Anna Redsand

Rick and I kept walking, heading toward the mission. Like everything else, it had changed. The sprawling, cobbled-together adobe we had lived in burned only a few months after we moved away. A modern frame house took its spot. The little white clapboard chapel had been replaced by a large, cinderblock affair. Two things about the mission were the same: the interpreter's modest bungalow was still there, and the oak tree stood halfway up the hill. But it had grown so small, shrunken like an old woman.

Officials said that the house and trading post fires had both been intentional, and now I wonder if the arsonist or arsonists started the fires out of resentment because the White missionaries and White traders had introduced such an alteration to a way of life that once flourished here. When I look back, that possibility seems so obvious, but when I was a child, I felt welcome, that living in Teec Nos Pos was my life, just as it was the life of everyone else who lived there.

***

As we came to the old places on our walk, I got out my camera several times. I needed to photograph the curve of the road from the old trading post to the mission, the rosy Three Monkeys under the pinking sky, the shaved off hilltop where I once went to school. I needed to do this to assure myself, "This is still the same place. Some things are different, and some are the same, never changing. Yes, I really did live here once. Yes, this place, really is a part of who I am."

Even more than the present-day photos, I need to look at the old ones sometimes. At home I get out a cardboard box, softening with age. In it I find a picture of Rick and me standing in the mission yard, eating yellow slices of casaba melon from my father's garden, the Three Monkeys behind us. I'm wearing baggy shorts and a striped polo shirt, my brown hair skinned back into tight French braids. Rick, with his blond GI clip has on shorts, too, but his baby belly hangs bare over the elastic waist. The picture leaves no doubt that I was here. I am real in this place, not a ghost.

***

I first learned to call the immense rock formation Shiprock, the name Bilagáanas gave it because it resembles a clipper, a two-masted, tall-ship, rising out of the desert sea. Much later I would learn its Diné name, Tsé Bit'á'í, Rock with Wings, for the lava dikes that extend outward for miles from the plug. They make the rock appear, especially from above, like a winged bird in flight. Reigning over the land as it does, it is small wonder that the rock holds a prominent place in Diné lore.

Any time we drove up and out of the valley of Teec Nos Pos for provisions or doctor visits, we passed close by the great monolith. As soon as one of us sighted it, we began to chant, "I see-e Ship-a-rock. I see-e Ship-a-rock." The rest joined in and carried on in unison until we exhausted our parents' patience. Up close the Winged Rock resolved into mysterious vertical fissures and crenellations—feathers of the great bird. As with most features of the land called childhood, Shiprock was just there. When we are young, life just is; we do not know that it is perhaps remarkable. We do not know what deep impressions it is making on us. We live in the present.

A few years after Rick's and my nostalgic trip to Teec Nos Pos, I visited my friend Alice Whitegoat who lives near Shiprock. Alice is an accomplished poet and painter, my supervisor when I worked in a Native publishing house. I drove to her place, not from Teec Nos Pos, which would have put me up close to Shiprock (the rock), but from the east. I crested a rise, and off in the distance it rose—the most iconic element in the landscape of my childhood, now seldom seen. My heart leapt, its striations set to thrumming, "I am home. I am home."

 

Way over there, it looks small, as small as the nail on my little finger. But I know. I know the way it towers over the flats dotted with platinum grasses and a few clumps of gray-green salt weed. The rock dominates the terrain, as though nothing else can exist there—a colossal volcanic neck, its spikes piercing the brilliant blue.

 
"I am home. I am home." It rises from my throat as the rock itself rises from the depths of the Earth. I can't help it, as much as I try to tell myself it isn't true. "You are not home," I remonstrate. "You are here on sufferance." In childhood there were no questions. Then I thought Dinétah belonged to me as much as it did to Rudy and Bobby Yellowhair, to Sally and Carol Belone, to the children we played with in the Teec Nos Pos arroyo, on the branches of the stunted apple tree. Now I know that wasn't how it was.

When I got to Alice's, we sat out on her patio in the dying light. I told her about how I sang when I saw the rock.

"Really?" She said. I couldn't tell what she felt.

So I added the renunciation, "I know it's not really my home. I can't claim it."

She didn't say anything. I decided her silence was tacit agreement. I said nothing more about it. I pulled back on the strings of my heart.

Our first arrival in Shiprock began a long and endless fall into the fissure that lies between two cultures. Alice sometimes shares with me her poetry in progress, and in her songs I hear hints of her own in-between places. Most of the Diné I know have those cracks in their lives to one degree or another because Dinétah has been under occupation for so long. Alice has expressed this crevassed life with rare eloquence and humor. Once I wrote to her after reading one of her poems, "Even though you and I live in different in-between fissures, they could well be parallel arroyos."

Days after my visit, seeming to go back to our conversation on the patio, and apropos of nothing I had written recently, Alice wrote me. It was as though she'd been thinking about it all that time. "Shiprock.  Belongs to you. Your love of Shiprock is legitimate and is for anyone, and it doesn't matter what color you are so long as your blood is red."

Whatever prompted her words, they were a blessing, and with the blessing came tears. Shiprock and Teec Nos Pos, Dinétah, are places that shape the stories I tell about myself.

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All rights reserved.

 

This is the final installment of "Fissures and Crenellations," which was first published in Solstice, Winter 2019.

On Monday, 1/22/24, the first installment of "In and Out," first published in Isthmus, Special on Politics, 2016, will post. It's a White girl's experience of government and mission boarding schools in Dinétah, plus stories about boarding school from her Diné friends.

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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.