Ohitika Woman

by Mary Brave Bird

  Everybody had their own campfire at night and they’d pray for the about thirty-five dancers we had that year, including Larry Anderson and Clyde Bellecourt. Flesh offerings would be going on. From the camps you could hear the peyote drum in the distance. At night you could see the light in the tipis and hear the singing and praying until dawn. The dancers then would have meetings with the support groups and the elders, and talk about the struggle and how the Diné could stay on the land.

  Many of the people at the sun dance didn’t speak English, so some of these meetings went on a long time with interpreters. The elders talked about how there was no dispute between the Hopis and the Navajos over the land because of the many intermarriages that had happened. A lot of the traditional people had relatives among the Hopis. During all these generations they had always shared, and the elders said that they had given the Hopis the land where they were now meeting. Some of the elderly Navajo women would talk, and they’d start out by saying things like: “Hello, my grandchildren.” And then they’d talk about the land, and the generations, about the centuries they have lived up there and raised their sheep. These talks went on for days on end. I noticed that the women seemed to have more pull, more of a voice than they do in our tribe. They spoke with anger about the white government telling them how many sheep they could have in every grazing area, forcing them to kill those that exceeded the number.

  The white support groups did a lot of good work there. Besides bringing in donations, they did a lot of physical labor. A lot of them would go out and herd sheep for different families. That first year I camped there, an older Navajo woman named Katherine Smith came up to me. She must have been sixty or seventy years old. She had one arm in a sling, broken when her horse threw her as she was herding sheep. She insisted upon chopping wood for me with her good arm and, later, making a cooking fire. When some white men came to fence off the land, Katherine came galloping up on her horse and chased them away with her shotgun. Leonard, myself, and others from our support groups also staged protests to prevent the traditional Navajos from being forced to relocate and to keep coal companies out. We took down the fences where they were going to strip-mine the area. We put our bodies in front of the bulldozers. We were arrested and charged with obstructing the mining operations. We had a support committee and legal help in Flagstaff and they bailed us out. I said to Leonard: “Here we go again, just like old times.” We had some potentially dangerous confrontations, but never firefights like at Wounded Knee.

  The Big Mountain country is worth fighting for. It is beautiful, high country—hills dotted with piñon, cedar, and juniper trees. In summer the landscape is covered with many wildflowers, particularly Indian paintbrush, along with cacti, cholla, and tall sage. There’s also a lot of wildlife—bears, bobcats, coyotes, deer, and mountain lions—but the lions you never see. They are too shy and wary. Enchanting are the nocturnal big-eyed, ring-tailed cats, which are not cats at all, and a special type of squirrel with big, long, bushy ears. Everywhere you look, the views are breathtaking. Tuba City is the largest town of any size nearby, and Oraibi the closest Hopi pueblo. When you go up in the mountains it’s all dirt roads. I can understand why all Navajo families have four-wheel-drive pickups. The roads are rough and go for miles and miles until, finally, they come to a trading post. The locals didn’t mind our support groups at all because we brought some extra business to these posts in an impoverished area. One time there was a big rainstorm as I was trying to get back to the camp. My truck was swimming through these dirt roads. I tried to turn around and got stuck in a sea of bright red mud. Only about the upper half of the truck was above this mess. A Diné family helped by pulling me out with their pickup and a lot of muscle power involving shovels. Then these newfound friends steered me back to the camp on another, much longer but drier road. For the Navajos, it is a blessing if it rains during a ceremony. It means that the Creator will answer your prayers.

  We herded sheep for Pauline White Singer. She’s one of the traditional women and like all of them always dresses in the old-style Diné way—pleated skirt, velvet blouse, high orange-brown moccasins, with plenty of silver and turquoise jewelry. She doesn’t speak English, but we managed to communicate in sign language. Pauline lived in an old-style hogan, a small octagonal structure, almost round, built of logs and covered with sun-hardened mud. Inside, slightly off-center, stood an ancient iron stove on which she did her cooking. The stovepipe went straight up through the ceiling and stuck out from the roof. Most of the space was taken up by her loom, on which she wove her beautiful rugs. She did her weaving sitting on a sheepskin spread over the floor of smooth, hard earth. She had an iron cot and mattress to sleep on, and an old trunk that contained everything she owned in the world and also served as a table or bench. Otherwise she had a kettle, a few pots and pans, a coffeepot, a ladle, and a few knives, spoons, and forks. And that was all. She made frybread for us and a delicious mutton stew, red with chili. Mutton was the staff of life. She knew how to find wild food—edible roots, berries, and something that looked like a tiny orange carrot, which she pulled from the earth to show us.

  Like all the traditional people on Big Mountain, Pauline believed in witches, particularly zombielike evil beings called “skin walkers.” These sometimes appeared, in animal disguise, similar to werewolves. Some of her beliefs resembled ours. Just as some Lakotas believe in wapiyas, conjurers who can make people sick by “shooting something into them,” invisible quills, feathers, and whatnot, which a medicine man can “suck out” and so make the ailing person well, so the Navajo have a wizard who can “shoot” bits of bone or teeth from a dead person into someone they want to bewitch, or maybe grains of sand, ashes from a “ghost hogan,” that is, a dwelling that has been burned because somebody has died in it. The Diné people on Big Mountain were also careful that none of their hairs, fingernails, and, to put it bluntly, shit would fall into the hands of a witch, who could make a poison out of these things to bewitch or even kill you. A witch might also feed a person “corpse food,” a tiny bit of flesh from i dead child hidden in a piece of frybread or a bowl of lamb stew. Also, the Diné take sweats as we do, but their sweat lodge is a tiny wood-and-mud structure for a one- or two-person purification. They also have medicine men, so-called “singers” and “hand tremblers,” who cure the sick. The singers do this by reciting a long chant, like “beauty way,” or “blessing way,” which is like a long, healing prayer. The patient usually sits on a sand painting, which will be destroyed after the ritual is finished. So we learned some of our Diné friends’ ways, and they learned some of ours. We have something else in common—a majority of Navajos are members of the peyote church, just as we are, though there are some slight differences in the manner in which we run our meetings.

  Well, it had been decided that it would give a big boost to the Big Mountain people to hold a sun dance there every summer. Crow Dog and Archie Fire Lame Deer began running sun dances every year at Big Mountain, starting in 1981. Over the years we had dancers from everywhere, some Chicanos and some Orientals. We never had any white dancers but they were allowed to sweat, to “humble themselves,” and to be on the work crews. Some years airplanes would fly over the dance ground real low, buzzing us, making a terrific noise—air force jets, navy jets. I am sure they were spying on us, taking pictures.

  Of course, wherever there are some “Indian doings,” we have weirdos, groupies, and New Age people. One year on Big Mountain there was a woman, a “crystal channeler,” who came to the sweat. She claimed that in Los Alamos they had gotten hold of a piece of the Shroud of Turin and with that were able to clone Jesus, because of his DNA on the shroud. But she said: “I’m channeling this, but this is the Antichrist, and the real Jesus is mad, and he’s going to come back because he’s mad at those people in Los Alamos.” Whew, she should be a science-fiction writer. I started really pouring water on the rocks, and that slowed her down. That was a very strange sweat.

  In 1987 a marine named Lone Tree
was doing time in prison on a charge of espionage. He had been posted to the U.S. embassy in Moscow and was accused of having let himself be seduced by a Russian woman who induced him to spy for the KGB. His father is a Winnebago from Wisconsin, his mother a Navajo from Arizona. She was present at the sun dance and addressed the crowd, saying that she needed their prayers and that her son was just a scapegoat, unjustly imprisoned because he was a Native American.

  One problem we had sun dancing at Big Mountain was the heat. The ground is all sand. When the wind blows you wake up in the morning finding your bedroll completely covered with fine, powdery sand. That sand is hot when you dance barefooted. It’s like putting your feet on a grill. One year it was so hot—115 degrees in the shade—that the dancers had blisters on the soles of their feet. One guy was putting grease on our feet and that made it worse. Crow Dog and Lame Deer took pity on the women. They made a little artificial pool of water for us to put our feet in. They also let the women have a little water, but not the male dancers. Some fainted. Crow Dog dipped sage into water and moistened our hair with it. One of the Diné ladies came around with her fan. She lifted our hair in the back and fanned our necks. They also fanned sage smoke on us. And the Diné women sang for us. Some of our Sioux songs had been translated into Navajo and so they could sing our songs in their language.

  I ran women’s sweats at Big Mountain, because the Navnjos don’t have mixed sweats. I had already been roped into leading the purification because I was the only woman there who knew how to do this. I experienced something like stage fright. I had been in many sweats before, but always as a participant, not as a leader. It went very well, except that some of the older Diné ladies thought that I had been making it a little toe hot for them. I thought I had gone easy on them but forgot that our Lakota sweats are the hottest of all—hot as hell. One year later there was this woman, Jessie, who was already running sweats for the elders. She’d let them come out after every round. But there were all these supporters, women who wanted to learn and be a part of it. So they asked all over for someone to run a sweat for them, and I was the last choice, the bottom of the barrel. So I said: “I’ll do it.” Then I ordered fifty rocks for that sweat lodge. The white women were real strong, but the two Sioux who were in that sweat ran out of there, crept out of the lodge. It kind of embarrassed me, because I thought Indian women were supposed to be strong. What had happened—and I had not realized it—was that underneath the canvas someone had lined the lodge with plastic trash bags. They then caught fire and burned the two Indian women. We just tore that plastic off and threw it out the door. A couple of days later the Navajo elders wanted me to run a sweat. I took it pretty easy on them, and got the heat up slowly, but it ended up hot. And then they prayed for a long time and that made it even hotter. They came out of there really happy. They said: “You’re the first woman to run the sweat where we really benefited from it.” Those were very strong women.

  In 1985, one Navajo dancer stood in the circle for four days and nights, pierced, his skewers connected to the tree with long ropes. When he broke loose on the last day, his skewers flew high up into a tree. When some men climbed up to retrieve them, they found them in the crook of a branch together with a fresh peyote button. This caused great excitement and was considered as something supernatural. So all the Diné peyote people brought their rattles, gourd boxes, and feather fans to the tree to have them blessed and to pray, telling me: “What happened is very sacred.”

  I danced at Big Mountain in 1987 and 1988. It was the first time I had pierced since I was twenty-six years old. I was thirty-two at that time. I kept dreaming all year about sun dancing. I dreamt that I was hanging from the tree, and I’d think and pray about this all the time. And I dreamt about my grandma, and about the Diné people, that we were all in a concentration camp with barbed wire around it. Inside, all the men and women were being separated, and the children taken away to foster homes. I kept dreaming this, and I thought maybe I was meant to do a pierce hanging, to suffer for the people. Even when I stayed away from home for a couple of weeks, I continued having these dreams—they kept bothering me. I finally went back home when it was time for Big Mountain, for purification day. I walked into my bedroom, and everything was there laid out for me—my sun dance dress and my sweet grass—and I knew I had to go back there to Big Mountain. The children were real sad that I was going. They said they were going to pray for me to come back. Leonard even bought me a new car, a Camaro, to get there. We went up to Big Mountain and made it in time for purification, and right away the women wanted me to run a sweat. I ran a real hot sweat, and the elderlies were in there. There were some real strong prayers in there. I was thinking about my dream and praying all that time. When I danced I ate medicine continuously just to keep my strength up. I kept dreaming and thinking about its meaning. Finally I asked Archie for advice. I told him about my dreams. I asked him if it was all right to do a pierce hanging from the tree, because I couldn’t get away from that dream. He said it was all right, that I should do it. But when they were taking me to the tree, I got very scared and felt like telling them to forget the whole thing. But I could not back out of it because I had made a commitment, a solemn vow. They took me to the sacred pole and I stretched out beneath it, facedown. A Big Mountain Navajo woman, Sarah Katenay, pierced me with a skewer on one side, high up on my back. A young mixed-blood guy, my own age, pierced me on the other side. They pierced me real deep. They attached ropes to the skewers in my flesh and threw them over the crotch of the tree, and men on the other side pulled me up, ever so slowly. I was hanging there for a while, suspended in the air, about seven or eight feet above the ground. I had an eagle wing in each hand and fanned the air with it, hoping that the movement would make me break free. Suddenly, the skewer on my right side broke and I was spinning around wildly, like a tumbleweed in a whirlwind. Finally the other side broke. I was pretty high up in the air and all I could think about was to try landing on my feet.

  They brought one girl to me after I broke. She took one look at my back and fainted. I had to fan her off with my eagle wings. I was hugging my family and everyone. I was still in a trance. I was happy. I was laughing and crying at the same time. I was proud to have kept my vow. Then all the elderlies came up to me just to touch me, praying and crying, telling me that I had done a great thing for the people. After that the helpers took me around the circle again, back to my place among the dancers, while all the women under the arbor yelled out the ululating, shrill, high-pitched “brave heart cry” for me. Later, we went over to Sarah’s hogan and sat down in a circle on the dirt floor, wolfing down her wonderful chili stew.

  In the following months I dreamed again but this time a red horse appeared in my vision, and I knew that I had to renew my vow and sun dance with a horse. So once more I put on my fringed deerhide outfit and went to Big Mountain to be pierced. Again I stood in the circle. The cedar man came around, from one sun dancer to another. He had cedar burning in a large seashell, so that we could fan ourselves off and get strength from the cedar. They also burned sage for us and its strong fragrance filled the air. As always, I had also eaten the sacred medicine to help me get through my ordeal. Again I was taken to the tree and pierced deep on the back on both sides, this time by my son Pedro. Again the ropes were thrown over the sacred pole’s crotch, but now they were attached to a horse ridden by a young warrior. As he walked the horse off a little distance away, I was slowly lifted in the air. The rider has to know his job so that the horse dancer does not slam into the tree. Again I had in each hand an eagle wing. The rider kept walking the horse maybe fifty feet or so off, toward the east, and would then gallop quickly back to the tree, thereby jerking me up and down in order to make me break free. I finally called to him to come real close and he did, gathering the ropes in all the time to keep me hanging above the ground. When the horse was at the tree, it started dancing. That was strong medicine. I fanned the horse off myself with both eagle wings and it raced away with its ri
der toward the east and I broke loose. Some of the skin off my back was then put on the tree as an offering. I was glad to have been allowed to suffer spiritually for the cause. My body bears the marks of sacrifice. I have four scars on my back from Big Mountain, two from hanging at the tree and two from when I was pulled by the horse. And I have two deep ones on my arms, right below my shoulders, from my first sun dance, and the scars from flesh offerings when old Bill Eagle Feather cut forty little squares of skin from my arms. And two more scars on my wrists where feathers had been stuck through at a sun dance. Then I have four piercings on each ear that were ceremoniously pierced by Fools Crow’s daughter. I also have scars from different accidents and confrontations, and I’m missing a few teeth as the result of too many fights. I call them honorable scars.

  The fight for Big Mountain was led by the women, the strong-hearted Diné mothers and grandmothers. They were at the core of the resistance. Sarah Katenay, who had pierced me, and Mary Shay formed the Weaving Project, made up by a group of traditional women weaving rugs to get funds for the struggle. They sold their rugs, through white supporters in California, for amounts raning from sixty to a thousand dollars apiece. They raised a lot of money that way for Big Mountain. This project also had a spiritual side. Weaving was taught to the Diné by Spider Woman, the female supernatural who had saved the people of the First World when they were engulfed by a big flood. She made a raft out of spiderwebs, a sort of Noah’s ark, upon which the people climbed and survived. Spider Woman also made the Thread of Life for the hero called Monster Slayer. Some women sing and pray while they weave. They always leave an imperfection in a rug, because nothing made by humans should be perfect. They likewise leave a little opening on the rug for the spirits to escape. In October of 1992, some thirty women elders from the Weaving Project led a protest, saying that driving them from their sacred land was a violation of Navajo religion.