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.

***

 

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

 

***

I became a boarding school student for the first time when I was eight. After the Teec Nos Pos BIA school, I once again took my schooling by correspondence. Halfway through fourth grade, my mother gave birth to her sixth child. My father bought our first automatic washing machine and decided I would go to Rehoboth Mission School, one hundred thirty miles away. The washing machine meant my mother no longer had to use a washboard or feed clothing and diapers through the rollers of the old wringer washer. Boarding school for me meant more time for her other chores.

I was excited. I thought I could be like those teens departing for Anadarko and Chilocco. The braids that hung to the middle of my back were cut off, leaving a severe bob to make it possible for me to take care of my own hair. My mother gave me a small tin box for my little treasures. It wasn't a footlocker like those big kids bound for Intermountain owned, but it was mine and it was new. Everything else went into the yellow and brown suitcase my mother had used since nursing school.

Sixty-seven years after I started at Rehoboth, whenever January 24 comes around, I remember it as the anniversary of my first day of boarding school. It's not that I try to remember; I can't help it.

My father drove me to Rehoboth in the mission pickup, thirty miles over dirt and cobbles, one hundred miles over the narrow asphalt strip that was New Mexico Highway 666. He was on his way to Prescott, Arizona to be a witness in the Federal trial of someone from Teec Nos Pos. He left the pickup to be serviced by the Rehoboth maintenance crew. Over the next few days, while he was in court, that pickup became my touchstone to home. I knew on that first day that boarding school was not going to be an adventure after all, Anadarko and Riverside to the contrary.

 
There was a separate dorm for missionary kids, which really meant Bilagáana missionary kids. Miss Vander Weide, the white-haired matron, showed me to my basement room with its Pepto Bismol pink walls and insulated steam pipes suspended from the low ceiling. "Everyone calls me Miss Van," she said. She showed me a drawer. "Just put your suitcase on your bed for now, and you can unpack later." Mine was the narrow bed. At right angles to it was a double one. "That's where Jessie and Bonnie sleep. You'll meet them after school."

Then she walked me down the hill from the big white house that had been turned into our dorm and across the mission campus to the school. She knocked on the third and fourth grade classroom door, and a stylishly dressed, young Diné woman opened it. She and the high school Home Ec teacher were the only Diné faculty. Everyone else was Dutch American or Dutch Canadian. Neither of these women would last long at Rehoboth. Miss Silversmith brought me to the front of the room, put her arm around my shoulders and introduced me. In all my years at Rehoboth, she was the only one to give me the welcome of touch.

At noon we lined up and marched to the Mission House where we sat ten to a table, all ages, with one adult who would ensure that we ate some of everything and cleaned our plates. After school, I went up the hill. Jessie and Bonnie were there in our room. Bonnie wore a brace on her leg, and when I saw it, I realized who she was—the missionaries' kid from Two Wells who had been bitten by a rattlesnake. She was in first grade, and I thought she seemed kind of slow. She didn't say anything at all.

Jessie was big, way bigger than me and a lot bigger than Bonnie. "I'm in sixth grade," she said. It sounded like a challenge. "What grade are you in?"

"Fourth," I squeaked.

"Ohh." The slant to her oh tied my stomach in knots. "Well, we had a lot more space in here before they brought your bed in." She kicked Bonnie's brace at the ankle, "Didn't we, Stupid?"

Bonnie nodded. She didn't seem to care about being kicked or called Stupid.

I knew I should say something, but I didn't dare. "I'll say something next time," I thought. I already knew there would be a next time. I unpacked my suitcase, and started out of the room.

"Hey! Where are you going?" Jessie asked.

I was afraid if I told her, she would follow me. I didn't say anything.

"Hey! I asked where you're going."

"Upstairs."

"Oh, are you going to tell on me? Are you a tattletale?"

I shook my head.

"What did you say?"

"I didn't … no."

"You better not be if you know what's good for you."

Just then Wilma, who was in high school and shared the room next to ours, stepped over to our doorway. I knew her because she was the daughter of the missionary in Shiprock. "Hey, Jessie," she said. "You better leave her alone."

I said hi to Wilma and hurried toward the stairs. I knew where my father had left the pickup, and I crossed the campus, walked up behind the houses to a garage that could berth up to three vehicles. Outside the garage stood the familiar dark green pickup with the white lettering on the door: "Teec Nos Pos Christian Reformed Mission." I touched the lettering. I tried the door, but it was locked. I wanted to get in and sit on the leathery brown seat and wait for my father to come back from Prescott and take me home. Instead I leaned in and rested my forehead against the door and felt the tears trickle down my cheeks.

I'd stood there a while, when a bell gonged on the other side of campus. A thin, bent man wearing blue coveralls and rimless glasses came out of the maintenance shop and said, "That's your supper bell. If you want supper, you better run."

I didn't know if I should run to the dorm or the Mission House. I picked the Mission House. Then I saw the others marching down from my dorm, and a second bell rang. I was pretty sure I'd made the wrong choice. Much longer lines of Navajo students marched from the big gray dorms on either side of the schoolhouse.

After supper Miss Van got out a carom board, and Jessie and a boy named Bobby, whom I recognized as a third grader from my classroom, taught me how to play. While we shot the wooden rings into pockets, two sisters from Naschitti who were in high school took turns practicing the piano. Three high school boys and Wilma did homework in the dining room. "Maybe it won't be so bad," I thought.

Then Miss Van told us it was time for us younger kids to get ready for bed. Bobby went to his room, and Jessie, Bonnie and I headed downstairs. I had brand new flannel pajamas, white with little orange and turquoise stars, ordered from the Sears catalog. I felt I was going to cry, so when I pulled the top on, I kept my head inside. I was afraid to let Jessie see.

"Hey. You. Don't start crying now."

I gulped and said, "I'm not." My voice quavered.

"You're on the verge. I can tell."

I pulled my pajama top on the rest of the way and sought refuge under the covers, pulling them close to my face so I could cry without being heard.

The next day I found my safe place. It was behind the big gray Girls' Dorm. The Navajo girls' dorm. Irma Ahasteen was in fourth grade too, and I knew her from Beclaibito, the place next to Teec Nos Pos. She drew me into a game of Red Rover. When the first bell for supper sounded I raced up the hill so I could march back down with the missionary kids. The Bilagáana missionary kids.

The first weekend I went home, I begged my parents to let me stay. "You wanted to go," they said. "Now you have to live with your decision." Only when someone else said, years later, "You were only eight years old," did I realize how inappropriate their reasoning had been.

"Can't I stay in the Girls' Dorm instead?" I asked.

"You can't stay there because the Navajo kids can't go home on weekends. You wouldn't like that, would you?"

"Why can't they?"

"If they go home, they might not go to church. We want them to go to church every Sunday."

Later I would realize that this constituted one rationale for a separate dormitory for missionary kids. Much later, it would occur to me to wonder why the Diné missionary kids didn't live in our dormitory. Surely no one feared that they wouldn't go to church if they went home on the weekends.

At home, my brother Rick and I made what we called Ps. We wouldn't say, "Plans" out loud because they were to be kept secret from our parents. The plans were strategies for keeping me from returning to Rehoboth after a weekend home. Our most elaborate P was to dig a large pit, cover it with branches, and hide me in it until it was past time to leave. That way I would miss my ride in the old green Studebaker with the missionary kids from Shiprock.

Every time I went back to school, I spent the first half hour in class sobbing. I tried desperately and failed to stop myself. Finally Miss Silversmith would say, "Why don't you go to the office and get a drink of water?" She never sounded impatient with me, only kind, even though I was the only one who went through this Monday after Monday.

It wasn't every Monday. All the other kids in our dorm went home every weekend, and even though I had a ride to Shiprock, my parents said that the thirty-miles over the dirt road would be too expensive and hard on the car every week. Two round trips would have amounted to a hundred twenty miles of rough road, but in my mind it was only thirty, and I couldn't understand why they wouldn't want me home every weekend. I was forced to spend alternate weekends with families that lived on the mission compound. Mostly one family, the Van Bovens, where the children repeated Jessie's bullying less overtly. The Van Boven kids teased me about having skipped a grade. They teased me about being homesick. They laughed when I accidentally slipped into what linguists have called Dummitawry English—English spoken with a Diné accent. They dished out the meanness of kids who don't want someone else's kid living with them.

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All rights reserved.

 

***

 

To Be Continued on Monday, 1/29/24

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Chapter I

 

Fissures and Crenellations

 

First published in Solstice, Winter, 2019

 

Installment 1

 

How do the stories we tell about ourselves in relationship to place shape our perceptions of place?

~ Terry Tempest Williams, Red
 

 We drove across endless white alkaline flats into the Navajo Nation. It was the first time. No trees, just a few gray saltbushes, some sage, shocks of platinum grass. We drove over dried-up washes that looked like long, narrow jigsaw puzzles. Across the plains to our left ran the blue-black Chuska Range, the off-center spine of the Nation. Far away on the right, tiny rust, orange, and purple boxes lined the horizon; I would learn to call them mesas. Overhead, all around us, wherever land met sky and into the distance above, rose the brilliant, inverted blue bowl. It was 1952. I was four years old.

We rode in the big green Chevrolet Carryall, a forerunner to today's Suburban. My father drove, and my mother sat in the back seat with me and my younger brother and baby sister. We were on our way to what my parents called God's Work. Missionary work. I would be proud of their work until I began to understand how it was an integral part of the devastation that is colonization; then I would take on a task that could return some measure of what proselytizing had taken away.

Somewhere between Naschitti—the Place of the Badger—and Sheep Springs, my father stopped the car to let a flock of sheep cross the road. While we waited for them, my mother pointed to a small, domed structure made of logs and earth. "It's a hogan," she said.

"What's a hogan?"

"It's a Navajo home."

I liked how its roundness hugged the flat land, small and cozy looking. "Are we going to live in a hogan?"

"No. If you live in a hogan you have to chop wood and haul water. You have to do everything by hand—wash clothes, butcher sheep for food, herd sheep—like that lady is doing." She pointed to the woman who followed the flock we waited for—a woman wearing a long dark green satin skirt, a gray jacket, and a paisley scarf tied tight under her chin. "There wouldn't be any time left for Daddy to do God's Work," my mother added.

In an afterthought she said, "They sleep on a dirt floor on sheepskins."

The idea of sleeping on a sheepskin on the floor stirred my imagination. Wanting to live in a hogan became the first inkling of what would grow into my longing to become other, to belong to this place and its people.

The sheep, their herder and a small yellow dog finished their trek across the road, and we started up again. As we neared the Navajo Nation town of Shiprock, the mountain range disappeared. Nothing but flatness surrounded us until, out of nowhere, the giant brown volcanic plug for which the town is named thrust its jagged peaks into the sky. I grew still in the face of something ancient, unshakeable, everlasting.

Then, "What is it?" I asked.

"Shiprock," my father said.

 

Looking back, I understand why my young self was confused. I knew we were going to live in a place called Shiprock, but living within this massive rock, folded into its mysterious crenellations, seemed impossible and also frightening. I asked my father, "Are we going to live there?"

He laughed in the way that can humiliate a child. "No. This is the rock named Shiprock. We're living in the town that's named after it."

 

 

***

 
The town of Shiprock lies close to where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet. On the lip of a hill, on the east end of the village, stood a two-story, square house made of gray blocks. It looked nothing like a hogan; it would be our first home in Dinétah. From then on, no matter where on Earth I find myself, I am always living on the edges of Navajo Country, just as this foreign house stood on the edge of that hill. If not physically, I will always live on those margins in the geography of my mind.

The hilltop was covered in large, smooth river rocks, left from the time when water covered vast expanses of this part of the world. The water had shrunken now to the brown flow of the San Juan River. Enormous gnarled cottonwoods populated the banks, and willow switches waved there—gold-green in spring, scarlet in winter. Diné farmers used the water to irrigate fields and orchards.

Up there on the hill, beside the garden where my father grew corn, string beans, squash, tomatoes and peppers, I played with Bobby and Rudy Yellowhair, my first playmates in Dinétah. Most days we crouched on the ground between the garden and the garage. My father had placed peaches, cut in half, onto window screens on the garage roof so the sun could dry them. Their peachy smell came down to us while we made little Diné homesteads in the soft dirt we stole from the squash hills—hogans, sheep corrals, summer shelters, sweat lodges. This was something Diné children had been doing for years and years, centuries probably.

 

***

 

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All rights reserved.

 

To be continued on Friday, January 12.

 

Your comments are appreciated.