Anna Redsand

Excerpt from DEMONS, SAINTS OR MORTALS

Chapter One: Artifacts

There is a place at the heart of Navajo Country where a long spine of golden sandstone forms the southern wall of a small valley. A low hill rising to a broad plateau and covered in juniper, piñon, sage and rabbit brush makes its northern side. Far up its western end, the valley appears to narrow and is eventually closed off by the blue-black Carrizo Mountains. In Navajo this place is called T’iis Názbas, in English Teec Nos Pas. The meaning of the name is something like Cottonwood Circle, and it may have been given because of the great, gnarled cottonwood trees that grow in the sandy white bed of the arroyo that runs the length of the valley. Or perhaps at one time a ring of cottonwoods caught some ancient one’s imagination.

In 1956, the buildings at Teec Nos Pas constituted a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) school, a small Christian Reformed Mission, and the trading post, which was placed at the open end of the valley. There a dirt road led out toward the great volcanic plug known as Shiprock and the town that is called after it. All around the valley, separated often by great distances, lay clusters of Navajo homes. Most of them were hogans—small, one-room domes made of earth and logs.

The mission, where we lived and from which my father did his work, was relatively small—our house, the home of my father’s Navajo interpreter, the tiny, white clapboard chapel with its stubby belfry, and a couple of outbuildings. In front of the mission was a bare, upright pipe with an attached spigot. Many times a day, Navajos drove up to it with horses and wagons to fill fifty-gallon drums from the sweet spring up the hill from our house.

I was eight years old in 1956. On one autumn evening that began as any other, my father and I walked down to our chicken yard. Directly across from the mission, the sandstone wall rises into a huge mound of stone and earth topped by great rectangular boulders. People called those boulders by two different English names, depending on who you asked—Six Brothers or Three Monkeys. The gold of the rock there is highlighted by shades of mauve, rose, verdigris, cream and rust. In the cool of the setting sun, the whole mass turned a deep golden pink as we arrived at the chicken yard.

The yard lay adjacent to the arroyo, and the chickens lived in an old wooden barracks that had been built when the New Deal employed Navajo men to lay the native sandstone and lift the massive pine roof vigas of the school. It was my job to help my father scatter dried yellow corn kernels across the yard, water the chickens and shoo them into the coop for the night. Absent mindedly, I watched the hens scrap with each other over the hard little nuggets.

Suddenly an unfamiliar object showed itself to me, distinct from the ground of earth, small stones, loose chicken feathers and corn kernels. “Look, Daddy. Look what I found,” I cried.

My father walked over, holding the red Hills Brothers coffee can filled with corn, and said, “Wow! Those are peyote feathers. I’m pretty sure, anyway. Let’s see?”

Goosebumps traveled up my back and down my arms. I handed him the fan, which was made of eight large red-brown feathers of equal size and shape. Each quill was bound in cream-colored suede, decorated with tufts of red and turquoise thread, then joined in a suede-covered handle. Below the handle hung a suede fringe.

“What’s it for?” I asked.

“I think the roadman uses it to wave smoke from burning sage or juniper, but I’m not really sure. I’ll find out.” I could tell that my father was excited by my discovery. Privately I wondered who would’ve left the feathers there in our chicken yard and why. They seemed too special, too valuable, to be carelessly dropped. I’d heard stories of objects used to curse people, and the thought that they could have been left on purpose niggled at me. At the same time, I felt proud and somewhat possessive of my find.

When we got back to the house, my father put the fan of feathers in a glass case with his collection of pottery shards, a miniature Navajo rug loom, a black-on-black Santa Clara Pueblo pot, an ancient yucca fiber sandal he’d found in a ruined cliff dwelling, and other old and new native objects. More than artifacts of other cultures, these were artifacts of the contradictions that made up my father. On the one hand, he was fascinated by Navajo culture and by the remains of the early cliff dwellers; on the other, it was his mission to effect the exchange of Christianity and all that it meant to him for the very culture that so intrigued him.

©Anna Redsand, 2009