by Jen Minkman
“There was a deadly silence in the breakfast room as we sat down. Nobody dared to speak, because the biligaana sometimes, unexpectedly, became angry and started beating children for no good reason.” Nantai is staring in front of him. “At some point, I could not take the silence any longer and I started to talk softly with the boy next to me, who, as it turned out, came from near Oraibi. We spoke softly on purpose so that we did not disturb anyone.”
“And then?” I ask, because he falls silent.
“Suddenly a fat, gray-haired man appeared behind us. He dragged us from the table, shouting at us in English. We were taken to the washing-room by two sisters. They put soap in our mouths and rinsed them. After that we were given a beating.” Tears come into Nantai’s eyes. “Later it turned out that they had heard us talking in our own language. That was not allowed.” He looks at my mother, almost imploringly. “Shima, for eight years I have not been allowed to speak my own language. I have forgotten things. I do not know anymore who I am.”
My mother puts her arm around him. “Do not worry. We know who you are.”
The weeks pass and very slowly Nantai learns to speak his own language properly again. It is a good thing that, without the others knowing, I understand English, for now I can help him when he does not know how to translate things. I am glad that my big brother is back. He takes care of our mother and tries to calm my father down when he is in one of his drunken fits. He was always better at that than me.
“Let’s go to Tseyi,” he suggests one morning when the sun has just risen and we are outside enjoying the singing birds. “I have asked the neighbors if we can borrow two horses.”
I nod slowly. Of course, Canyon de Chelly is a sacred place for our people, but it is much more than that for me. In my previous life I fought to see that place again…. and I also lost there what I had wanted to keep more than anything. We tell my mother that we are going away together for a few days, and when the horses are saddled, we leave in a south-easterly direction.
Before long, the day is pretty hot and I try to lead the horses along a route that will take us to water a number of times. The terrain that we travel is, however, not easy, and it is not until the end of the second day that we arrive at Tseyi. The sun is setting behind the slopes of the canyon and I hold my breath as I lead my horse into the valley where I lived a century ago. It is so strange to see this place again. There is still a village where my clan used to live.
“Do you mind if we stay the night here?” my brother asks an old man of about seventy, who is sitting beside a fire next to his hoghan.
“Of course not,” answers the man with a smile, baring an incomplete set of teeth. “You are welcome to stay.”
Although I am tired, I am overcome by a strong urge to walk to the rock plateau. The pendant that the old man is wearing reminds me of the necklace that I buried under the roots of the tree. With all my heart I hope it is still there.
“Shall we take a walk into the mountains?” I ask Nantai after the old man has given the two of us a bowl of soup and some bread. “I saw that there is a path climbing up from the village.”
“Okay. I’ll put on another shirt first.”
On our way to the path we pass a flock of sheep watched over by two young Diné women in long skirts and velvet blouses. They greet us in a friendly fashion and one of them starts to grumble when a few lambs break away from the flock and run toward the brooklet which flows into the valley along the trees.
“Beautiful girls.” Nantai gives me a nudge and grins at me. “Do you have a girlfriend, little brother?”
“No.” It comes out harsher than I intended. “And I would not know how to pay her family if I wanted to get married, at any rate. We are not particularly rich.”
“Oh, well,” he says, “love conquers all.”
Climbing up the path is easy. In my memory, the path was steeper, but the last time I was here I was over fifty years old and weakened through sickness and years of malnutrition. When I reach the plateau and walk toward the edge to take in the view, I fall completely silent. Nantai, who is standing next to me, somehow understands how I feel. He does not speak and stares out over the valley.
“It is beautiful here,” he says softly after some time. “So untouched.”
My eyes blink and I try not to think of our village burning to the ground and our animals being killed.
When my brother sits down on the rock to meditate for a while, his legs tucked up under him, I turn around. My heart beating fast, I walk up to the old tree, which is now much bigger than the last time I was here.
“I have come back,” I whisper softly when I lay my hand on its bark. “Have you looked after my pendant?”
In my pocket there is a small spade that I have brought with me. I take it out and scrape away the hard soil around the tree roots. Slowly but surely I make a hole in the ground that becomes deeper and deeper. The sun is now so low that there is a red glow over the horizon and I hope that I will manage to find what I am looking for before it is too dark to see anything.
Then I strike against a fragment of an old pot and my mouth gets dry. I had hidden the pendant in a hand-made pot and buried it, but now I can only find these broken pieces. Has someone found my treasure?
I dig hurriedly on, when I suddenly see a fine turquoise stone half buried in the earth. I manage to get my fingers under it, dig away some more soil and then hold Ho’oneno’s pendant in my hands.
Everything around me stops and I feel the weight of the pendant in the palm of my hand, feel the weight of years gone by on my shoulders. I am squatting on my haunches and wipe the soil from the pendant. My fingers are trembling and my eyes suddenly fill with tears. I am now as old as I was when I met Ho’oneno in my former life. So many things have happened – I am now another person living another life with a different background, but yet I still miss her. I miss her so much.
I sit down on the ground sobbing softly, wiping away my tears. I do not want to cry any more. There is nothing to be done. This shadow of time keeps me in its grip, but time will also heal my wounds. I am intensely grateful that I have been able to preserve one token of the love of my life.
“Is something wrong?” I suddenly hear Nantai’s voice next to me. I look up and my brother sits down beside me. “What happened, shik’is? Why are you crying?”
Speechless, I stare at my hands and I see how his hand glides over mine and partly removes the pendant from my cramped fingers. “Have you found something?”
“This is my pendant,” I answer almost inaudibly.
“Then how did it end up here?”
The wind blows softly over the rocks, rustling the leaves in the trees and blowing through my long hair. Slowly, the sun dips under the horizon.
Suddenly I can hear myself starting to talk.
I tell Nantai about my former life as Barboncito, about my lives before that, about my life’s mission and about the curse that has come upon me. I do not pause for a moment and I do not look my brother in the eye. In all these years, I have never confided in anyone apart from the hataalii who accompanied me and even then, I did not tell him all the things that had happened to me. My story is like an unstoppable flow of pent-up emotion and I no longer have the power to stop it. I want to have someone with me. I no longer want to carry my burden on my own, to decide everything all by myself. I want to be an ordinary human being again, not a mythical figure whose coming is expected and praised by hataalii in all of Dinétah.
When I finally stop talking, my brother puts his arm around my shoulders. He talks to me in English. “My God, Samuel. You are carrying one hell of a burden. I will help you, I swear.”
I answer back in English. “I don’t know if you can. You don’t really need to. Just listen to my ranting every now and then.”
“I’ll think of something. You have my support,” Nantai says in our own language again and smiles. “And here I was, always wondering where you had picked up all those English words.”
; I chuckle. It feels good to laugh and to be able to share a part of my burden with someone from my own family.
1933
I wipe the sweat from my forehead after I have climbed the last hill that separates me from Keams. The day is hot and my drinking bottle is practically empty. I only hope that the trader in Keams has work for me, for I have been on the road for almost a week hoping to take part in the CCC program that is now being set up in the reservation.
Some weeks ago, Nantai had returned from the trading post in Kayenta near our house, all excited. “John Wetherill has told me that they are going to build roads in the area south of Black Mesa,” he told us full of enthusiasm. “President Roosevelt has extended the New Deal to include our land. He also wants the people here to be trained as carpenters, car mechanics, builders, you name it.”
I had only once seen an automobile in my entire life. A year ago, an important biligaana had come to Kayenta driving an automobile. In spite of the fact that the Civilian Conservation Corps was an invention of the white man, I could not stop myself from sharing Nantai’s enthusiasm. I was rather curious to know more.
“Join the corps,” Nantai had impressed upon me that night. “For centuries you have had a mission in our tribe and you can play an important role in the development of the reservation. Try to learn as much from the biligaana as you can. They are here, and they are not going to leave again, so we might as well learn how we can be a part of their world.”
“Won’t you join me?” For a moment I felt abandoned.
“I am staying here.” Nantai looked at the weaving loom outside, where my mother had started on a new blanket; at the empty whisky bottles near the tree on the left side of the hoghan. I understood his decision perfectly well, and not just because he had recently started to train as a hataalii in the village.
“We will keep in touch,” I had said softly.
Now I walk slowly down the hill into Keams in search of the trading post. After I write a short letter to my family, the man from the post office offers to drive me to a camp just outside Keams that afternoon. It seems that there are Diné working there, supervised by a white inspector, to make gravel for the roads that are to be built. “The work pays well,” he says, when I sit beside him in his car. The speed at which we drive away makes me momentarily dizzy, but after that I start to enjoy the velocity at which the car is traveling. The prospect of a good wage also makes me happy. I will make sure that the money goes directly to my brother and mother without my father being able to squander it.
There is a pleasant atmosphere in the camp. There are local Diné working there, but other men and boys come from further afield. The white man who organizes the work and teaches us to blow up rocks with dynamite is really no more than a boy. He is about my age.
When I walk to my tent that evening, I see that the young inspector is sitting by his car with a thing that I have never seen before. He is making music with a wooden sound box with six strings attached to it. It sounds wonderful and I am curious enough to stop for a while and listen discreetly to the song that he is playing.
After I have listened for a while, the white boy looks up. “Hi, there! Would you like to sit with me and sing along?” He gestures at me, probably because he cannot be sure that I understand his English.
I start to smile and walk towards him. “Sure. I like your music. It’s beautiful.”
“Hózhó?” he says, laughing, using a word from my own language. I sit down next to him. This white man is clearly interested in our culture.
He introduces himself in the typically American way. “My name is Edward, Edward Hall, but all my friends call me Ned.” He puts out his hand and shakes mine. “And what’s your name?”
I hesitate slightly. “Sam Yazzie. In my culture we do not usually call ourselves by our real name.”
Ned raises his eyebrows and looks somewhat ashamed. “Oh, sorry. So, what do you call each other?”
“It depends. Relatives we call ‘brother’, ‘sister’, or ‘father’, and people that we know well we call ‘friend’. We usually have nicknames for people that we are close to, so that we do not diminish the power of their real name by using it all the time.”
He nods slowly and begins to smile. “What a beautiful thought.”
“I do not mind you calling me Sam, since it is not my real name,” I grin.
Ned chuckles. “I do not mind you calling me Ned, since that is a nickname, too.”
We go on talking. I actually really like Ned, the first biligaana I have ever liked in my whole life. He tells me about his studies, his work for the CCC program, he shows me how to play his guitar and even teaches me how to play a simple song. I tell him about my family up north, my brother, who has been to boarding school, and the traditions we still cherish. Only when we are really very tired do we decide to turn in.
“I liked talking to you very much,” Ned says cheerfully. “Will you come and play the guitar again tomorrow night?”
“Yes, I’d like that. I also liked talking to you.”
In the course of the following weeks we get to know each other better and better, and I learn a lot of English by talking to Ned. Although I already had a reasonable command of the English language, my new friend teaches me a great many words and expressions that did not exist fifty years ago and I also come to appreciate different, more positive aspects of the biligaana civilization. We discover that we have more in common than we thought.
At the end of the year there is a long letter from Kayenta. I read the letter in total dismay, tears running down my cheeks.
“Sam!” Ned sees me sitting against a tree. “What’s wrong? Why are you so sad?” Sullenly, I throw the two sheets of paper on the ground and look away from him, when he sits down beside me. “It’s my mother’s sheep. The Indian agents have slaughtered all her sheep. Without asking or explaining anything.”
Nantai’s English words staring at me from the page cannot adequately express what my brother must feel at this moment. He is writing that my mother does not know what to do with herself, that my father has sunk into a perpetual state of drunkenness and how the whole village is coping with the same problems.
“There is an enormous drought in your reservation,” Ned begins to explain hesitantly. “There is a good deal of overgrazing. That is why the animals have to go, or else the grass will never return.”
“Nonsense. The agents do not understand that we have had this drought since the turn of the century. That has nothing to do with our sheep. Further up north, there are farmers completely ruining the land – American farmers who have no idea how to preserve and respect the land so that you can live in harmony with it for centuries on end. We have had sand storms in Dinétah for years. We can hear that the wind from the north is different. We can feel that the rain is different. The birds tell us that the grasses have gone.” How can I explain to Ned what a Diné can feel, see and hear when he lives in complete harmony with nature? These things do not exist in his world.
“Sometimes I wish I could see with your eyes,” I hear him say. He sounds almost melancholic, as if he has lost something in the confusing and busy world in which he has grown up.
“Believe me, you do not wish to see through my eyes,” I am about to reply bitterly, but I stop myself. After all, Ned knows nothing of my centuries-long history and the things that I have witnessed. I get up, fold the letter and put it in my pocket. “I am going home.”
“What, now, right away? If you go now, you will not get your wages.”
“I don’t care. My family is more important.”
“Then come to Oraibi after the spring,” Ned tells me. “There are a few new projects planned. We are going to build roads and dams. Ask for my team.”
“I will do so.” Then I embrace him briefly and give him a warm smile before I walk to my tent and get my things.
After a week I arrive at Kayenta. The trip has tired me. I am not used any more to walking such distances. When I wanted to go to Keams, I
usually went with Ned in his car or I went on horseback with a few other Diné.
The land near our hoghan looks shockingly empty without animals, and again my eyes fill with tears when I think of all the slaughtered sheep.
I slowly approach the hoghan singing a soft song so as to alert the people inside, and when my mother comes out, she rushes into my arms sobbing. “Shiyáázh! Oh, I am so glad to see you again.”
I give her a firm embrace. Behind her, Nantai walks up to us and grabs my hand. “It is good that you have come home, shik’is.”
We sit down and my mother goes inside to make coffee. I sit with Nantai saying nothing and gulp down the coffee that my mother pours us when she comes outside again. My gaze drifts over the things outside the hoghan – the weaving loom with a blanket on it, half finished, the pots and pans, and the tree to the left of the house. Only now do I see that there are no empty whisky bottles there.
I turn toward Nantai. “Has Dad stopped drinking?” I ask almost incredulously. I do not want to confront my mother with that question, so I ask him in English.
My brother stares out over the empty field in front of our house. “Yes, he has stopped drinking.” His voice sounds strange.
All of a sudden my heartbeat increases and I start feeling dizzy. Nantai sighs. “He stopped drinking forever, Sam. He passed away.”
I swallow something. “When?” I ask hoarsely.
“Four days ago. My letter to you was already on its way when he died.”
Later, when I am standing by the graveside all by myself, I do not know what to say. I do not know with what final words or thoughts I have to leave shizhé’é behind. Should I tell him how insecure we felt? How afraid we all were when he was drunk?
It does not matter anymore. It is over. He has gone away. He lost his roots by following the path of outsiders, but now he may find his roots back again. He is cradled by the earth. And the earth embraces everyone, regardless of someone’s background or the life they have lived.