by Kurt Caswell
Why was I leaving such beauty? Did I really want to go? Was Arizona really going to be any better? At the risk of making too much of it, of being overly dramatic, perhaps I was leaving simply because I was born to travel, because I wanted to be born to travel anyway, because I was a romantic, because settling down makes you fat and dull and ugly, because the mind is made alive by seeing, observing, experiencing the new and unknown, because I feared seeing, observing, and experiencing the new and unknown and I couldn’t allow that fear to rule me, because movement somehow cures sadness and loneliness, because the hardships of the road make you strong, because I couldn’t sit still, because I was searching for home and I hadn’t found it, because like Kuma, the blue heeler, I had to cover ground, because like the birds of migration I was compelled to go, because, as Robert Louis Stevenson put it, “The great affair is to move.” I felt ready to settle my accounts with Borrego, to leave behind what was not mine, to leave the desert to itself.
I opened the little box. The potsherds lay nested inside each other like the petals of a flower. I selected a few from the top. In my hand, the smooth and shining pieces looked at once familiar and new. I saw markings on them I’d never seen before: chips in the surfaces, a roughness about their edges, shapes that reminded me of certain states (Nebraska, Oregon, New York), even the silhouette of a mountain. Which mountain, I did not know. I’d missed so much detail when I collected them. I wondered if I’d ever inspected these few. Had I ever really seen them?
I emptied the box of potsherds onto the dry ground. I sorted through them, making little piles of ones I liked, and ones I didn’t like so much. I returned several of the pieces I didn’t like so much to the wash. They seemed to go right in, like they wanted to be here. I returned several more, and a few more again, but the most beautiful ones, the ones I liked, and the big one I found that day with Kuma, could I really let those go? Maybe I would take them with me. After all, I wasn’t going to keep them forever. I’d be here only a half dozen decades more, give or take a few years, and these chips of fired clay were going to last until the end. Or was this merely a trick to satisfy some other desire? I returned all the other potsherds to Borrego, and those few beauties I put back into the box to take with me.
Walking now with Kuma, we followed along the sandstone walls, golden in the sun, and made our way from the arroyo around the sandstone edge and into the shaded grotto among the junipers and the cactus. This is Borrego. A red-tailed hawk wheeled in the sky overhead. A few clouds sifted by on the wind. And this is Borrego. The light of the sun flashed at crystals in the rock as Kuma ran a pattern around the edge of the cliffs, weaving in and out of my view. And this is Borrego. I wanted to go on and follow the trail up to the mesa top again, to make that country clear and perfect in my mind and in my heart. I was also ready to go, ready to leave this place. I stopped and stood there in the sun, taking in its warmth, taking in the view, taking in the desert beautiful. Maybe for the last time.
I waited for Kuma to make his rounds. I waited, a little anxious, as if lingering too long would somehow be impolite. In the silence there among the rocks, I heard the wind. I heard Kuma’s feet drumming the dry ground. In the distance, I thought I heard the sharpened barks of coyotes, those dream notes that first sang me into the desert at Borrego.
“Ku-ma,” I called. “Ku-ma,” I called again.
He appeared suddenly at my side, ready.
REX LEE JIM
AFTERWORD
In your hand is the narrative of a difficult journey by a white teacher through Navajo Country. We have all taken this journey in our own ways. Sometimes we need to walk in worlds other than our own to learn more about ourselves.
Ultimately Kurt Caswell seeks hózhó, “a state of harmony, balance, and beauty between male and female, between the Self and community, between community and the universe,” as he explores several landscapes while teaching at Borrego Pass School. His is the story of a human being journeying through a human country.
Mr. Caswell’s experience is shaped by his worldview. After reading In the Sun’s House, I thought about my own experience as a Navajo student learning from white teachers at the Rock Point Community School. I remember one male white teacher telling me that, with my attitude, I would end up sitting outside the local store asking for quarters. With degrees from prestigious universities, today I ask for hundreds of millions of dollars in Washington, D.C., which would make certain white teachers proud. Quarters or millions—that’s the difference. How I dress when I ask, and whom I ask—that’s the difference. The reason I ask would be similar. It’s all a matter of perspective, rooted in our values.
At one point Mr. Caswell wonders why Navajos choose to stay home instead of going on to higher learning or finding decent paying jobs, why they end up having babies and standing in the welfare line at the first of each month, why they do not live prosperous, rich family lives, prosperous, rich Navajo lives. He never sees it. That is so unfortunate. Indeed, Navajo life is a life of celebration. We celebrate when a child is born, when he or she first laughs and comes of age. We perform traditional and contemporary ceremonies and games yearround, singing, dancing, laughing, and eating. We honor national holidays, even Columbus Day, using it as an excuse to be with relatives. In fact, when I was in grade school, we all looked forward to the annual Song and Dance Festival at our school, where Borrego Pass students came and won. They still do so today. I hate to think that Mr. Caswell was never exposed to these talented and competent young people, and to the people who taught them, the families who offered such enriching and nourishing environments.
Borrego Pass is a community school where the locally elected school board works with parents to develop a culturally relevant curriculum, which consists of courses in the Navajo language, history, and culture. Again, it is unfortunate that Mr. Caswell was never exposed to the minds and lives of the people who developed and fought for such a curriculum. Taking on the federal government and the Navajo Nation to ensure that your children have access to a Navajo education is, after all, not an easy task.
Then again, any journey that is “for reals” is not an easy task. The twenty-six-year-old Caswell, with no real belief in education, would learn its true meaning, educare—in Latin, “to draw from within.” His walks force him to dig deep within to respond to the demands of the external landscapes of the New Mexican desert, the Navajo students, and the stories of the Navajo, which ultimately become aspects of his own unexplored internal territory. He understands this in the context of literature, writing that when we read, “we discover that the foreign is not so foreign after all, that we are in fact reading a story about ourselves.” This applies to Navajo stories, too: they open doors to the inner depth.
Walking the desert eventually teaches Mr. Caswell that he is wandering his internal landscape, one as harsh and honest as the desert he comes to regard as beautiful. Of one of his walks, he writes, “Standing between these sunburned walls, I listened to the greatest silence I had ever known.” I, too, have walked in the silence of the desert. When you hear the greatest silence, you realize there is no such silence. For from within the depth of that silence, you hear your very own heart beat, your own breathing. Life! I am alive! And yet within seconds you realize that in this intense moment life is fragile and vulnerable. Death! You could die! Mr. Caswell expresses this in his own words: “I had that troubled, happy feeling that comes when you know the perfection of the moment cannot last, and what will come later is going to be hard, painful even, perhaps a kind of trial you might just fail.” Yet he continues walking, feeling free and happy and complete. He paints the desert with words that give new forms of life to the landscape, stirring old and new emotions even for those of us who call this land home. I hope that as you walk with Mr. Caswell, you, too, will stop for those human moments where you realize that you are a spiritual being having a human experience. Treasure those moments.
Mr. Caswell came totally unprepared for wandering the landscape of Navajo stude
nts. But who is ever really prepared for encounters with people from very different cultures? This landscape is as challenging as and perhaps even more rewarding than the land itself. His first encounter with a student questions his very essence, as well as his presence at Borrego: “You wanna be an Indian?” His experiences of other people and other places didn’t prepare him for kids who grew up in a harsh environment. His temper surfaces more quickly and more intensely than he has ever experienced. To survive and thrive in Navajo country, you must learn to laugh at yourself—and to laugh through your negative experiences. The clanship structure allows for a kinship with varying degrees of teasing. An individual may be my sister or brother because we belong to the same clan or because we are born for the same clan. How we become related determines how we can tease one another or play practical jokes on one another. These interactions play out in Mr. Caswell’s classroom in ways that would have enlivened the classroom environment. But in looking through his own cultural lens, Mr. Caswell judges some students’ comments and teasing critiques as rude and cruel, and his reaction makes engaging the young minds that much more difficult.
Laughing Woman, my paternal grandmother, never understood why contemporary homes had restrooms in the same building where people slept and ate—that’s what animals did, not humans. The “dilapidated things” are homes where the people eat, sleep, tell stories, tease one another, laugh, and live. Most ceremonies, where the people communicate with the gods and the sick get well, take place in these homes. Laughing Woman informed us that we must always have a fire going in the hooghan, so we did; that we must always have water, so we did; that we must keep our home clean at all times, so we did; that we must have food in case someone showed up, so we did. But more importantly, she related to each of us as shinálí, as her paternal grandchildren. Along with it came the teasing and the funny stories she loved to tell. We ate, slept, loved, listened to stories, and laughed in these “sad dwellings” where the human spirit is alive and strong. And the Borrego Pass folks participate in these activities too.
After putting the book down, I invited several non-Navajo teachers from our school to cultural activities at my house. Several showed up, and a lot of learning took place. More Navajos need to open their homes to non-Navajo teachers who make sacrifices to help our children. Schools within the Navajo community also need to develop mentoring programs for new teachers and work with local people and colleges to offer courses and cultural activities. There always will be those few, of course, who come simply for personal gain. But more come sincere in their desire to help, and we need to welcome them as a people. With such programs in place, Mr. Caswell would not have to ask, “Why would a community like this one offer this dark part of itself to me, a stranger, and hide its best qualities?”
He writes: “The place, Borrego Pass, in all its antagonisms, touched me, took hold of me, and wouldn’t let me go. I found myself caring more than I ever wanted. And in caring, I had to face my feelings of failure with these kids.” And so, with all the dark antagonisms in this book—as the experiences of Mr. Caswell seem to be—the people cling to you until you learn to care about them and their land.
As much as I admire Mr. Caswell’s ability to portray the desert landscape in vivid detail, he falters, like many before him, in his attempt to interpret Navajo stories and beliefs. His dependence on non-Navajo scholars, who themselves relied on translators with limited English and cultural proficiencies, for further interpretation resulted in similar conclusions that fit a Western scholar’s paradigm. As a Blessing Way Singer, almost every weekend I sing the protection songs of the Bear and the Coyote and pray their protection prayers for Navajos of all ages. Coyote is alive and well during the winter season, constantly entertaining and teaching young listeners. Bear forever instructs and protects in the depth of the sweat lodge, where sacred stories, songs, and prayers are shared. The Monsters with Killer Eyes are everywhere, too; in fact, they shamed Mr. Caswell into putting down mirrors at his home in Borrego Pass.
And yet, although the stories are foreign, they helped shape the “Air-Spirit” Kurt Caswell into a better man. He awakens to a reality that only a deep commitment to self can allow: “At Borrego when I looked for the light, I always came up with more darkness. I felt the loss of this belief in America very powerfully, and I acknowledged that I had lived for all my years in the fog of an illusion.” Earlier he informs us that he is rich because he has the power to choose to pursue wealth. We are fortunate that he chooses to pursue a wealth of stories and experiences, to sort them out and learn from them. We walk away from his narrative with a stronger sense of self, with a willingness to look deep within and search for the seed of greatness found in every adversity.
Before moving on, Mr. Caswell writes, “In the silence there among the rocks, I heard the wind.” This is the wind of movement, the wind that moves within. This is breathing. This is the breath of Mr. Caswell’s final encounter with the desert of Navajo country and people. This is an experience worth breathing and moving with.
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Published by Trinity University Press
San Antonio, Texas 78212
Copyright © 2009 by Kurt Caswell
Afterword copyright © 2009 Rex Lee Jim
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