to where the man was selling roasted corncobs, and Lesley turned to me. “Did you know,” she asked, “that the Hopi have over a hundred words for corn?”

  “Oh, good God!” I groaned.

  “What?” Lesley looked at me, puzzled. “What did I say?”

  We drove north and west of Santa Fe, past a place called Los Alamos. It’s right on the edge of the Navajo lands. Even as we wound down the road toward it, something about the name jogged at my memory. Los Alamos. Why did that sound so familiar? Then it came to me.

  Los Alamos is where Americans built and exploded the first atomic bomb. During the dying days of the Second World War, Robert Oppenheimer and his team unleashed a new kind of weapon, one that forever changed the world.

  Los Alamos today is an unremarkable little town. Two fingers of land — the south mesa and the north mesa — stick
out over a series of dusty ravines. At the edge of the south mesa the Los Alamos National Laboratory still rises above the hoodoos. It continues to draw some of the top physicists in the world, and yes, there’s still a lot of research being done on nuclear weapons, though they don’t actually explode them here anymore. Given the times, there’s a lot of security. The research facilities are very much off limits and very top secret.

  Of course, anyone who’s ever read much about the Second World War knows that it was a conflict won thanks to superior technological development — well, superior technological development and knowing what the other guy was up to. Spying and code-breaking played almost as big a role as the technology, and one of the best of these stories involved the Navajo.

  In 1942, even before the Manhattan Project was initiated, the Navajo were enlisted in the war effort in a way no one possibly could have imagined. Twenty-nine Navajo men were recruited to put together a code that was never broken by the Germans or the Japanese. These Navajo men were known as Windtalkers. That name comes from the Navajo word for wind — honí3ch’i — which also refers to a person’s soul or life force.

  The code they developed consisted of two parts: a sort of alphabet based on Navajo words and a short dictionary of manufactured slang. The alphabet part worked in much the same way that military radio operators have always worked. “Alpha” stands for the letter A. “Charlie” stands for C, and so on. Now the Navajo code took that a step farther, using Navajo translations so that A became wol-la-chee, which is the Navajo word for ant. B became shush, or bear in Navajo. C became moasi, the Navajo word for cat.

  To make things run more quickly, though, a list of common words was drawn up and coded into an invented slang. A bomb in the Windtalker code became a-ye-shi, which in Navajo means “egg.” A fighter plane was da-he-tih-hi, “hummingbird,” and a tank was chayda gahi, “tortoise.” For the navy a battleship was lo-tso, “whale,” while a destroyer was ca-lo, “shark,” and a submarine was besh-lo, literally “iron fish.”

  After the war, it took a long time for the Navajo Windtalkers to be recognized. The code was kept officially classified until 1968, and it wasn’t until 1981 that the Navajo part in the war was formally honoured. Many of the Windtalkers (and there were almost four hundred of them by the end of the war) died without receiving any sort of military pension. But their part in the war effort was enormous. The code played a huge role in campaigns such as the Battle of Iwo Jima. It was used right until the end of the war when two very big “eggs,” atomic bombs, were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Languages really are a sort of code, one that a set number of people have agreed upon, whether it’s a few dozen Tsuu T’ina speakers, a hundred thousand Navajo, or five hundred million English speakers.

  “Every language,” Benjamin Whorf wrote, “is a vast pattern-system … by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, channels its reasoning, and builds the house of consciousness.” It’s those last three words that are important —House of Consciousness.

  Each language is different. They encode things from our particular environments like snow or buffalo or corn, but it’s more than that. There are subtleties in the understandings. There are metaphors, connotations, and social constructions that go far beyond the simple assigning of a word to a thing.

  And that’s the point. Our thinking isn’t constrained by our language — there are just too many other semiotic systems at play — but our language is the central encoder and processor of the information that our brains receive from the outside world. It’s the frame for our House of Consciousness. It’s the load-bearing wall, and as such it helps to create our immediate personal experience of the world, our phenomenological sense of our everyday lives. It’s the world we inhabit and the very root of linguistic relativity. It is, once again, our Palace of Words.

  The Navajo are still a large and powerful group of people. They’ve managed to hang on to many of their ceremonial systems in the face of a strange new world, a realm of skyscrapers and nuclear weapons. Many Navajo continue to live in mud-walled hogans … and their code hasn’t been broken yet.

  The Navajo belief system is unbelievably complex. Even different groups within the Navajo community approach things in slightly different ways. But perhaps that’s how it should be. There’s nothing neat and tidy about life. Defining whole worlds can’t help but get a bit messy.

  There’s at least one thing, though, that all Navajo would recognize, and that’s the singular importance of the phrase S1’áh naagháí bik’eh hózhó — the same phrase I tried out at the Navajo barbecue in Alberta with the guys in the Winnebago. I didn’t know it then, but it turns out that the phrase is a textbook case of linguistic relativity. It’s almost impossible to adequately translate it into English but, seeing as I’m already into it up to my eyeballs, I’ll give it my best shot.

  Now bear with me here.

  is a derivative of the past tense verb to grow or to mature. Naagháí, meanwhile, is one of about 356,200 distinct inflected forms of the verb to go (it’s the singular form of the third person of the continuative-imperfective mode, if you really want to know), and it refers to a continuous going about and returning. When talking about a person, it means unendingly walking around, the metaphor being that we walk through life. Bik’eh is the simplest of the words in the phrase. It just means “according to” or “by its decree.”

  And then there’s hózhó which, in truth, would take pages and pages of English to even come close to describing. Hózhó is often translated as “beauty,” though it’s much more than that. It includes everything that a Navajo thinks of as being good. Beauty, yes, but also perfection, harmony, goodness, normality, success, well-being, and order … an idea perhaps not unlike the Chinese concept of Tao.

  So a simple translation of the entire phrase — one that leaves out all the allusions and connotations, all the richness of a thousand years of experience — would be something akin to a wish to unendingly move along a path of goodness well into one’s maturity and old age.

  The phrase is the centrepiece of one of the most important of all Navajo ceremonies — what in English is called the Blessingway chant. The Blessingway chant goes on for days, and it’s designed to right the world, to bring the world or the individual back into balance, back into harmony and goodness.

  The full phrase, though, isn’t only for religious ceremonies. It’s also used in everyday Navajo life. A Navajo uses this concept to express his happiness and his health. It’s employed to remind people to be careful, and a shortened version of it is even used to say goodbye to someone.

  To be poetic (because sometimes poetry can do things that normal prose can’t), we might even reduce it all to this: “May you always walk the trail of beauty.”

  And that’s something I like very much.

  We all walk, I suppose, down these long trails of beauty, these long lines of history. We have been cast across continents and oceans and we have named them all. We have conjured up countless worlds in a thousand different tongues.

  We are symbol-smiths. We are the spinners of tales. We are the builders — and memory keepers — of entire civilizations. And with our languages we call ourselves into being and sparkle, for a time, like stars over a dark and silent world.

  Epilogue: The Unimaginable Future

  I’ve been through more than fifty countries now. I’ve been caught in snowstorms and lost in jungles. I’ve been attacked by sharks and mauled by dogs, but my most terrifying adventure was yet to come. I was going to teach teenagers. My job would be to work with immigrant kids at a high school in Calgary. I was going to teach them English.

  I got ready early in the morning before the first class, practising my lines in front of the mirror. “Good morning, everybody,” I would say. I would write my name in neat, chalky lines on the blackboard. Twenty pairs of eyes would look up at me and twenty young sets of minds would rip me to shreds. I was sure of it.

  When they s
huffled into the classroom under the buzz of fluorescent lights, though, they were even more apprehensive than I was. Rupinder, a girl from the Punjab, arrived in a flash of colour, wearing her best sari. Two girls from Afghanistan hid under their head scarves. I couldn’t get them to look up. Omojok and another boy came from Sudan. They had nothing. They’d never even been to a real school before. All of them sat hesitantly, their eyes darting nervously around the classroom.

  A Chinese girl, Xi Chen, sat with two sisters from Vietnam. The boys sat in clumps at the back. Some of the students spoke a little English. Rupinder had learned English in India. A few others, knowing they would be coming to Canada, had picked up what they could from American movies and magazines. Still, they were caught off guard by the reality of it all: the brick walls, the strangely pale teacher, the posters of Garfield the cat left behind by a well-meaning teacher long ago. I caught a few of the students glancing at the posters. Why was there a cat talking? What was it saying and who taught it how to stand up?

  Omojok and the other boy, Keyak, came from southern Sudan. Their dark faces were empty of emotion. Not even confusion was there. Their faces were simply blank. They had a language in common, Nuer — something I’d never heard of — but even that was neither of their mother tongues. Omojok spoke a tribal language called Shilluk. It’s spoken along the western banks of the Upper Nile. Keyak, meanwhile, spoke Dinka, the traditional language of the cattle herders in the grasslands.

  Xi Chen, from China, had been educated in Mandarin, but her first language was really Suixi, a dialect from the south. A couple of more kids were from Afghanistan. They spoke neither Arabic nor Farsi (what we call Persian). Instead, they only knew the language of the mountain passes behind Kabul — a language called Pashtu.