Anna Redsand

"In and Out" was first published in Isthmus, Special Political Issue, 2016

 

Anadarko. Chilocco. Haskell. Riverside. Intermountain. That's where the giant olive-green, formerly military buses were headed. Far away to Oklahoma, Kansas, California, Utah. I watched with admiration as teenagers hefted their shiny enameled cobalt or black footlockers into the bellies of the buses and then climbed aboard. The girls wore shirtwaist dresses with full skirts, bounced out by crinolines. The boys had on startlingly white shirts and brand new dark blue jeans, black or white cowboy hats.

 

The buses lined up beside the little Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) School. Each bus stood there for a whole day, while horses and wagons came and went—parents bringing their children to buses that would take them to boarding schools far away. At day's end, the buses roared off, raising dust as they passed the mission below the school—the mission where I stood watching.

 

I loved the names of those places. They sounded like poetry. Anadarko—full of mystery. Chilocco—a sound of music. Intermountain—surrounded by majesty. Riverside—a green paradise. "Someday I will go to boarding school," I thought, and I knew it would be a romantic adventure.

 

I was five, living on the small mission post in Teec Nos Pos in the northeast part of the Navajo Nation. My first year of school had been a kindergarten correspondence course from the Calvert School in Baltimore. Missionaries the world over used the Calvert Course, but the next year my parents arranged with the principal that I would attend the BIA school.

 

"She won't be on the books," the principal said, "because it's not really legal for her to attend."

 

"What about report cards?"

 

"She'll get a report card, but we just won't include her in any of our reports to the Bureau."

 

My parents were sticklers for rules, so it's surprising that they agreed to this arrangement, having me be a sort of ghost student.

 

"We can't have her in first grade, though," Miss Mims added. "The other kids will still be learning English, and she already knows how to read." She gave my mother a look of disapproval.

 

On a bright September morning, my mother walked me up the hill for my first day of second grade—my first day of "real" school. The building had been constructed as a Works Project Administration (WPA) effort during the Depression and was built of native sandstone and pine vigas. We entered the cool, dark hallway, and I was assailed by unfamiliar smells that I would soon enough identify as sawdust sweeping compound, petroleum jelly, and Government commodity powdered milk, pressed pink lunchmeat and pale yellow processed cheese.

 

We marched down the quiet, empty hall to my classroom. My mother knocked, and Mr. Washington answered. Silent children filled all the seats but one. Perhaps the arrangement with Miss Mims had been reached after the school year started, and that explained the already full classroom. Mr. Washington pointed to my seat, and my stomach went queasy. We started work, and between reading, coloring, adding and subtracting, I forgot that my mother was gone.

 

Before lunch I found out where the petroleum jelly smell came from. We girls went into a bathroom to wash up by the long porcelain trough with its many faucets.

 

Afterwards, the others took large dollops of Vaseline from a container in the coatroom and spread their faces, hands and arms with it to protect against the desert air. I imitated them. We trouped into the dining hall, where I learned about the powdered milk, pink meat and pale cheese. My stomach got queasier.

 

Then Mrs. Belone came in, and I was happy to see her. Hers was the first familiar face I'd seen all day. She was the mother of Sally and Carol, the girls we played with in the apple tree, down in the arroyo, and in each other's houses. But she pretended that she didn't know me. "Line up! Line up! Time for your nap," she shouted.

 

"What?" I didn't say it out loud, but I was thinking it. "How could this be? What's happening? I don't take naps anymore. And why does Mrs. Belone sound so mean?"

 

She got us marching to a room with rows and rows of narrow metal beds. Striped seersucker bedspreads covered them—light and dark green ones and pink and maroon ones.

 

Mrs. Belone led me to a bed. "Here. You sleep here."

 

I tried to say, "But I don't sleep here. I don't stay here." But she was gone to some other part of the room where two boys were tussling with each other and laughing. She got that out of them right away.

 

I lay stiff and straight on top of my pink and maroon spread. I was terrified that this could mean I would be staying here permanently. Mrs. Belone left. My bed was near the door, and I rolled off of it, being as quiet as I could. The springs squeaked, and I stopped. No one said anything or did anything. I got to the floor, hunched over, and scooted to the door. It was open a crack, and I slipped out, looked both ways down the dark hall, saw no one, and made a dash for the outer door. It was heavy, made of metal, and it made a loud creak when I pressed the bar to open it. I squeezed through, and launched into a run. I didn't stop until I was home.

 

My mother looked surprised, when I dashed into the kitchen. Between gulped breaths, tears streaming, I said, "I don't want to go to school anymore. They're trying to keep me there. I had to go in this room and go to bed. They want me to stay there. And Mrs. Belone pretended like she doesn't even know me." I stopped and looked up at my mother, then I added, "And the food tastes awful."

 

She got on the phone to Miss Mims. I waited, hoping I wouldn't have to go back ever again, and listened to my mother's end of the conversation. When she got off the phone, I said, "Do I have to go back?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Noo. I don't want to. Please."

 

"You have to. But you can come home for lunch and have your nap here."

 

"But…" I was pleased but puzzled. "I don't take naps."

 

"We'll see about that. You have ten minutes. Then you have to go back up."

 

As soon as things were settled, I felt ashamed. I knew the other kids' mothers couldn't call Miss Mims and get things changed for them. I knew they had to eat the lunches, take naps in that big room, eat supper there, and sleep there at night. I was glad I didn't have to, and I felt guilty for being glad. What had happened didn't fit with my sense of fairness. But I wanted the reprieve anyway.

 

***

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All rightds reserved.

 

If you missed the first essay, "Fissures and Crenellations," you can read the entire essay by going to the Table of Contents.

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To be continued on Friday, 1/26/24

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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.

That evening Rick and I took a walk, moving through a geography of change. We strolled slowly because the boy who used to run and leap over rocks like a young goat walks with a limp now. We left the home of Rick's friend Janet, and I witnessed a change in the simple fact of Janet's house. It stands in what looks like a suburban subdivision, common now in communities all over Dinétah. Putting houses close together makes indoor plumbing and electricity easier to install, but the developments also cause some social problems, especially among young people because the traditional Diné way of living is not to live so close together. People refer to the sites as The Housing, no matter which community in the Nation they live in.

The Housing in Teec stands on the hilltop that rises up behind the mission, the place where we lived once. When I was a child, my summer lullabies sounded from that hill, as I lay in bed, my heavy-lidded eyes roving over The Three Monkeys. I watched the mound's colors go from gold to rose to mauve and at last, tones of shadowy charcoal. As stars came out, drumbeats and chanting arose from beside a hogan, the only dwelling on the hilltop in those years.

Now a large cinderblock Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) complex covers the area. There is a water tower with the name Teec Nos Pos painted on it in large black letters. There are teacherages with boarded up windows, a sprawling school with a gym and cafeteria. Everything is painted government mint-green except for the water tower, which is silver. And there is The Housing.

When Rick and I first started our ramble, walking through The Housing, we passed young Diné couples out for an evening turn, pushing baby strollers and holding the hands of toddlers. Some exchanged hellos with us. Others seemed not to see us. I felt what I often feel at times like that—as if I am a ghost. It's because the people I pass can't see me. Not really. They see the physical me, and if they think anything at all, it's probably, "Old White woman." They have no way of knowing that I am rooted here, perhaps as much as they are. That I lived here before they did. That I speak some Diné bizaad. In fact, sadly, I speak more than many young Diné, perhaps more than the ones we're passing. They have no idea that The Three Monkeys formed me as much as the rocks have formed them.

In light of this, I take Terry Tempest Williams's question and twist it around so I'm asking, "How does our perception of place shape the stories we tell about ourselves?" For surely this place has shaped me, but it has created parts of me in ways that can't be seen when someone looks at me.
Rick and I ambled down the old road that was once a dirt thoroughfare for trucks laden with yellowcake uranium. Below stand tall cottonwoods that previously sheltered the former trading post. A year after we left Teec, the post burned to the ground, leaving only the trees and chunks of stone foundation, a few rotting fence posts.

My brothers and sister and I used to walk to the trading post every Saturday, each with a nickel in our pockets. On the way we counted the green lizards that sunned themselves beside the road. Their prehistoric faces made me shiver, and I expected that one day, one of them would dart at me and attack.

In those days, a broad, shaded veranda fronted the dressed sandstone store. Old men sat on a long bench, sharing news and chewing or smoking tobacco. Inside, the building was cool and dark. Wood and glass counters formed a U around the entire floor, displaying a little of every sundry imaginable—Vicks VapoRub, Noxema face cream, Band-Aids; needles, scissors, pocketknives, and cheap eating utensils. Floor-to-ceiling shelves behind the counters held bolts of velveteen and satin, jeans and western shirts, cowboy hats shaped like oversized potato chips. Other shelves contained canned fruits and vegetables, condensed milk and sacks of Bluebird flour. From the rafters hung speckled enamel coffee pots, galvanized tubs, coils of rope, horse collars and saddles, coal scuttles, axes and shovels.

The candy counter to the immediate right of the double swinging doors was our object, and the traders, Mormon brothers, gave us plenty of time to choose among Baby Ruths, Zeroes, and penny candies. While we considered the display, I listened to the brothers speak a creole Diné that even I could hear was heavily accented and hesitant. Later I learned the name linguists gave it—Trader Navajo.

Outside, if women were butchering a sheep behind the hog wire fence next to the trading post, we might stand there chewing our candy, watching them lay the head and the glistening innards on the shiny inside of the sheep's skin. I listened to them talk, too, learning by osmosis the sounds that I was starting to use to form words.

***

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.

***

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

 

To be continued on Friday, 1/19/24

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We didn't live long in Shiprock—a little less than a year because my father had been transferred to the mission in the small valley that was Teec Nos Pos. My mother packed our house into the pickup, and my father took several loads before we all piled in with the last one. We drove west over thirty miles of dirt road punctuated by cobbles the size of babies' heads, bumping at last down into the place that would become home. And yet, it would never really be home, though I would not understand that until I was older. Because we were not Diné, we would always be guests in Dinétah.

 

Where Shiprock was the gray of round river rocks, the white of the flat plains, the secretive blacks and browns of the great monolith, and the narrow strips of green edging the river, Teec Nos Pos was all color. A great rock-and-earth mound of melon pink, verdigris, mauve, violet, chocolate, peach, sorrel, gold, and cream dominated the valley. Atop the heap, gigantic sandstone blocks stood guard over us. Despite their majesty, the guardians had been given the comical name, The Three Monkeys. Dark and light greens of junipers, piñons, and scrub oak, graced the valley. The indigo of the Carrizo Mountains closed off its southern end. Great cottonwoods rose above the arroyo top and gave the valley its name, T'iis Názbas in Diné bizaad—A Circle of Cottonwoods.

 

Teec Nos Pos became the first place where my heart set down tendrils into the Earth, and they are there still. Even now I sometimes dream of that valley. I dream that I have made a tree house in the little twisted oak that seemed so tall when I was small. In my dream, a stream runs beneath the tree, and a huge slab of apricot-colored rock bridges the water. The bridge becomes a path that leads down to an abandoned house covered in scarlet Virginia creeper, a house that never existed, any more than my tree house did. I wander through the rooms of the white, board-and-batten house, trying to find my place. I live in this dream, looking for myself in this house. It happens again and again.

 

***

My brother Rick is two years younger than I, closest to me in age and experience of my seven brothers. More than fifty years after we'd moved away from Teec Nos Pos, he and I took a trip there. It was the first time that just the two of us returned together. We drove the rolling highway from Shiprock and kept long silences, each in our own thoughts. Then, bringing us out of our reveries, I asked him, "How do you think of Teec Nos Pos now?"

"I think of it as the place of my Magic Years," he said without pause.

I looked over at him, a little surprised, waiting for an explanation. "There's this book about early childhood called The Magic Years, and at Teec, I was the age of those years." His face took on a dreamy look, reminding me of the little boy with blue-gray eyes—the boy who was always looking to someplace beyond. He said, "I remember a time when I made a circle of little stones on the dirt and sat down cross-legged in it. I was probably about five. It was by the apple tree. That tree was magical too, because of the names we gave the branches."

I smiled and nodded. We had called the branches Big and Little Buttermilk, Montana, Big and Little Texas, Wonderland. We spent hours owning the branches we sat on, negotiating trades, chattering with each other and sometimes with the traders' children or Sally and Carol Belone, the daughters of the dormitory matron up the hill.

"I was sitting in my circle," Rick went on, "trying to get a tooth loose so I could get a nickel to go to the trading post and buy a Big Hunk candy bar. Pretty soon I was watching these lizards go in out of crevasses in the rock ledge just above the arroyo. I could fly then, too. I had dreams that I was flying."

I asked, "Do you remember the time that Miss Mims called down because you hadn't shown up at school? I guess Mom always called if you weren't going to be there, so the principal was worried when she didn't get a call. Mom told her that she'd sent you an hour earlier. Do you remember this?"

He shook his head.

"Mom went out to look for you and found you sitting on a rock halfway up to the school, watching a pair of birds."

He laughed. "I don't remember that." In that moment, I realized something I would notice several more times on this trip. Our age and gender differences, our personalities, have given us different memories of this place.

Then he asked, "How about you? How do you think of Teec Nos Pos now?"

"I think of it as home," I said. "Even though by the time I was sixteen I knew that I was really only a visitor. I understood that I could never come back here to live. I call it Home-Not-Home."

It was his turn to nod. He knew the reason. Because we are Bilagáana, we can only come back to live temporarily, for professional reasons, unless we had happened to marry someone Diné.

I went on. "Still, it's more home to me than any other place on Earth. When I fill out profile questions, I say that I'm from Teec Nos Pos. I come back to Teec in my dreams." I didn't tell him the specifics of the tree-house dream, the dream of the nonexistent house where I am trying to locate myself.

Later it came to me that the first place we think of as home is not a place. It is a memory of a place. My favorite poet, Rumi, wrote, "It is right to love your home place, but first ask, 'Where is that, really?'"

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All rights reserved.

 

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