Anna Redsand

THE IMPORTANCE OF CLEAR
 
Often it is not we who shape words but the words we use that shape us.
~ Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop

 
I. PLAYING IN DUMMITAWRY ENGLISH

In 1952 our family lived in Shiprock, a village in the Navajo Nation. We lived there because my father was a missionary, something I told people with pride until my early twenties. Something I didn't want to admit for a long time after that. We lived in a large two-story house on top of a hill that overlooked Jack's Trading Post. On that same hilltop, not far from the house that the mission board provided, lived my first Diné playmates, Bobby and Rudy Yellowhair. Every day the boys and I met in a spot of shade between my father's garden and a small wooden garage. My father had spread apricot and peach halves on the garage roof to dry. Every once in a while a breeze brought us the faint sweetness of drying fruit.

We stole soft dirt from my father's squash and melon hills, and from it we created miniature Diné home sites. We snapped thin elm twigs into short pieces and poked them upright into the dirt to form corrals. Tiny pebbles inside the fold became our sheep and goats. A little pile of earth with a bit of twig pressed into the top for a stovepipe became a hogan—a traditional Diné home. Outside the hogan we heaped dried, platinum-colored grass to make an outdoor cook fire. Finally, we peopled our homes with imaginary characters, and then we talked for them.

We started off speaking what linguists have called Dummitawry English. At that time, most Diné who spoke English used this creole, which meant speaking with a Navajo accent sprinkled here and there with Diné words. Often it also included modified syntax. At some point in our play, the Yellowhair brothers would almost always switch to speaking Diné bizaad. I might not notice at first, but when I did, I felt poverty-stricken; I owned only a small bag of Diné words. I closed my mouth for a little while. Then, under my breath I started speaking the longest bit of Navajo I knew—the Apostles Creed. I just wanted the boys to be able to hear that I was speaking Diné bizaad; I didn't want them to hear my actual words because I was ashamed of what I didn't know. I repeated the creed again and again, imagining the little mother flipping fry bread and laying it in a pan on the cook fire. As she told stories to her children, I was saying, "God ataa' t'áá bí t'éiyá alaahgo..." I believe in God, the Father Almighty... .
 
II. SPEAKING DINÉ COMES WITH K'É

It had been easy for me to start speaking Dummitawry English. I was learning to speak Diné bizaad at the same time, but that involved conscious thought. In the Diné worldview every person, every animal, every star, is related—connected through a kinship system called k'é. I caught on to the most elementary k'e as I learned the language. When I greeted someone in Diné bizaad, using the right kinship term was simply part of it. If a woman was old enough to be my grandmother, I called her shimásání. If she was my mother's age, she was shimá.

I became versed in small social skills, like shaking hands with a soft passing of palms, rather than the firm clasp-and-shake of the dominant culture. I could see that my father was proud of me, and Diné who visited our home laughed with apparent pleasure when I served them coffee and spoke Diné bizaad to ask what they took in it. "Abe' nínízinísh? Áshiiłikan sha'?" I was pleased, too.

During our first summer in Shiprock, my father went away to learn how to read the Diné language. Early missionaries had created a Navajo alphabet, wanting people to read the Bible for themselves. Later, the Diné-White linguistics team, William Morgan and Robert Young, refined and standardized the written language. When my father came back from his training, he could read the Navajo New Testament from the pulpit pretty well, and he could teach others to read. He taught me at the same time I was learning to read English. I thought this was the natural order of things. More accurately, I probably didn't think about it. Like the rest of my life, it just happened back then, the way life does for children. Our lives don't seem special or unusual because they are ours and we are perhaps more present in them than we will be at any other time. Though I wasn't aware of it, reading in Diné bizaad helped increase my vocabulary. My father's mission thus became some of my earliest lessons in a language that would surround me and return to me for the rest of my life, though it would never be fully part of me.
 
III. MY MOTHER THE LANGUAGE COP

Less than a year after we settled in Shiprock, our family moved to Teec Nos Pos, deeper within Dinétah. This tiny place was close to the Four Corners—the exact spot where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet. I kept on building tiny Diné home places, now on the floor of the sandy bottom of the arroyo across from the mission. I played with my brothers and sister and with Sally and Carol Belone whose mother was the matron at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) School. I kept on speaking Dummitawry English with my friends and classmates.
Sometimes Dummitawry English slipped out at the dinner table. One of us might say, "Pass da brat, please."

My mother, a vigilant language cop, would correct us immediately. "You mean, 'Pass the bread please.'"
"Ja."

"Say it." We did.

She corrected little oddities we picked up at school. We all called the tallest of my friends Mareeta. "I'm sure her name is supposed to be Marietta," Mom said when she heard me talking about her.

"No, it's Mareeta."

But when Mareeta came for cake and ice cream when I turned seven, my mother called her Marietta. Mareeta, of course, had no idea who she was talking to.

I brought a game home from school and taught it to my sister and brothers. "Whoever's it says, 'Rilla, rilla, rilla, I see something. It is rat. What is it?'"

"You mean, 'Riddle, riddle, riddle. I see something red.'"

I conceded to red instead of rat, as we would say it in Dummitawry English. But, "No. It's rilla, rilla, rilla."

I was interested in language, in traversing more worlds than one, although at the time I saw both worlds as part of my one world, my only world. I have no doubt that I would have become fluent in Diné bizaad on the playground except for the language policies in the schools on the Navajo Nation. Speaking Diné bizaad, even when children came to school with no knowledge of English, was forbidden. Teachers and dormitory matrons punished children if they caught them speaking their own language. The most natural and efficient way for children to learn a second language is from their peers, so at the same time my friends' language was being ripped from them, I was being denied access to that language. I would feel that loss keenly as the years passed. My loss, however, would never be as great a loss as Diné children's was. Knowing how my insufficiency paled next to the costs my friends paid set me further apart from people to whom I wanted deeply to belong.

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All rights reserved.

 

To be continued on Friday, 4/19/24.

TONGUES
 
I.

 

Humans tell stories to explain why Earth is covered by so many tongues. The Tower of Babel is the story I heard as a child. A cautionary tale about folks building a tower into the sky to reach the Holy One. The Holy One got mad because humans were overreaching. Suddenly the builders couldn't understand each other anymore, so they had to stop work. Too many tongues. But why shouldn't we want to touch holiness? With our hearts. With our tongues.
 
II.

 

At the Pike Place Market, I stopped to admire the vibrant scarves the artist was laying out on her table. She caressed each silk beauty with her fingers, but for me, it was a tongue thing. "I want to lick them," I said.

"Then they're doing what I want them to."

We smiled.

Gorgeous colors, gleaming smoothness––round and glossy beads, jewels, small stones from beside a trail. They all look so licking-delicious. There must be some neurons that link the pathways between the eyes and the tongue.
 
III.

 

The tongue is an organ formed of eight muscles in humans. Four of them are attached to bone, and four are not. We share the presence of this organ with all other tetrapods––four-legged beasts. The tongue is replete with nerves and blood vessels, and its surface is covered with papillae, the tiny bumps we call tastebuds. It is the main organ of our sense of taste, and it enables digestion by helping us chew. It empowers humans to speak and four-leggeds to vocalize.
 
IV.

 

I played trombone in high school and college and for a while afterwards. Inserting the tongue repeatedly and rapidly into a brass instrument's mouthpiece creates separate notes on a sustained tone. It's the same with a digeridoo, the long, hollowed, wooden instrument made and decorated with pointillist paintings by Australian Indigenes. I had one once, and it was made from a long, hardened section of hollowed cactus. Having played trombone helped me learn my digeridoo, and tonguing into it had the same effect––breaking up drone notes into short bursts. Played well (by others, I might add) the music raises goosebumps on my skin.
 
V.

 

The average human tongue in men weighs about 2.5 ounces, and in women, about 2.1. For such a small organ, it performs a hefty load of work. It is an organ of sense, of connection through language and human intimacy. Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing the praises of the tongue.
 
VI.

 

So much of my life is about language and always has been. Different tongues pique my curiosity: How have they been formed? How do people use them or not use them? My parents used Dutch to exclude––when they didn't want us to know what they were talking about. My identity is wrapped up in tongues and in the spaces between tongues. Human identity is ever bound to our Mother Tongue. Having language is about connecting, communicating, knowing people more deeply. The purpose of language is not exclusion.

Diné who don't know me, when they realize, I am not even close to being a fluent speaker, considerately switch to US English––another way of using language. My friends who know that I have some knowledge, speak both US English and Diné bizaad when they're with me. The minuscule size of my little bag of Diné words is a reflection of the In-Between identity I struggle to embrace.
 
VII.

 
I have in my possession a bag of tongues. I imagine it is a bag I have sewn from a royal blue and orange and green Pendleton blanket. In this bag lie my two most well-developed tongues––US English and Danish.

The tongue I wish I knew fully is Diné bizaad. When my Diné friends were denied their language, it was denied me, too. Government and mission policies made it so I couldn't learn the language from my peers.

When we take something from one group of people, everyone loses.

I can read German, so it's also in my bag of tongues. I used to be able to speak it. I can read Norwegian because it's so similar to Danish. I understand quite a bit of spoken Swedish but can barely read it, which shows how differently we may pack diverse tongues into our language bags.
I traveled to Poland because I needed to see Auschwitz. While I was there, I picked up a tiny bag of ten Polish words. In New Zealand, I learned a few Maori words. I read a lot of Jewish literature and lived with a Jewish family once, so I know a smattering of Yiddish. High school Latin helps me with Spanish.
 
VIII.

 

Our tongues are attached to the floor of the mouth by the frenulum, a mucous membrane. When the frenulum is too short and too thick, it renders speech, eating, and swallowing difficult. We say someone with that kind of frenulum is tongue-tied. The solution is to snip the frenulum to loosen the tongue.

On the other hand, tongue-tied is when you can't find your words.

By contrast, a teller of secrets has a loose tongue. Too many words.
 
IX.

 

The Latin word for "tongue" is "lingua," which is also the Latin word for "speech." Many everyday English words come from "lingua"––language, linguist, lingual, bilingual, multilingual, cunnilingus, lingo, to name a few.
 
X.

 

My mother was rarely given to silliness, but sometimes we would tease her, and then she would stick out her tongue at us, and we would all laugh. Her too.

After living in New Zealand, which the Maori call Aotearoa, The Land of the Long White Cloud, I am always deeply moved when I hear and watch the Maori haka. The haka is a group war dance or challenge. It touches me most profoundly when it is performed to honor someone of warrior character––for instance, when a firefighter has died. Their companions execute a haka for them. Loud, energetic chanting and roaring are accompanied by the dramatic sticking out of tongues. It can show prowess, challenge, intimidation, bravery, or honor.
 
XI.

My Mother Tongue is the US variety of English. I also heard Dutch and Diné bizaad before I left my mother's womb. Dutch from my father's parents and sometimes from my mother and father. Diné bizaad from the Diné man who was my father's big brother, his mentor, at Bible School, and especially from Ed's wife, Ella, who talked more than Ed.
 
XII.

The church of my youth was not a shouting church. Members scoffed at Pentecostal churches, where people spoke in tongues. "Holy Rollers," they called them. Once, when I was ten years old, I went to that kind of church with my friend. It was loud and mysterious, fervid. The worshippers were heirs of the biblical apostles who had tongues of fire land on their heads at Pentecost. All that emotion scared me, but I sure hoped I would get to see tongues of fire.
 
XIII.

The tongue of a cow makes a delicious sandwich. It's been a long time since I saw a beef tongue in the meat section of a supermarket, but one place I shop has real, live butchers, and I can purchase a tongue if I ask. A cow tongue weighs three to four pounds. I bring one home and simmer it in salted water with lemon slices, cloves, coriander seeds, and peppercorns. When it is tender, which comes after hours of cooking, I slice it thin, and the slivers are smooth on my tongue.
 
XIV.

 
The tongues we speak bring us the taste of words. The muscles wrap themselves around teeth and cheeks and lips to make the sounds. The tongues we speak also present us with lavish food flavors. From US English, mac and cheese. When I am being Dutch-American, I eat moes, a peasants' mix of mashed potatoes or rice with bacon fat, kale, and bacon pieces. At Christmas, my grandmother mailed us the flaky, buttery, Dutch almond pastry, banket. In Diné bizaad, I can never get enough dahdíníilghaazh––puffy golden fry bread and with it, mutton stew. My friend Pita says my ris alamande, the Danish Christmas rice pudding, made with almond slivers, whipped cream, and cherries, is food from the gods. In Jewish homes, at Passover, I eat brisket and matzoh ball soup, charoset, and bitter herbs.
 
XV.

When she was in middle school, my daughter asked if she could get her tongue pierced. I had by then learned that it was useful to say no by saying yes––little to no resistance from a teen. So I said, "Yes, but you will have to save enough money ahead of time for the piercing and for treating any infections that could result." She never brought it up again.
 
XVI.

Conquerors, colonizers, and occupiers the world over have, through concerted effort, including physical and cultural violence, erased Indigenous tongues. Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic were nearly eradicated by the takeover of the British colonizers. It happened through violence, through the perceived prestige of speaking English, and sometimes through more benign intercultural contact. Scottish Gaelic is now an endangered language. Irish Gaelic is making a comeback through revitalization efforts.
 
XVII.

I dream sometimes that I am speaking Diné bizaad fluently with one of my friends. I feel overjoyed. Then, before the dream is over, I realize I am speaking Danish, the only language other than US English in which I am fluent. The power of my disappointment wakens me every time.
 
XVIII.

 

In Chinese medicine, the tongue is used to diagnose health problems. Is the tongue coated? What color is the coating? Does the tongue tremble when at rest? Are there tooth impressions on the sides of the tongue? Once, when a Chinese medicine doctor had been treating me for a while, as always, she took a look at my tongue and exclaimed, "Oh! What's happened?" She went to work right away prescribing a new set of horrible-tasting herbs for me to make into a foul-smelling tea.
 
XIX.

 

Throughout the US, the government and missionaries have tried to obliterate Indigenous languages. For more than a century, the speaking of US English was forced on school children. They were severely punished for speaking their Mother Tongue.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that half of the approximately 6,000 tongues spoken around the globe today are in danger of disappearing. By UNESCO standards, Diné bizaad is one of them.

The UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger asks, "Why preserve language diversity?" In the Diné Language Teachers' Association (DLTA) handbook for a Diné language revitalization project, Louise Benally gives this answer: "Diné bizaad and, through it, the cultural beliefs and practices that it imparts, is valuable because it is our identity. It makes us who we are. We have pride in the teachings, the beliefs, and the traditional songs and stories that provide us the foundation for being a Diné person. When we listen to Diné bizaad, it makes us feel good. It brings us home. When we listen to a Diné song, it moves us to cry, to laugh or just to be silent in awe."
 
XX.

The desire to lick things that are not food must be what makes adults tell children not to lick a metal pipe in winter. Otherwise, why would anyone even think of it? A tongue frozen to a pipe is consequently forever fixed within the repertoire of slapstick humor. Has anyone ever done it in real life?
 
XXI.

And why is a wagon tongue even called a tongue? Who first named it that? I haven't been able to find out.
 
XXII.

Tongues eating, speaking, playing grant us sampling tongues, twisting tongues, coding tongues, frozen tongues, lashing tongues, flaming tongues, reclaiming tongues, sly tongues and honest tongues, faltering tongues, silver tongues, licking tongues. (After Ross Gay on "skateboarding eyes" in Inciting Joy)

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

 

"Tongues" was first published in 

Fertile: An Anthology of Earth Poems and Prose from the High Desert and Mountains of the Four Corners Region.

Fertile, with its richness of diverse voices is available for purchase at https://www.annaredsand.com/contact 

or

by contacting me in a message through the Contact page.

You can read more about Fertile and sample some other writers from the anthology at https://www.annaredsand.com/blog/posts/43466.

***

 

In the early part of the 20th century, progressive Christians promoted the Social Gospel Movement, which they saw as living into what Jesus preached in his Sermon on the Mount––not just taking his words as nice ideas. To them it meant actually feeding the poor, bringing clean water to countries where people were dying for lack of it. It meant sharing the love they believed was the essence of Christianity in concrete ways. If that drew people to becoming Christians, well and good, but proselytizing was not their goal.

Evangelical Christians like my parents disparaged the Social Gospel; they believed the people they called liberals (progressive Christians) were taking an easy path, substituting the Social Gospel for preaching. The battle against liberals was almost as strong as the battle against Satan. They went so far as to say that liberals were not really Christians. My father talked about the Social Gospel pretty often, always with a sneer. And yet, in many ways he practiced it alongside his preaching by doing things like burning a dead horse so an old woman could eat.

My father was not a saint in the conventional meaning of the word. He could've put his wife first on the day of the dead horse and sat at the table for another fifteen minutes before heading out to stack tires on the corpse. It would've been a loving thing to do and wouldn't have asked much of him.

On the other hand, he helped the people around him because he loved doing it, not because it was his duty. He'd grown up poor on a farm in Southwest Michigan with an abusive father, and early on he vowed never to be like the man he'd seen hitting the farm horse on the forehead with a two-by-four. Instead, he took his mother, whom he did consider a saint for her kindness, her patience, and her prayers for her children, as his life model.

When we moved to Gallup, on the edge of the Navajo Nation, some of the members of my father's new congregation at Tohlakai suffered from alcohol addiction. My dad was deeply moved by how it affected not only the alcoholic but entire families, and he got a member of AA from Gallup to start evening meetings there. He saw fatherless children and took them fishing with my brothers, included them in hot dog roasts, and piled them into the pickup to go sledding. At my father's funeral, a grown man who had gone on these boyhood jaunts with our dad, talked about how much that had meant to him. Whereas I had left the church, this man was still an active member, maybe in part because of my father's kindness.

My father definitely preached to convert, however. At funerals he preached that "the wages of sin is death," always hoping to save those standing around the grave from an eternity in hell. He picked up every hitchhiker he could. Countless times, I sat in the back seat and heard him launch into the same talk with his captive audience.

"Do you have sheep at home?" he would ask. This was invariably a gratuitous question, as Diné life centered on raising sheep.

"Yeah. Sure."

"I'm sure you take good care of your sheep—taking them out to graze and get water. You watch out for coyotes that might attack them. You put them in the corral at night. You would know if one of your sheep was missing, right?"

The hitchhiker would nod, probably already regretting having accepted the ride.

"And if a sheep was missing, you would leave the others in the corral and go out to look for the lost one?"

The hitchhiker nodded again.

"Jesus told a story about the Good Shepherd who goes after one lost sheep. He doesn't want even one sheep to die. The Bible calls Jesus the Good Shepherd because he doesn't want you and me to be lost, either. Anyone who believes in Jesus will go to heaven when they die. If we don't believe in him, the Bible says we will go to hell, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth."

While he felt and showed concern for the lives of people in the here and now, his greatest concern was for their lives in the hereafter, and any way he could reach them for Christ was beneficial. He believed that traditional Diné ceremonies must be eradicated because they were of the Evil One. Some practices, like summer squaw dances (also called that by Diné, despite the otherwise pejorative term squaw) were mainly social but still wrong, in his mind. Other ceremonies were for healing. One in particular represented a form of what I see as restorative justice: the Enemy Way Ceremony, performed for returning soldiers to help relieve them of pre- and post-combat stress and return them to connections with family, community, and Native culture. To my dad and missionaries like him, they all had to go.

He saw rules that traditional Diné lived by as superstitious restrictions that fostered fear if they were broken. In his mind, Christianity could relieve people of those fears and offered the pathway to an afterlife in heaven. Diné friends have told me that many people have tremendous fear about breaking the taboos of traditional Diné ways. But fear of breaking cultural and religious rules is part of living socially; rules have, at least initially, existed to prevent behavior that can damage the group. Many restrictions in traditional Diné culture have to do with living in harmony with the natural world or have their origins in common sense, such as rules about water use in an arid land. As in many cultures, the origin of these rules has often been forgotten, so the proscriptions can seem irrational, not connected to real life any longer. The replacement religion and culture my father felt duty-bound to offer meant tearing apart a culture that had functioned well, but not perfectly––like any culture, my dad's included.

On one hand, Dad believed it was his mission to destroy the aspects of Diné culture that he saw as a false religion, and on the other, paradoxically, he was passionately curious about the culture, even the parts of it that he believed must be wiped out. He was able to live within this contradiction because he saw Diné religion and culture as two separate things, which is not how traditional Diné experience them. To them, all of life and how we live it is one great, interconnected whole. I learned this from Diné elders and healers, not from Bilagáana missionaries.

I've never been more aware than I am at this point in the 21st century of the necessity for vetting information sources. And I have to say that my father's sources were often suspect—White missionaries with their soul-saving agenda, White traders with their commercial agenda, the federal government with its assimilation policies, and Diné who had embraced Christianity within the post-colonial ethos and would thus have a bias against their own traditions.

 

***

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved. 

 

To be continued on Monday, 3/4/24

If you are just joining the serialization of Fissure, you can read earlier installments in order by using the Table of Contents

 

***

 

Diné people might not have liked my mother, but quite a few came to trust her as a nurse, and when she was called on in that capacity, she was always ready to serve. When she was offered Navajo Country as a temporary substitute for Nigeria, my mother agreed and took her first airplane ride to the Rehoboth Mission Hospital, five miles east of Gallup. It was 1946, and she met my father at the mission. He arrived after her by a few months to work as the cook for the boarding school and hospital, having learned institutional cooking in the army during the war. They married in 1947 and drove to Michigan so he could attend Bible School and become a Bible-preaching missionary instead of a cooking one. I think they had always hoped to return to Dinétah. By the time the mission board sent them in 1952, they had three children, of whom I was the eldest, nearly four years old.

Over the years, I saw things my mother did for which Diné people could have loved her. And maybe they did sometimes. One Sunday, after the morning church service, someone came to the interpreter who worked with my father and told him a baby had been born the night before and was very sick. Could my mother come to the family hogan to see him? We drove over, and my mother stooped to enter the traditional earthen home. She was in there only a few minutes when she came back out, walking swiftly and carrying a small bundle wrapped in a blanket.

My father turned the car around, and we headed for Shiprock, where there was an Indian Health Service hospital. From the back seat I watched my mother hold the tiny, naked, wrinkled baby upside down by his ankles. His skin, which should have been a rich brown, was blue-gray. Periodically my mother thumped his back, and she kept wiping him down with a wet cloth.

"Why are you holding him that way?" I asked.

"He's barely breathing because there's mucus in his air passages. If I had a bulb syringe, I could suck some of it out. Holding him upside down helps drain the fluid, so he can breathe easier. He has a high fever. That's why I'm using this wet cloth. I'm trying to bring the fever down"
The car bumped over the dusty, rock-strewn road. My father didn't watch out for rocks the way he usually did. We jerked over them, going faster than we ever had.

At the hospital, my mother rushed in with the baby. Hardly any time passed before she came back without him. "They said his temperature went all the way up to the end of the thermometer. Probably past it," she said. She sounded so serious, so worried. "They don't know if he's going to make it."

The boy did live and got named Clifford. The doctors said my mother had saved his life. Clifford grew brown and chubby, and whenever we saw him, his family called him my mother's baby. Surely that was a kind of love.

Still, it's not difficult for me to see why my mother was not liked in the same way my dad was. Her own mother was a brusque, direct woman, quick to judge, and she included my mother in her pronouncements. There never seemed to be room for doubt about what Grandma thought of people and their foibles. Once in my mother's kitchen, I was a silent witness to one of her cruel comments. By that time my mother had given birth to nine children (her mother had had only three), and my mom said something about the joys and maybe even the religious obligation to bring children into the world. Grandma said, without pause, "Yes, but a woman is not a cow, for instance." I almost laughed, but I saw my mother's face and bit my lips.

Despite, or more likely because of, having absorbed many more belittlements and perhaps worse, my mother became a judgmental person herself. If she didn't come right out and say what she was thinking, and she usually did, at least at home, her attitudes were communicated by her withholding visage.

***

There was a bit more to the rattlesnake story. Before my mother went for the shovel, she noticed that there was a Navajo Police vehicle parked up the hill at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school. She went back to the house and called the school, which, since it was a boarding school, was staffed on Sundays. She asked to speak to the officer. She wanted him to kill the snake for her. When she told us the story at dinner, she said, "He hemmed and hawed, said maybe, and I knew he wasn't going to do it. What a chicken."

My father said, "But you know Navajo people aren't supposed to have anything to do with snakes."

"Yes, but he's a policeman," she said. "Why be a policeman if you're afraid of a snake? If you can't help people who need help? Those Navajo Police are useless."

My mother raised us the way she was raised––not to question authority; it didn't even occur to me to have an opinion about what my mother had just said. Though I had no opinion then, clearly my mother's blatant othering, made an impression, as I stored this and similar incidents. They would lie at the root of my radically opposing views later on.

***

Old Lady Appel was thin and bent and moved swiftly down the dusty road in front of the mission whenever she came by. No one seemed to know where her name came from, though her face did have as many wrinkles as the skin of an apple ready for the compost. Her long skirts swished around her high-top work boots, and her cane barely touched the ground. "What does she carry that cane for?" my mother complained. "Obviously she doesn't need it, walking at that clip. She's practically running."

When Old Lady Appel turned off the road and onto the mission compound, my mother groaned. "Why does she always have to come here when we're eating? And when you're home for once?" That was addressed to my father, who was rarely home at lunchtime.

Sometimes it was a mystery why Old Lady Appel came at all, and contrary to my mother's complaint, it wasn't always at lunch. I thought she was the oldest person I knew, and I can still see her sitting on the kitchen floor, even though she'd been offered a chair, while my mother, who probably spent more time in the kitchen than in any other room, worked at the sink. Neither spoke each other's language, though I could sometimes hear the old woman rattling on at my mother in Diné bizaad. It was almost as if she thought my mother would grasp what she was saying if she just kept on talking long enough.

When I look back, I think Old Lady Appel's visits might even have been a form of hospitality. Possibly she thought my mother must be lonely––a Bilagáana woman in Dinétah without her extended family nearby. Or maybe the old lady was just out walking and wanted the cup of water she knew my mother would offer.

I try to understand my mother's antipathy, which descended to its nadir when it came to Old Lady Appel, but was often present when other Diné people showed up unannounced. Although she was a guest in their land, my mother's attitude reflected the US government's post-colonial assimilation policies of the 50s. I often heard her refer to "those people," resentment in her voice, for many reasons, one of them because "they" had not adopted the White habit of arranging a visit ahead of time. It was an empty, ridiculous wish, as only the trading post, the school, and the mission had telephones, which made pre-arranged visits an impossibility. Never mind that scheduled visits weren't part of the Diné hospitality culture.

Aside from her insensitivity to the host culture at best and her racism at worst, I know my mother lived under constant stress. While we lived at Teec Nos Pos, her passel of children doubled to six; in the summer we had electricity only two hours a day in the evenings; her hands were always red and cracked from laundering clothes on a washboard and in a wringer washer––including piles of cloth diapers––and from hanging them outdoors to dry in all weathers; she accompanied church services (sometimes three on a Sunday) on the piano, pump organ, or accordion. But chief among her grievances, was the fact that my father was absent far more than she thought necessary.

He was gone to passionately spread the gospel. And to help people––probably one explanation for the first half of Janice Becenti's pronouncement: " You know, the Navajo people really like your dad."

One day my mother's nemesis did come by when we were eating lunch, on a day when my father happened to be home. We saw her scuttling along the road, turning in at the mission. My mother had things to say from the moment she saw the woman. When Old Lady Appel knocked at the back door––the only door we used––my father went to answer. A few minutes later, he came back. "I need to get John's help," he said. "She keeps mentioning łíí', her horse. She's making the motions of throwing up and holding her nose, but I can't put together what she's talking about."

The interpreter's house was a few hundred yards from ours, and my father went to get Mr. Tsosie, who was doubtless also eating lunch. Together they talked with Old Lady Appel. Then Dad came back and said he had to go out to her place. "Her horse died a few days ago, and the smell is so bad, it's making her sick. She hasn't eaten for three days."

He knew my mother would object, and she did. "Can't you at least finish your lunch first? That horse isn't going anywhere." But he put on his fedora, which I suppose looked odd with his short-sleeved, white nylon shirt and khaki pants with the front pleats. He left in the mission pickup with Mr. Tsosie and Old Lady Appel.

Over dinner that night he told us the story. "She was right, you know. The smell was so terrible, John and I had a hard time not vomiting. We threw a couple old tires on top of the horse, and some gas, and started the pile on fire. The burning rubber smelled terrible, too, but it got rid of the decaying horse smell. If we had just burned the horse, the stink would've hung around."

"Wasn't there anyone else around there who could help her?"

"She asked us," Dad said.

"Well, I hope she was thankful."

"She didn't say anything about that." He grinned.

 

"Of course not."

***

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

 

To be continued on Friday, 3/1/24

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