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FISSURE: A Life Between Cultures

CHAPTER III, Installment 2, SOME THINGS WERE TRUE

***

 

On a sunny spring morning when I was seven or eight, my mother called me away from the game I was playing with my brothers and sister by the side of the house. "I want to show you something," she said.


She led me into my father's study in the small building between our house and the chapel. It was always cool in there, unless the tall blue kerosene heater was lit. The room smelled of Bible leather and the musty yellow paper of commentaries and concordances, of mahogany and cracked linoleum.


On that day I noticed another faint, slightly sweet smell mingling with and rising above the old familiar smells. On the desk where my father prepared his sermons, a Diné baby girl lay on her wooden cradleboard. She wore a traditional, dark green velveteen skirt and blouse with a turquoise and silver pin at her throat, delicate bracelets on her wrists and tiny black patent leather shoes on her feet. Her eyes were closed, and her face was pale, a kind of milky beige, surrounded by fine dark brown hair. Her cheeks were round and fat.


"Isn't she beautiful? We wanted you to see her because she's so beautiful," my mother said. "So peaceful."


"Are you going to show her to the other kids?"


"They're too young to understand."


I was torn between pride that I was old enough and not wanting to be that old. I thought the little girl looked stiff and too pale for a Navajo baby. Not beautiful. I felt unaccountably sad.


My mother closed the door to the study and headed for the house. I stood a moment longer in the shadow of the study, then took off running up the hill behind the mission, leaping over stones like the curly-haired goats I sometimes herded with my friends. I could hear the voices of my brothers and sister from among the juniper bushes, and I wanted to find them, to return to the game that had moved on a ways while I witnessed death.

 

***

 

I didn't expect death to taste like anything, but it did. When I was twelve, my only sister, Trudy, was diagnosed with leukemia. While she was sick I spent hours on the terminal pediatrics ward, massaging her feet and legs because they were wracked with pain caused by the changes in her bone marrow. One by one other children disappeared from the ward. Trudy died two weeks before my thirteenth birthday. We drove to Michigan to bury her next to my grandmother, and at the funeral home I stood with my parents by her coffin. All the time we stood there, an acrid smell floated above the over-sweetness of the formal bouquets.


After the visitation, we went to my uncle and aunt's house for supper. My aunt had made a fruit salad, and the mayonnaise on the silver-plate serving spoon recreated that smell, a deathly sharpness mixed with sweetness.


"It smells like the funeral home," I said.


The adults said, "It does not. It's all in your head. Don't be silly."


I knew my parents were embarrassed by my impoliteness. But I couldn't eat the salad.


I didn't want to go to the funeral. I'd had enough of death after the visitation. But my mother said I had to. "You'll be sorry later if you don't."

 

So I went, and I cried the whole time, which was probably good for me. I wore my royal blue pleated wool skirt and vest and a long-sleeved white cotton blouse. Those clothes should have been too hot in May, but I shivered.


Trudy wore the prettiest dress I'd ever owned. It didn't come from a mission barrel or a catalog. My mother had sewn it for my piano recital a year and a half earlier—pink and white organdy with little rosebuds. I felt scared when I imagined what would be happening to my dress and Trudy's body inside the coffin. In the ground.


Beside the grave relatives and friends hugged my parents. I stood there, not knowing what to do. Because we were in Michigan, John Tsosie, one of my father's former interpreters, was the only Diné present. He was also the only person who noticed that, although I was a child, I was grieving, too. He was the only one who came over to me and hugged me long and hard and cried with me. He looked into my eyes, and our eyes were like round baskets, pouring our grief back and forth.


Afterwards there was food again—ham on rolls, milk with cream on top from my grown-up cousin's farm, salads. I didn't eat any of it. The funeral smell hung in my nostrils, and I couldn't get rid of it. I couldn't eat mayonnaise after that for a long time because it tasted like death. When it sits on a silver-plate spoon, mayonnaise turns green.


***

 

In the months after Trudy's death, dreams kept waking me. My armpits prickled with ice, and fear lay in my stomach. I'd get up and sit on the porch in my pajamas and wait for the sun to come up. In my dreams my dead grandmother sat up in her coffin. Or Trudy came back for a visit. We'd be talking or playing, and I'd be so glad to see her. Then all of a sudden I'd realize, "She's not supposed to be here. She's supposed to be dead." Only I couldn't tell her because while she was sick, I wasn't supposed to tell her she was dying. My gladness chilled to fear. I didn't want to be around this dead person, my little sister, and I needed to figure out how I could get away without her suspecting anything. I needed to tell my parents she was back, so they could tell her she was dead, so she would go back to where she belonged.


I told my mother and father about my dreams. They said, "You don't need to be afraid. Trudy's safe with Jesus now."


I was the one who felt unsafe.

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All rights reserved.

 

***

 

To be continued on Friday, 2/16/24

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CHAPTER III, Installment 1, SOME THINGS WERE TRUE

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, fears we have hidden in as if caves. ~ Michael Ondaatje


I shivered when I walked among the graves across the road from the mission. We had to pass through that dry, rocky cemetery with its weathered wooden crosses and sun-bleached plastic flowers on our way to the top of the massive golden mesa beyond it. The graves were pocked with small holes dug by mice and gophers, maybe even snakes. I was afraid I would see part of a dead body, a bony hand reaching out of a hole, a grinning skull, if I looked into one. I felt a sick looseness in my throat when I thought of little animals living down there with decaying bodies.


In the small valley of Teec Nos Pos in Dinétah, my father was Éé'nishoodii Yázhí, Little Long Coat—the Protestant missionary, as differentiated from the Catholic fathers with their long robes. Whenever we came into Teec Nos Pos from the east, we drove down a sharp incline to enter the valley. At the bottom of the hill I couldn't help seeing the charred, broken timbers of a ch'íidii baghan that stood there. I asked my father once about its name, and he said, "It means ghost house. People call it that because someone died in there. Navajos are afraid to live in it after that because they're afraid of death. They break a hole in the north side of the hogan for the person's spirit to leave. Then they burn it. It's such a sad waste of a good home when people are so poor. We want them to know they don't need to fear death because Jesus gives us victory over death through his resurrection."


I nodded. I believed that everything he told me was true. And I shivered then too, even though I also believed I should have no reason to fear death. In my mind's eye I watched frightened people breaking a hole in the back wall of the hogan and then setting their shelter on fire. Chills moved up my spine. I wouldn't go near a ch'íidii baghan myself, if I could help it. I didn't want to see or touch people who were dead any more than I thought the Diné did.

 

Because he believed they were terrified of death, my father also believed the greatest service he could offer Diné people was helping them bury their dead. He and my mother washed and dressed bodies; Dad built pine boxes, dug graves, and spoke words. I don't know how much comfort he gave because he also believed that he must preach the gospel at every opportunity. Unsaved people might be standing around the grave, and it was his mission to bring them to Christ, even if that meant scaring them with stories of hell awaiting them after death.


One evening at dinner, my father said something to my mother that got my attention. "We were burying that Benally man this afternoon. I got him washed and dressed, and had the box made."


It was his tone that made me look up. I saw his half-smile, which meant he was trying to suppress some emotion. I could tell he didn't want to be smiling, but he couldn't help it. His voice cracked. "The body wouldn't fit in the coffin. It was too tall. I measured him, but I must've gotten something wrong. I took his shoes off, and that helped, but he was still too tall." Dad laughed, a helpless laugh. 
"After that I tried to bend his feet back."

 

By then I sensed that my father's laughter was about to cross over into something else.

 

"I was afraid I was going to break his legs," he said. "Finally I got the corpse stuffed into the box." At last he stopped laughing and seemed relieved.


My mother did not laugh. She looked sympathetic. I looked at my father in wonder, feeling that something in him had come close to breaking, if only for a moment.


All I could think about was his hands touching that dead body—corpse he called it. He had touched death that afternoon. My throat underwent that same loosening I felt when I walked through the graveyard. I wanted my father to wash his hands with the gritty gray Lava soap he used whenever he changed the oil in the pickup, the soap that made his hands feel smooth and smell clean. I wanted him to wash them a second time before I would let him touch me.


The night of the too-long body, my father had a dream. He told it to us at breakfast the next morning. "That Benally man sat up in his coffin just after I got him crammed in," he said. He licked his dry lips and started laughing all over again.


I could tell it was a scary dream. Maybe that was the first time I wondered if it was true that Christians didn't fear death.


Sometime later my dad said that he would become a mortician if he ever stopped being a missionary. That is how great a service he believed he was performing when he buried the Diné dead.


I shuddered. I knew that if he handled death every day, he would never be able to wash it off. "If you become a mortician," I said, "I won't ever let you touch me again."


He laughed. "You'd get used to it," he said.


I didn't believe it.

 

***

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

 

To be continued on Monday, 2/12/24

 

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CHAPTER II, Installment 5, IN AND OUT

***


Years later, sitting in our shared office, I told Ilene about that paper. She said, "You saw that back then? I didn't even see it until much later."
This is one of the things that happens when you have a foot in both worlds, or when you live in a crack between two worlds. You see things with different eyes. I was always aware, from the day I ran away from the BIA school in Teec Nos Pos, when my mother got the rules changed for me, that my experience of boarding school was both the same and different from what it was for my friends.


All of us still recognize the same boarding school smells and the taste of government commodity foods. Even though I went home for lunch at Teec Nos Pos, commodity foods were once again part of my diet when I attended Rehoboth, both as a day and a boarding student. We can reminisce about the games we played, about our nicknames for teachers and each other. We can tell stories of things we did together and things that happened to us.


I often become a listener rather than a teller of these stories, afraid of appropriating the pain or indignity that belongs to a friend. I cannot yet explain to myself or anyone else how it is that I quantify and qualify and assign value to their suffering and mine. Perhaps the pain cannot be quantified. There is pain in being a representative of the group that colonized, and there is pain in having been colonized. The sources of the pain are different.


I did face the loss of family and home, as my friends did, but it was for a relatively short period of time with breaks in between. My parents could and did exercise agency; my friends' parents most often did not have the same choices. A couple of years ago my friend Lila, who is one of the most phenomenal teachers I know, told me about attending the big BIA school at Shiprock.


"The administration decided the dorms and classrooms were too crowded," she said. "So they sent some of us students to the school in Teec Nos Pos. Just sent us without letting our parents know. My older brother was still an elementary student. They called him into the office and told him that when our dad came to get us, he had to be the one to explain where I was.


"My dad was a very protective father. First when he got to the school to take me home for the weekend he was worried when he couldn't find me. He went to the office, and they called my brother in. He explained to my dad in Navajo. My father was furious."


I know that this did not and would not have happened to White parents whose children attended boarding school.


My friends' culture was ripped away from them; while my culture was being reinforced for me, it was forced on them. All was familiar to me, foreign to them. Winter is the time when sacred Diné stories are told and games are played. Strict rules prohibit teaching these cultural foundations at other times of the year. This meant that my friends gradually lost their traditional teachings. Ironically, one of my father's interpreters sat with my siblings and me in the evenings after eating supper with us and told us some of the very stories that were being taken from the rightful heirs.


Little is so core to our humanness, our uniqueness, as our mother tongue. That precious essence, Diné bizaad, was systematically suppressed in an effort to remove it entirely, to make everyone English Only. Diné students were punished for using their own language in boarding school; yet I heard it sometimes on the playground. For them there was the multifaceted and deep grief of language loss and the partial loss of identity that went with it.


For me there was a different sort of grief around language. Because my friends weren't allowed to speak Diné, I never learned to use it fluently. The most natural way to learn a second language is in a social setting with one's peers. I'm aware of this loss in so many ways—being able to catch only parts of conversations; dreaming in Danish (in which I am fluent) and joyously thinking in the dream that I am speaking Diné bizaad with a friend, only to awaken and discover the reality; feeling envious of younger Whites who grew up in the Nation and are fluent in Diné bizaad because language policies had changed by their time. Nevertheless, I am aware that my loss is different from the losses my friends endured.


The traumas inflicted by the boarding school system are generational for Native people. Great-great grandparents of children now in school were taken from their homes to be "Americanized," and their losses are compounded from generation to generation. In the early days, many children died at boarding school of grief or from physical punishment or illness.


Nevertheless, not everyone talks about negative experiences in boarding school. When I asked Lila if she was frightened when she was moved from the Shiprock school to the Teec Nos Pos one, she said, "Oh, no. I was with all my friends. They were like family. And I knew that road. I knew I had relatives there because my dad was from there." To this day, Lila is one of the most positive people I know, always finding the bright side of things but not in a superficial way, so I believed that what she said was genuine.


Not long ago, I attended the funeral of an upperclassman at Rehoboth. I went mainly because I knew one of my classmates would be there. She and I stood outside the church catching up after the service, and as we stood there, I overheard a classmate of the woman who had died talking about Rehoboth. "Yeah," she said loudly, "they say we were abused there. I say they abused us pretty good because we're still all part of that church." The women she was talking to laughed with her. I thought she might be carrying a pretty heavy load of denial.


Charlie, on the other hand, has the self-awareness of someone who has done his work and can speak about his experience of boarding school in a balanced way. He talks about the bullying and abuse that was endemic to the system. He talks about the hypocrisy he saw in the missionaries. But he also says that he is grateful for the excellent academic education he received. "I can speak articulately and think critically, and I got that there—at Rehoboth," he says.


A few weeks ago, I got an email from my friend Alice Whitegoat. She attended Rehoboth about ten years before I did. Alice wrote that her niece had been at the Indian Health Hospital in Shiprock. "My niece saw this woman we know. The woman was so thin and wasted. Her hair had gone completely white, and she was barely able to walk without assistance."


This friend had attended Rehoboth, too, and, until recently, had been a strong presence in Navajo education. "She told my niece that she was suffering, but she couldn't remember what her illness was called. She turned to her husband to ask him. 'Depression,' he told her. She started to cry. She said she can't stop crying."


Alice asked me, "Is that a Rehoboth disease?"


I wanted to cry.


***


I don't forget Ed's painting. I imagine small Diné children lined up, marching in and down that ramp that looks like a livestock chute. I imagine teenagers marching down the steps, back into the light, forever changed. And I imagine myself standing in that dark, rusty space between the two doors.


 
"In and Out" was first published in Isthmus, Special on Politics, 2016

This is the final installment of Chapter II of Fissure, "In and Out." 

The first installment of Chapter III, "Some Things Were True," will post on Friday, 2/9/24

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CHAPTER II, Installment 4: IN AND OUT

From R to L: Rehoboth High School, Church, HS Dorm behind 2 houses, 1962 

***


After my first year at Rehoboth, our family moved to Gallup, and I became a day student. But in high school I was so miserable that at the end of my sophomore year I talked my parents into asking the principal if I could double up on classes and do summer school at Gallup High. I had it all figured out how I could graduate a year early. His response, "There's something lacking in her socially. She needs to be in more after-school activities." Now I see that he was blaming me for the bullying I endured. One of the bullies happened to be his son.


It wasn't as if the school offered such a wide array of activities. With six, soon to be seven younger children at home, transportation between Gallup and Rehoboth was a deciding factor. The principal and my parents decided that I could become a boarding student. By that time there was no White missionary kids' dorm, and there was a separate one for high school students, all of whom were Diné with a few Zuni and Hopi students sprinkled in.


I became the first student to racially integrate a dormitory at Rehoboth. Despite the continued bullying by those Bilagáana boys, it would be the happiest year of my time at the mission school. It was also the year that I became deeply, consciously aware of White privilege and racism there. Not long after the school year began, Bilagáana missionaries in the field got wind of the fact that I was staying in the dorm. They were miffed because as members of the General Conference, they had had no input into this decision. That was when I finally learned the ostensible rationale for the existence of the racially separate dorms. It was so White children wouldn't be taking the places meant for Native children who needed to be saved. I wondered yet again why the Diné missionary kids hadn't stayed in the Missionary Kids' Dorm. I still didn't have the word racism in my vocabulary, but I recognized it for sure.


In 1963, the Red Power Movement was rumbling awake. In six more years, Vine Deloria, Jr. a Standing Rock Sioux, would publish Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. But already in 1964, he had become executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, growing its membership from nineteen to 156 tribes. This nascent movement for Native rights had already influenced some of the more vocal Diné missionaries.


The controversy about integrating the dorm was placed on the agenda at General Conference, and I knew I might be sent back to stay at home. However, in the end, those vocal Navajo missionaries won the day, along with some of the White missionaries, including my father. They argued that integrating the dorms was a symbolic gesture of equality, one that could bring more converts into the fold. It was a wise argument, couched as it was in the rhetoric of saving more souls. I was allowed to stay.


Near the end of the year, something happened to validate the Bilagáana missionaries' worst fears. Kee Bitsoi and I were both working on the laundry detail by then and, although he was a class behind me, we were in band and choir together. He asked me to go to church with him one Sunday evening. That might not sound like anything that could possibly threaten anyone, but at the mission it amounted to a very public date. It was like a declaration, and many couples who went to church together on Sunday evenings ended up marrying each other.

 
I heard audible gasps when we walked down the aisle to our pew, but that was nothing compared to what happened afterwards. The high school dorm had a boys' side and a girls' side with a common living room between. We had two house-parents, Mr. and Mrs. Haverdink. Mister had a nickname—Yogi—because his long torso, and the way he waddled made him look like the cartoon character Yogi Bear. Mrs. Haverdink was so uninvolved on a day-to-day basis that she didn't merit a nickname.


Yogi walked up to Kee and me after the service with fury that had been building during the whole service. Scarlet faced, he pushed us apart and said, "You go this way," to me, "and you come with me," to Kee. As he walked away with Kee, I heard him shout, "I thought you were a nice boy until now."


I was shaking when I got back to the dorm, not in righteous anger, which would have been fitting, but in fear. Yogi had already sent Kee to his room. "Do you want to marry a White boy or don't you?" he shouted at me, so everyone in the living room could hear. To my everlasting shame, I said nothing. I didn't need to because Yogi kept ranting for another five minutes, but I wished I had shouted, "No!" He sent me to my room and told me I was grounded for a week, which basically meant I couldn't go to study hall in the high school library at night. It turned out that Kee had been grounded for the next month, and I was again plunged into shame over the unfairness of it.


Nothing ever came of the incident, except that a week later the principal called me into his office. The only words I remember exactly were, "I guess there's been a storm in the teapot over there." Then he said something to the effect that I should ride it out and maybe not do anything like that again. I nodded miserably and kept my true thoughts and feelings to myself.


I was no longer a boarding student the next year, mostly because I could drive by then and had a job at a supermarket in Gallup. But my stay in the dorm had made me acutely aware that something was drastically wrong at Rehoboth. In Church History class we were assigned a paper about some topic like Martin Luther's ninety-nine theses or the impact of the Gutenberg Bible on Christianity. I got permission to write instead about Rehoboth.


My paper's unwieldy title was "How the Gospel Is Not Presented at Rehoboth Mission." It was replete with examples of oppression, intimidation, privilege, racism and sexism, although I didn't use any of those words. I was developing a social conscience and trying to have an effect on my world in my own way. I think the minister thought he was indulging me in meaningless teenage rebellion by letting me write the paper. Neither he nor anyone else ever talked with me about it. It was as if my attempt to call attention to the wrongs I'd witnessed slipped into an airless void.


**
*

To be continued on Monday, 2/5/24

If you're just joining the serialization of Fissure, you can find your way to the beginning by using the Table of Contents

 

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