DNA USA

by Bryan Sykes

  “Eventually the survivors, my ancestors among them, were settled in Oklahoma, where some of my relatives still live. Of course, this wasn’t empty land and had its own population of Plains Indians, mainly Cheyenne and Arapaho. I can remember my great-grandmother, who died when I was seventeen, saying how she regarded the Plains Indians as ‘wild’ and nothing like her. They were hunters and lived in tents, while the Cherokee had always been farmers. She said she had much more in common with the whites than these wild Indians of the plains. I remember my great-grandfather, who died when I was about five, because of his false teeth, which he used to snap loudly to scare me and my brother. He denied being an Indian at all, even though he spoke the Creek language, played stickball games, and went to stomping dances, which are a basically a pow-wow.

  “In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, farming in Oklahoma was hit hard by the dustbowl conditions, when all the topsoil was blown away. My grandparents, like many ‘Okies,’ had to move west again, to the Central Valley of California. This was the same journey that John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath. You probably remember Henry Fonda in the film even if you haven’t read the book. My grandparents, my father’s mom and dad, both settled in the very same town, a town called Weedpatch, believe it or not, near Bakersfield. They got work picking onions, strawberries, and carrots but my grandfather eventually landed a job as a state trapper. The work was catching coyotes and other vermin. It wasn’t glamorous, but unlike the picking, it did pay regular wages and a he got a small pension when he retired.

  “After my father met and married my mother, whose ancestors were European for as far back as I know, they moved to Sauglas, which is just north of Los Angeles. That’s where I was born and grew up. It is only an hour’s drive from my grandparents near Bakersfield, so I went to stay with them a lot. My parents moved back there when I left for college.

  “When I was a child I always thought that my mother’s family were much more fun than my dad’s. Her father was a big-game hunter, and the house was full of taxidermy, mounted heads of deer and so on. But as I have gotten older, I have begun to appreciate the qualities of my father’s Cherokee side of the family. These are, I would say, a great sense of personal and social responsibility, not relying on others to help, but at the same time helping others where they could. My grandmother, who died at eighty-eight and lived alone until the last month of her life, volunteered at the local social center. There was something unshakable about her, a quiet fortitude that surrounded her. The same was true of my grandfather. He was something of a trickster, a practical joker. He told me about when he went to a neighbor’s watermelon patch and hollowed out the insides of the fruit, then hid and waited for them to discover what he’d done.

  “He told me about ‘noodling’ for catfish back in Oklahoma when he was young. When catfish lay eggs, they collect them into a sort of mud nest that is usually hidden under a bank. One fish stays behind to guard the nest, and they will defend it. Noodling involves diving into the river and literally fighting with the catfish, trying to get a hand into the gills, or in through the mouth and then through the gills, and heaving them onto the bank. Catfish are strong, so it is quite dangerous, but a big fish, which could be five or six feet long, would feed the family for quite a while. During the Depression this was what kept them going.”

  By now, with the calamari well on the way to digestion, another round of cocktails had arrived and the sun had slid into the ocean behind the Golden Gate. The sky took on the bright orange glow that I have only ever seen in California, and the first stars appeared overhead. We talked of many things until the air had cooled enough for the servers to light the patio heaters. The lights had come on all over San Francisco and, illuminated by their headlight candles, the great unending river of cars flowed smoothly across the Bay Bridge toward us. The silhouette of the Golden Gate slowly melted into the night sky, leaving only the red aircraft warning lights to mark its presence. Eventually even the gas heaters could not keep the cold away, and all three of us made our ways home.

  16

  The Call of the Canyon

  Monument Valley.

  Our original schedule was looking rather ragged by now, but the fortunate encounter with the two African American women from Atlanta meant that we had a few days to spare before we needed to be in Washington, D.C. After my intriguing conversation with “Will Kane” I realized that the time could be put to no better use than in paying a visit to the Navajo reservation where she had been brought up. Not that I had any intention of even trying to obtain any DNA samples, I just wanted to see what it was like. We booked a flight to Las Vegas, picked up a car, and headed off on the long drive to Flagstaff, Arizona, past the Hoover Dam and then through scrubby desert peppered by faded settlements with evocative names like Grasshopper Junction and the distinctly chemical Chloride.

  It was dark by the time we arrived in Flagstaff, and our first accommodation, on the outskirts, was a bad mistake. I had been away from home for two months now and long exposure to hotel air-conditioning had given me a chesty cough, which was beginning to feel and sound like a recurrence of the asthma I had years before. This got a lot worse in the desiccating atmosphere of this particular building, created by a croaking air-conditioning unit and exacerbated by the extreme dryness of the outside air and the elevation. Flagstaff is almost seven thousand feet above sea level. Besides, since the hotel was a set of suites, there was no food and we had to make do with a very basic Thai meal three blocks away. Not what you want after a long drive. Early the next morning I went in search of somewhere else to stay, preferably without air-conditioning, and headed into downtown Flagstaff. This was a very different place from the outskirts, with two-story brick houses laid out in small blocks. On one corner stood an old hotel, the Weatherford, and it had a cancellation. Within an hour we were on the upstairs veranda drinking beers and listening to old Beatles tracks coming from the loudspeakers on the walls above our heads. My dry cough retreated a little further with every familiar track.

  As any American road buff knows, Route 66 passes through Flagstaff. From there the original road takes the steep ascent to Oatman and on to the promised land of California, ending on the Pacific coast at Santa Monica, 2,448 miles from its starting point in Chicago. There are plenty of notices in Flagstaff alerting you to the town’s location on this iconic highway, but if you miss them, the throaty roar of Harley-Davidsons cruising up and down soon lets you know. We had a great view of these shiny chrome machines from the veranda as they slowly growled their way along the narrow streets before roaring off to rejoin Route 66 near the railroad tracks. Very occasionally another make of motorcycle, a Triumph or a Yamaha, puts in an appearance only to be “seen off” by the Harleys and scuttle down the side street, out of town.

  The Weatherford Hotel opened its doors in 1900 and since then has had its fair share of famous guests, including the much-traveled President Theodore Roosevelt and his friend Charles “Buffalo” Jones, the first game warden of Yellowstone and a hunter-turned-conservationist who tried to interbreed buffalo with cattle, which didn’t work. However, the project did take Jones on a fund-raising lecture tour back east during 1907. In the audience in New York was a dentist from Ohio whose name was to become the one most associated with the Weatherford. His name was Zane Grey, and he was so enthralled by Jones’s tales of the outdoors, the mountain lions, and the adventures that he gave up dentistry and began to write for a living. He became the most prolific novelist of the American West, writing more than ninety books with worldwide sales of forty million. His first books were his best, but although his later works were rather repetitious, his readers still loved them. In later life, by then a millionaire, Grey traveled the world indulging his first love, which was fishing.

  Zane Grey was also instrumental in publicizing New Zealand as an unspoiled mecca for fly fishing, which is how I first heard his name, at Turangi on the Tongariro River near Lake Taupo on North Island. That was where Richard caught hi
s first wild trout. Zane Grey often stayed at the Weatherford on his research trips to the West, so I did not mind at all following in his footsteps. To complete the experience I walked around the block to Starlight Books on North Leroux Street and bought a copy of Call of the Canyon. I spent the rest of the day on the veranda in the company of the rugged Glenn Kilbourne, living rough in the Arizona wilderness after returning from World War I, and his reluctant fiancée, Carley. Reluctant, that is, to leave New York and the soft life of cocktail parties and shopping that made up the daily routine on the Upper East Side for wealthy young ladies in the early 1920s. Having recently finished my namesake Plum Sykes’s debut novel Bergdorf Blondes, I was struck that nothing much seems to have changed in the intervening ninety years. In the end, of course, Carley relents, and true love transports her to the West where she and Glenn live happily ever after on the range.

  The fortuitous move to the Weatherford was amplified by the evening’s session in the bar by a Celtic band, which was just as passionate and lively as anything on the Isle of Skye. In the mid-nineteenth century Flagstaff was growing just as Scotland was exporting Highlanders in the Clearances, so there has been a strong Scottish community here ever since.

  While it was charming to be reminded of home, it was not getting us any nearer the Navajo or Hopi reservations. Our first step was to stop at the excellent visitors’ center near the train tracks. We looked through the brochures, but while there was plenty on the nearby Grand Canyon there was nothing much about the reservations. Then a young man with a broad smiling face came up to ask if we need any help. He told us he was half Hopi himself and pointed out the best way to get to the reservation. Ulla wanted to enroll him as a volunteer straight away, but I was reluctant to put him on the spot, so Ulla and I went back to the hotel for lunch. Over a Reuben sandwich of corned beef, sauerkraut, and melted swiss cheese—Zane Grey’s favorite apparently—we wondered what we should do about our new Hopi friend. I was still reluctant about overstepping an invisible line, especially after talking to “Will Kane” about the Navajo moratorium on genetic testing, and reading about the even greater reluctance of the Hopi to reveal themselves. But Ulla’s enthusiasm was, as usual, persuasive. In the end I agreed that she could go back to the visitors’ center and see if our friend would like to join us for a chat at the Weatherford. I don’t know how she did it, but an hour later we were all sitting in the hotel lounge and ordering beers.

  Although I certainly did not expect it, our friend did want us to do a DNA test. This meant he had to have a pseudonym, and the next film character out of the bag was “Roger Thornhill.” The newly anointed “Roger” told us that both of his maternal grandparents were Hopi. His grandfather had been born before any proper records of births or deaths were kept, so he didn’t know when he was born or how old he was. This left him free to choose his own birthday, and he settled on the Fourth of July because, as “Roger” told us with a smile, this way he was guaranteed fireworks on his birthday. His grandparents had been brought up in different villages and belonged to different clans. His grandmother was a member of the Spider Clan, while his grandfather belonged to the Sun Clan. A close relationship between members of different clans was frowned on, so they eloped and left the reservation to live and work together at the Grand Canyon. From there they moved first to Phoenix, then to Flagstaff in the 1960s. They had saved enough money to buy a plot of land and build a house, where “Roger”’s mother had been born. His grandfather is still alive and, at around eighty-three, now spends most of his time back on the Hopi reservation where, over the years, he also built a house. “Roger” told us that poverty is still a big factor on the reservation, with many people living without electricity or running water. Generating income is still a major problem, and though some still farm the land, those with cars look for work in the closest towns, like Winslow, Gallup, and Flagstaff, which also operate a shuttle to and from the reservation.

  I could tell that “Roger” was used to helping people: Our conversation was punctuated by sudden thoughts about what he thought might interest us. The Hopi have lived in the same villages for longer than any other Indian tribe, with Old Oraibi on Third Mesa being the longest continually occupied village in the whole of North America. As I had picked up from my visit to the Cheyenne, there was a deep division within the tribe between traditionalists on the one hand, who are reluctant even to share their history with the outside world and just want to be left alone, and modernists on the other, who are eager to embrace the life they see outside the reservation and often decide to leave. This is not just a benign ideological debate. It is a real clash between colliding ideals, which, as “Roger” told us, has recently become violent with gas stations on the reservation—symbols of the new—blown up and destroyed.

  The other long-running battle has been with the Navajo, whose reservation entirely encircles the Hopi land. The two tribes have quite different ancestral origins, reflected in their completely different languages. While the ancestors of the Hopi, so it is believed, had moved up from Central America at least two thousand years ago, the Navajo had migrated south from northwestern Canada much more recently. “Roger” could tell the difference by their appearance, the Navajo being taller and slimmer compared to the shorter, more compact Hopi. In “Roger”’s opinion the Navajo were more progressive than the very conservative Hopi, and that attitude had helped them to expand their territory and surround the Hopi lands.

  The key moment was in 1901, when a Navajo delegation arrived in Washington, D.C. to lobby President Theodore Roosevelt to grant them more land so as to reduce the frequent clashes with the growing numbers of white settlers in and around Flagstaff. The Navajo hired a clergyman, the Reverend William Johnston, to come with them, not so much for himself but because his nine-year-old son, Philip, was fluent in Navajo and acted as their interpreter. Philip was later to be instrumental in proposing the use of the Navajo language as the basis for the secret code used by the U.S. Marines in the Pacific during World War II. But back in 1901, what a scene that must have been with a child acting as the vital link between the Navajo nation and the president of the United States. (In much the same way, the young John Quincy Adams, later the sixth president, had acted as French interpreter for the American mission to the court of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg in 1781, when he was only fourteen.) With Philip Johnston’s help, the Navajo intervention worked, because Roosevelt signed the Leuppe Extension Treaty, which sealed the expansion of the tribal territory at the expense of the now-encircled Hopi. I had read enough about Navajo history to know that this was a tremendous simplification, and that the president’s apparent generosity was in stark contrast to the terrible treatment the Navajo had received at the hands of earlier administrations, especially the mass deportation to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in 1864, that was only reversed after a public outcry.

  To return to “Roger”’s own story, his paternal grandfather had been the son of a Mohawk father and an Ojibwa mother. He had faced the familiar prospect of discrimination, but being light skinned, he managed effectively to conceal his Indian ancestry, adopted a familiar Irish name, and lived as a white man. Rather like Zane Grey he was drawn to Arizona, and his love of Westerns led him to enroll at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and there he met and married “Roger”’s grandmother, a redhead European American with a Dutch-German background, and then they moved to upstate New York, where “Roger”’s father was born. So, from a genetic point of view, “Roger”’s ancestry was one-quarter European American and three-quarters Native American. “Roger” told us that he planned to go to New York one day and find out more about his Dutch-German forebears.

  Unlike “Will Kane,” “Roger” had not been brought up on the reservation but in Parker on the Colorado River, just south of Havasu, close to the border with California. (It was also incidentally, the final resting place of a structure I knew as a child—the same London Bridge I used to cross to meet my father after he had finished work in the City of Lon
don, when we would go for a meal and a movie. The old bridge of 1831 had been moved across the Atlantic, numbered stone by numbered stone, after its demolition in 1967.) It was while the family was in Parker that “Roger”’s mother was asked if she would like to join CRIT, the acronym for the Colorado River Indian Tribes, a federation of Mohave, Chemehuevi, Navajo, and Hopi. She declined even though the federation owns and operates the BlueWater Resort & Casino in Parker, which adds millions of dollars to the federation’s coffers and allows generous educational grants to its members, which would have included the young “Roger.” As it was, “Roger”’s family moved to Prescott, Arizona, from where he enrolled in Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff, where he has stayed ever since.

  “Roger” was an intriguing mix of the traditional and the modern. He felt himself to be Hopi at heart, but was also completely at ease with the modern world. There was none of the quiet, almost demure reserve I had sensed in “Will Kane.” “Roger” was open and optimistic. He had dated Navajo girls while at high school but had found them too bound by tradition for his taste. In college he found himself hanging out with the white students, which is how he met, fell in love with, and then married his wife, Emily, a red-haired girl with her origins not among the arid mesas of the Hopi and the Navajo, but in the emerald meadows of far-off Ireland. At the same time “Roger” feels deeply attached to his ancestral roots in Hopi land even though he never lived there. But he is also very aware of the titanic ideological struggles going on in his ancestral homeland.

  Finally “Roger” left us with instructions of how to get to the Hopi mesas, which is where we headed the next day. I knew there was no prospect of any DNA collection on the reservation, and I had no intention of even trying to do so. Indeed, on each occasion that I had entered an Indian reservation I made quite sure the DNA sampling kits were left behind. This was primarily out of respect, but it also removed any residue of temptation I might have felt when I got there. I was, after all, a collector of genes, and I was well aware of the devil that comes over all collectors, be it of fossils, archaeological artifacts, or butterflies, banishing all sense of danger, moderation, or propriety when surrounded by the objects of their desire.