Anna Redsand

X. CONFLICT

I was twelve the summer our family camped in a tiny trailer fifteen miles outside Gallup in Tohlakai. The little green shelter was parked by the chapel where my father was the missionary. The Goldtooths lived a few hundred yards from us. Mr. Goldtooth was one of several people who might show up on a Sunday morning red-eyed, smelling of booze and still under the influence from a twenty-four-hour bender in town. His usual self-control destroyed by drink, he would shout out in the middle of a sermon or prayer. Ours was not a shouting church, so it was noticeable. The yelling ended in loud, histrionic crying. The services went on as if nothing unusual were happening. I knew Mr. Goldtooth hadn't always been that way. He had helped build the chapel on his family's land and had worked as a missionary's interpreter, years earlier.

One night that summer, I got to feel up close how the clash between the border town and Dinétah had seeped across the line into Tohlakai. Our family had finished supper when Birdie Goldtooth came to the trailer. At first, I thought she just wanted to hang out, but then I saw in her eyes that something was wrong.

"My dad's drunk again," she said. "He's really mad. He's yelling and tearing up the house."

My mother heard her. "Why don't you and your sisters come over and sleep in the chapel?" she suggested.

They brought their bedrolls, and I begged to join them. We laid our pallets out on the floor, and the problem of the evening turned into a sleepover. We chattered and giggled until a fist pounded on the door, silencing us. It was Mr. Goldtooth. He yelled at us to open the door. "This is my chapel. I built it. Open the door!"

I tensed. Mr. Goldtooth rattled the door and pounded some more. I was petrified it would come crashing down.

The girls didn't seem fazed, now that we were safely locked in. By silent agreement we said nothing, and he left after what seemed like an hour, though it was probably only minutes. As I lay there, letting my body go soft again, it came to me that being safe was unusual for my friends while being terrified was unusual for me.
 
XI. EDGE EFFECTS
 
At the Scandinavian Yoga and Meditation School I was assigned to weed and thin a large field of young parsnips. I noticed that whenever I came to an edge of the field, the parsnips were much smaller and thinner, scrawny really, than those a few rows in. They bore the effects of the wind, the cold, dust from passing cars, and maybe other stresses I knew nothing about.

Ecologists and mappers refer to edge effects, particularly where ecosystems overlap. In those places flora and fauna compete for resources, and the competition can result in peaking or falling biodiversity. For example, where the eastern escarpment of the Andes meets the tropics in Ecuador, a remarkable diversity of bird species lives. Birds find what the mountains have and have not, and all that the jungle has and has not, which creates an environment amenable to diversity but one that also fosters conflict and competition.

Other things happen on ecological edges, too; invasive species exploit the vulnerability of edges. Plants, such as my parsnips, struggle to thrive on the edges. When I was tending the parsnips, I thought of the puny roots as offering a buffer for the vegetables at the center—bearing all the exigencies that occur in the borders. I drew an analogy to people who live on the margins—how we may also provide a cushion for those who live at the center. Maybe there is always conflict, discomfort, in the edge places, in border towns—for everyone—whether Red or White. Some people thrive on the discomfort, find their creativity and growth challenged and become productive, venture farther out. Others bear the brunt of the stresses that come to bear on them at the verge and perhaps retreat toward the center or withdraw into the numbness of addiction. Still others experience the edge and ponder what goes on there.
 
XII. LOVE/HATE

I love Gallup, and I hate it; my Diné friends testify to this even more than I. When I was young, I didn't know how my Navajo friends felt about Gallup. A Diné woman recently told me, "Natives won't tell you what they really think. They'll tell you what they think you want to hear." I was hurt, and I had a hard time believing it. But it's possible I only get the truth when Diné feel they're talking to each other, and I'm just an invisible observer.

My friend Alice Whitegoat laughs as she tells me about being a teenager in Gallup, sneaking down into the Rio Puerco with her friends on a summer night, about the tattletale who didn't know how to have fun, a Presbyterian convert. And then she shows me the black-and-white photo where she is marching at the front of the protest after the Gallup police shot and killed Larry Casuse. The police had their photo taken, posed over his body as if he were a deer they'd bagged. Three hundred students walked out of Gallup High School the day of Larry's funeral. We never knew the truth of what happened when he was slain—what really went down. Larry had remonstrated hard at the State House in Santa Fe against police brutality and the exploitation of Natives by the Gallup liquor industry. Not until after his tragic death were the state alcohol licensing laws changed.

The summer after Larry Casuse was killed, I went back to UNM to take courses toward my master's degree. One class required a local field study, and I called my project "Gallup: An Ugly City." On a south-side hill I took images of sprawling ranch-style homes with landscaped front yards—the homes of those who profited from liquor sales and from selling the work of Native hands to tourists. I photographed bars and pawnshops. I went to the north side to take images of the condemned hovels in which people still lived.

When I presented my report, a student took exception to my title. "Those houses on the hill," she said, "they're not ugly."

I had already called attention to the fact that those houses were built on exploitation. I reiterated, "The people who own those houses gained their money from alcohol sales to Natives, from price gouging, and unfair lending practices."

The instructor understood and reinforced my argument, but the woman, a public- school educator said, "Still…"

I shook my head.

Gallup. Border town. The place in-between that oozes over its borders. Gallup. My hometown. The place I keep coming back to. The place I love and hate.
 
XIII. AT THE ROOT

I hadn't seen alcoholism in Teec Nos Pos. In Gallup, I heard White grownups speculate that Natives were genetically predisposed to alcoholism. According to the former Director of Substance Abuse Treatment and Prevention for the Navajo Nation, a medical doctor, research does not support the theory of genetic predisposition. In fact, the demographics say there is no higher incidence of alcoholism among the Diné than among any other group of people.

The question then arises: Why does it appear otherwise? One reason is that the Navajo and Zuni Nations, the reservations closest to Gallup, are dry by law. If people want to drink, they must go to a border town or a bar just off the reservation to do so. It is also forbidden to bring alcohol, even in closed containers, into the Nation. This makes Diné who want to drink highly visible in the border towns.

There are root causes for addiction. In this case, colonization in its manifold manifestations destroyed a way of life that functioned well—the way of life that was still largely in existence in Teec Nos Pos in the 1950s. Near border towns, the story was otherwise. The colonial system did not replace that effective subsistence economy with a viable alternative. Colonization has brought with it poverty and often purposelessness to Indigenous peoples the world over.

In the Dinétah, excess drinking numbs the generational pain of trauma and loss—loss of homeland, family, language, and culture. Generations of Native people have been ripped from home and family and forcibly taken to boarding schools where the stated goal was to "make them White," to "pacify" them, "to kill the Indian but save the man."
 
XIV. MY PLACE IN THE BORDERLANDS

Sometimes, as on a sheet of stationery, a border serves as the edge; no stationery exists beyond it. More often, a border lies between two places. Sometimes, as with a living cell, the borderline is microscopically thin. Other times there is a space that is much wider than a line, a sort of no-man's-land. When I first came to live in the Navajo Nation, I began a lifelong fall into a fissure between two worlds—into an invisible, yet very real, border. At first, I lived physically close to the center of the Nation. As a child, I thought I belonged there because that was my life. Then we moved to the border town, and I began to know that I had not belonged at the center, after all.

Maybe that is why I have kept coming back Gallup. Because my place is here. In the borderland. The in-between place. Prickly and uncomfortable and rough-edged, full of conflict. We live here together, work here, make our art here. A place where no one quite belongs.

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

 

This is the final installment of "Border Town."

The first installment of "Naturalization will post to this website on Monday, 3/18/24.

V. BORDER TOWN
The main border towns are these: Gallup, the most well-known, except maybe Winslow, Arizona because of the Eagles song; there is also Farmington, New Mexico; Cortez in southern Colorado; and Flagstaff and Holbrook, both in Arizona.

These towns both serve and exploit the people of the Nation, the Diné. They supply goods similar to those provided by trading posts in the Nation. They provide commodities that people can't or don't grow or produce and sell larger items like cars and trucks, appliances, electronics, and mobile homes. Border town businesses exploit Native people by selling these goods, especially durable ones, at inflated prices with exorbitant interest rates. In return, businesses pay low prices for fine jewelry and rugs crafted by Diné, Zuni, and Hopi and resell them to tourists at huge profits. Without Indigenous people, tourism in Gallup would be limited to an overnight stay en route to natural wonders like the Grand Canyon or Monument Valley.
 
VI. WHY INDEED
People asked why when I said I was moving back to Gallup in 2018. Again. Really, I moved to an edge between edges, to land a few short miles north of town. Gallup and other border towns were built for commerce and religion. They are not lovely. But all around them lies beauty of heartbreaking wonder.
 
I came back

To hear the wind rise suddenly, soughing through piñon and juniper.

For the hills.
The mesas.

 

I came
For the flat chocolate slabs of sitting-rocks,
from there to watch the glory
of dusk—the pink flush, gold blaze,
the ginger and orange, the scarlet—
all diminishing to mauve and indigo.

 

I came
For the smell of rain-washed earth and sage.
For cedar smoke at night.
To cut small sprays of scarlet paintbrush
and purple asters,
to line them with juniper,
place them in a small brown vase.

 

I came
To hear Diné spoken every day.
To speak Diné with others.
Perhaps to finish something I'd begun.
To make the circle round.

 

Maybe that.
 
VII. CULTURE SHOCK
When we first moved into Gallup, the way I saw Diné people became the greatest shock. I wandered downtown for a cherry coke at the Rexall drugstore or to the library and came face to face with Diné stumbling toward me. Their eyes were red and swollen, weeping, their clothes dirty and torn. When they came close enough, I smelled the sickening sweet stench of alcohol. Sometimes instead of bumbling toward me, they lay in a huddle next to a building, sleeping or blubbering.

When I got home I told my mother, "I'm scared of them."

She said, "You don't need to be scared. If they're drunk, you can knock them over with your little finger." I didn't believe it for a second, but I learned to steel myself and keep walking when a drunk passed me or tried to talk to me.

In Teec Nos Pos people walked upright. The women wore traditional satin and velvet with loads of turquoise-and-silver jewelry. They tended their flocks and fields of corn and melons, took their sheep up the mountain in summer for good grazing. They rolled up to the mission in wooden wagons to fill fifty-gallon barrels with water and gave us rides to the trading post. They brought loads of wool to the trading post to be packed into burlap bags as tall as a man and walked out with coffee and sugar and Bluebird flour.

Close by the border town, Diné women wore long, gathered cotton skirts and button-down cotton blouses, less jewelry. They owned sheep, but not as many. If they drove, it was pickups, not horses and wagons. Homes were tarpaper-covered rectangles, not round, earthen hogans. I saw poverty, but I didn't understand that it was because the original, sustainable way of life was mostly gone, and nothing had replaced it. Alcoholism was evident on the land skirting Gallup, as if the town had slowly leaked into the border and beyond.
 
VIII. THE NATURE OF BORDERS

The border that cannot be permeated doesn't exist.

I know a man,
carried on his father's shoulders
when he was a baby,
held above the water of the
sewers of Berlin,
crossing the wall from East to West.
 
Cell walls are semi-permeable membranes.
Our lives depend on the exchange of
nutrients, oxygen, inorganic ions,
waste products, and water
across those thin barriers.
 
My colleague comes up too close;
I step back.
I excuse myself,
saying my trifocals make
it uncomfortable to stand so close.
But really, our personal boundaries
are not the same.
 
I tell my Hispanic students,
children of undocumented immigrants,
about marrying my
New Zealand friend so we could
get permission to stay in each other's countries.
"Isn't that illegal?" one of them asks.
"Yes," I say, "but I don't believe in borders.
We should be able to cross
over into any country we want."
They are silent.
No one has said this to them before.
 
Poland could be said to have
too many borders.
It has been taken,
retaken,
gained independence,
only to be taken again.
And again.

New Mexico, the state in which
I have lived most of my life,
was taken from Mexico,
along with parts of California,
Arizona,
Texas,
following the border war
known in the US as the Mexican War,
known in Mexico as
the American Intervention in Mexico.
 
Borders are in-between places. They are places where contact and contrasts take place. They are places where we rub up against each other and discover differences in language, customs, religions, and life goals. In Gone Native in Polynesia, Ian Campbell writes that culture contact is simply "an abstraction of what happens when people from different societies meet and attempt to satisfy their respective needs." This is a benign view of what happens in the borderlands. But Campbell goes on to add a critical piece, saying which group makes the most cultural adjustments "depends on how important the transaction is to the respective parties, location (on whose territory is the transaction taking place), or which party has the most coercive power." And therein lies the recipe for the conflict that so often happens at borders.

 

Some boundaries, such as cell membranes, are natural, and, unless a disruptive process such as disease occurs, exchanges pass freely across them, to the benefit of all. But the borders we humans create are arbitrary. Because of their artificial nature, when a crossing is attempted without permission, conflict occurs. The ancestral lands of the Indigenous Tohono O'odham Nation, stretch from southern Arizona in the US into the Mexican state of Sonora. To them the Mexico-US border is eminently artificial. Originally, crossing of boundaries did not exist; there were only homelands.

 

One of my brothers has lived most of his adult life in Gallup. He says of the conflict that exists here, "I've learned to be comfortable with being uncomfortable." Discomfort arises because he lives in the imaginary space that lies between the White and Diné worlds. There is confusion as to where and whether he belongs. It is in the nature of borderlands—this not knowing.
 
IX. CHANGED AND UNCHANGING

Nighttime, the second Saturday in November, and downtown Gallup is teeming with people in winter coats, scarves, and stocking caps. It is the night of the monthly Arts Crawl. Galleries and shops are lit, doors open. Outdoor vendors sell crafts, coffee, and snacks. The air crackles with good will. Businesses that were once grimy and tired have gotten facelifts, making their facades clean and appealing.

I enter a Diné-owned shop where every piece is thoughtfully and lovingly curated. An outsized painting shows four Yé'ii (Holy People). In a traditional painting, the Yé'ii would be stylized, painted with squared lines, offering no sense of the men beneath the masks. This one is full of mystery, humor and humanness, revealing the emotions and character of the subjects and the artist. Shelves in the store contain sleek marble sculptures, fabric arts that blend traditional craft with contemporary motifs. Black-and- white photos that showcase the high desert.

I leave the bustle and noise of Coal Avenue to see what, if anything, is happening on Route 66. On the way I pass a puddled, unlit alley where the backs of those refurbished fronts reveal dark, rough-hewn stone. The bleak, narrow passage is emblematic of borders, boundaries that still exist, unchanged. Gallup—the same, yet different; changed and unchanging.

Earlier that week, I saw three small Indigenous boys leaning against a low adobe wall in a middle-class neighborhood. They watched two black-and-whites pull up to join a parked paddy wagon. White officers stepped out and joined a Native policeman, the driver of the wagon. I asked myself, Why all the firepower? The Diné officer had already cuffed a Native man who sat on the ground, head bowed. I wondered what the boys were thinking—if they were simply curious, if they saw the unfolding scene as an exciting crime drama, or if they felt ashamed, living in this town where Natives have been unwanted for so long. Except for the money they bring.

 

©Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved. 

 

To be continued on Friday, 3/15/24

PART II

 

Part II, containing three essays, has a particular focus on the search for identity. "Border Town," a hybrid essay, shows the everyday devastation that exists in and because of towns that border the Navajo Nation. It tells of the nature of borders, about trying to find my place in Gallup, New Mexico, a town on the edge of the Nation—the town that in many ways describes who I am. Two further essays address questions of identity that have persisted into my adulthood. "Naturalization" is about how an interracial partnership left an imprint on my interactions with my Black college students. "A Good Stranger" is a braided essay that explores a search for spiritual identity within the milieu of three distinct cultural identities.

 

***

 

"BORDER TOWN"

 

I. HOMETOWN

Gallup. The town of legends. Nat King Cole immortalized it in "Get Your Kicks on Route 66." Bob Dylan famously lied that he was raised in Gallup, New Mexico in his first radio interview on the WNYC Folk Festival show. The town likes to call itself the "Indian Captital of the World" and has celebrated this putative status annually since 1921 by holding the Intertribal Indian Ceremonial, hosted by Indigenous performers and attended by visitors from around the world. But in daily parlance, Gallup is more often known as "Drunktown," memorialized as such in the 2015 indie film, Drunktown's Finest.

More than half a century after our family first moved to Gallup, I moved back. People asked why, and their tone said, "Of all places!"

I told them, "It's my hometown." I've often called it that over the years. I write a column for the Gallup Independent four times a year and have had work published in the Gallup Journey. I've had four book signings in Gallup and been interviewed for a feature article in the town newspaper. I volunteered as a writer in residence in a fifth-grade classroom. Two of my seven brothers and my niece and her family live there, and my parents are buried there. Occasionally I join family in Gallup for holidays or for the milestones we share. I've come back for the funerals of schoolmates and their family members.

I call Gallup my hometown, but I don't think of it as home. When I'm asked where I'm from, I say, "Teec Nos Pos." T'iis Názbas in Diné bizaad. But Teec Nos Pos is not home either; it became Home Not Home when we left it.
 
II. LEAVING THE CENTER

 

It was my fault we moved to Gallup in 1957, away from Teec Nos Pos, deep within the Navajo Nation, where my parents were missionaries. To this day, although Teec Nos Pos stands in the western half of the Nation, I think of it as the center. The beloved center. I was nine years old when our family moved, and it was because I had been deathly homesick at the mission boarding school. On my first visit home, I had pleaded with my mother and father not to send me back.

 "You wanted to go," they said. But I hadn't known what boarding school was. "You have to live with your choice," they said to my eight-year-old self. In the end, they decided it wasn't working, but they made me finish out the school year.

On the day we left Teec Nos Pos for Gallup, a long orange moving van pulled up in front of the adobe missionary house. At the very end, our bicycles were tied to the back of the truck, and the truck churned through dust, headed for Gallup. In the way of flashfloods, dark clouds suddenly filled the sky. Rain began to pelt down as we piled into the station wagon. Water cascaded from the sky, and the arroyo across from the mission filled to the brim, muddy brown water raging down toward the trading post.

It was a flood of mythical proportion, and one of the boys took it as a sign. "Maybe we're not supposed to leave," he said.

I'd been thinking it and said, "Yeah. Let's stay."

My mother turned and looked at me. "You'd have to go back to boarding school."

My stomach dropped, and I was silent.
 
III. BACK AND BACK AGAIN

Recently I interviewed a White woman for a writing project. She was consulting on health initiatives in Gallup at the time. "I don't know how much a part of your life Gallup is anymore," she said.

"Always." I said without hesitating.

She laughed, and I smiled. This border town has had a hold on me since I was nine years old, and it probably will as long as I am in my right mind. Gallup is called a border town because it stands on an edge of the largest Indigenous nation in the United States, the Navajo Nation. It is a magnet that both attracts and repels me.

When I'm away from Gallup and see images of the town in the media, I immediately place them in my personal geography. I keep up with current events. I applaud changes for the better and feel bitter sorrow over things that need to change and don't. Over the years I have considered moving back to Gallup more than once.

In fact, I have left and moved back several times. The first leave-taking was outside my control. It happened in 1959, when my only sister was hospitalized at NIH with leukemia, and our family moved to Maryland to be with her. In 1961 we returned to Gallup where I finished high school and then left a second time, this time for college. I came back summers to work at Dandee Supermarket. I'd worked there during high school, too, for $1.25 an hour and a measure of sanity—a world away from the mission school. I returned again in the early 70s to teach, leaving a year and a half later. Back again in 1981 after a life-shattering divorce to live for a few months with my brother's family.

 

And once again in 2018, something drew me back—back to Drunktown. Back to this border town.
 
IV. A DIFFERENT GEOGRAPHY

The town sprawls amid once coal-rich hills, a hundred thirty miles from Teec Nos Pos. We had been there only a few times before we moved. It was one thing to drive through, stopping to wait for a passing train or for my parents to do some grocery shopping while we sat in the car for what seemed like hours. It was culture shock to begin living there:
 
The soft, cream-colored arroyo bottom turns into asphalt
streets.

Round hogans are rendered into squares topped by triangles.

 

Horses and wagons rolling slow in Native time
transform into pickups,
whipping around corners—sudden danger.

 

Bright blue air traded for a gritty shroud—
twenty-six defunct mining towns still
spread their dust.

 

Drumbeats and summer chants from the hill
switch to shrill
klaxons of rattling freight trains.

The great golden rock pile becomes hills
peppered with stores, churches, bars.

Gone from the center.

Shifted to an edge.
 
We moved into the yellow brick house at 213 West Green. Here houses stood close together. Our neighbors were all Bilagáana except for one Japanese family. No Diné lived alongside us anymore. I began to learn, little by little, what a border town was. It has taken me a lifetime to make meaning of it.

 

© Anna Redsand. All Rights Reserved.

 

***

 

To be continued on Monday, 3/8/24

If you're just joining this serialization, you can use the Table of Contents to catch up or orient you, if you've gotten behind.

 

 

 

 

***

 

Sometime after my father's years of preaching were over, he, my brother Ed, and I went for a drive after a holiday dinner. We saw a man by the side of the road with his thumb out. Seeing the hitchhiker triggered a memory for my dad, who still had memories then, and he told us about recently picking up a Navajo man.

"He was a young man," my father said. "I asked him where he was from. He said Twin Lakes. I told him I used to hold Sunday night services there. 'Oh, you're a missionary,' he said. Then he asked me, 'Why did you missionaries ever come here? Why did you have to come and destroy our culture?' He was so bitter. So angry." Dad sounded bewildered. "I told him that wasn't true. We loved their culture."

Ed is much more able than I am to confront both of our parents with the flaws in their logic, and he does it lightly. He is a middle child, while I am the firstborn. Gently he said, "Really, Dad, you were. Destroying their culture." I was grateful to Ed for articulating what I thought but felt unable to say.

"No." That was all my father said, his voice laden with sorrowful protest. Not understanding. Maybe he even recognized a grain of truth in the young man's words or in what Ed said. He could not accept it.

Neither of my parents would have said that converting people to Christianity was also about converting them from traditional Diné ways to White ways of living. Within their missionary circle, few if any questioned whether or not those might be the same thing—Christian belief and mainstream culture in North America. It didn't occur to them that they were interlarding the majority way of life into their message, as if that were part and parcel of Christianity.

My mother's viewpoint was filled with her own pain, which so often caused her to be caustic. Her acceptance of the received missionary and government perspectives flowed through her demeaning speech and actions. The physician's first principle, "Do no harm," was also embedded in my mother's nursing practice, and she followed it, as so many other rules, to the letter. But she limited that code to providing physical medical help. She saw the effort to force Indigenous assimilation as a good thing, not harmful. And generally, as Janice told me in the girls room, she was not liked by people who saw deeper than her willingness to provide nursing care.

My father was a critical thinker, though always within the framework of a World War II veteran, a patriot, and a zealous evangelical Christian missionary. He was also, in many ways, a humanitarian, insofar as that did not conflict with his religious beliefs. As my mother's corrosiveness came from her early pain, my father's desire to help came from his pain as the son of a physically abusive father, whom he was determined not to emulate.

Curiosity is often a saving grace, and my father had it even after he began to lose his mental faculties. I, too, was curious about the Diné world that surrounded me. I wanted to learn to speak Diné bizaad. I ate the food, absorbed the love of the people I knew and loved them back. I embraced my parents' beliefs during childhood, but I sometimes secretly edged outside them. I relished my summer lullabies––the ceremonial drums and chanting that floated down from the hill above the mission. I would have liked to peer around a juniper tree when I heard them, to see what was happening, no matter how much I also believed my mother and father when they condemned the happenings.

From the stories I've told here, it's clear that, as a child, I observed and absorbed the differences in the ways my mother and father lived as guests in Navajo Country. Their ways often contrasted sharply, rising to the level of heated verbal conflict between them. Not until I reached high school did I begin to disagree with the beliefs they shared, even when they lived them out differently. It would be several more years before I understood the damage caused by how White missionaries drew a separation between religion and culture, thinking in all sincerity that they were offering a great gift. However, on an unconscious level I was deciding where I stood. At first, as children often do, I aligned myself without knowing I was taking a stand.

I have a sharp memory from when I was four and hadn't lived in Navajo Country for long. The house the mission board had assigned us in Shiprock stood on a hill overlooking the main road. The living room had a large picture window that looked directly onto Jack's Trading Post. We could watch people pull up in their horse-drawn wagons and go in bearing hand-woven rugs, bags of raw wool, or Bluebird flour bags wrapped around turquoise and silver jewelry. They came out with Bluebird sacks full of flour, red cans of coffee, bags of sugar, and boxes of canned goods. Old men sat along one exterior wall of the trading post visiting while their horses ate from their nosebags.

One day, we had visitors from Michigan, and they stood watching the scene unfold below. I was playing on the living room floor, when I heard one of them say, "Just look at those Indians down there."

By then I probably knew that Diné could be called Indians, but I heard something denigrating in the tone. Somewhat righteously, I imagine, and without a pause, I said, "They're not Indians. They're nice Navajos." I wasn't punished; I would remember it if I had been. But I was undoubtedly reprimanded for disrespecting an adult.

As an adolescent I became conscious of wanting to truly belong to the people who surrounded me, to be one of them. There is a minor incident that stands large in my memory. Our high school choir was bussed to Red Valley, Arizona, where our church had one of its missions. Before our performance, the Navajo church ladies stood behind long tables to serve a traditional Navajo meal of mutton stew and frybread. We lined up on the other side, and when I reached the tables, Mrs. Redhorse (Diné), the wife of the missionary there, greeted me by name. She handed me a bowl of stew, and I picked up an industrial sized salt shaker and shook a generous amount into my stew. Mrs. Redhorse laughed. "You're just like us. You love salt." A warm glow suffused my chest. I had been seen. Some White students stood near me, and I hoped they'd heard her. I wanted them to know who I belonged with. I had added all that salt because I knew that traditional foods were cooked without it. You were expected to add it later.

 

***

 

When the washing of diapers, the canning of fruits and vegetables, the cooking of gallons and gallons of soups and stews had been done, when there were no more church services to accompany, and most of all, when my father had more or less retired, my mother's harshness softened and diminished. My father preached whenever he was asked, until he fainted one Sunday on the podium. He continued to deliver Bibles to a stand at a Gallup truck stop, and he went regularly to the nursing home where he would spend his last years, so he could read the Bible in Diné bizaad to residents there.

In North America at large, in the Navajo Nation, and even in the evangelical mission world, an emergence from post-colonial policies and practices was in progress, and this seems to have had something of an effect on my mother. When she moved from my youngest brother's home into a nursing home, she was genuinely pleased to have a Diné roommate, a woman she already knew. Two days after Hilda's death, my mother had a stroke, and four days later she passed away. To me, this was not unlike a spouse dying within days of their partner. I chose to take my mother's departure so close to Hilda's as additional evidence that she had changed and grown with changing circumstances in the world around her.
I hesitate to write that my mother's prejudices can almost be seen as a gift because I am definitely not advocating or excusing her racism. But if Janice was right, and I think she was, my mother's expressions of antipathy, even when only felt, not heard, could have given the Diné people who knew her something to resist. It was probably unlikely that anyone would abandon their traditions because of her influence. Or maybe I'm projecting, and her attitudes eventually became something for me to confront.

 
My father's genuine interest in the people he met, on the other hand, made it more likely that they would readily trade in their traditional practices for Christianity along with its cultural trappings. It was my father's example I followed as a guest in Dinétah. In fact, perhaps how I related to life around me was one of my earliest steps away from both of them––taking my own path, which would turn out to be different from both of theirs. I didn't feel as if I was taking any sort of a stand. I was only doing what seemed natural.

Acculturation is generally defined as adaptation to a culture different from one's own, typically the dominant one. I acculturated in certain ways, not to the culture that prevailed in the US at the time and at home, but to the one that surrounded me and dominated so much of my early life. No one exerted any pressure on me to assimilate, the way the US government and missionaries did on Indigenous people. I did so mostly unconsciously because Diné people surrounded me with love and acceptance, because I viewed what enfolded me as positive, desirable, and natural, whether in spite of or because of my parents' varying views and actions.

***

Recently my brother Rick interviewed a Diné woman on her thoughts about missionaries. She was a child in Teec Nos Pos when our family lived there and attended the mission school. She spoke of how missionaries entered Diné homes without a thought as to whether or not they were welcome or belonged there. "And we served you food. This wasn't reciprocated." And then she said, "But your family invited us into your home." Her voice took on a sound of surprise, almost amazement. She repeated it. "You had us into your home! And your mother served us cookies. She gave us medicine, probably from her own stash. We knew she was," and here she used the Diné phrase meaning, the one who carries medicine. She laughed, "She was a pharmacist. From her own stash."

"From her own stash" was an incorrect but generous assumption. In reality, the hospital at Rehoboth provided my mother with various medicines she could distribute, including injectable penicillin. But the interview with Sharla helped me see my parents, and especially my mother, in a different light from what Janice had said to me in the Girls Room. We all have public and private personae, and in this telling of how I saw my parents encounter and influence the lives of many Diné people, I have exposed what went on behind the scenes. Sometimes the private spilled over into the public enough that people saw my parents in contrast to each other, in the way that Janice had undoubtedly overheard it from adults.

In a conversation with my mother, a few years before her death, I said something about her attitudes toward the Diné people. Her reply has left me still parsing the layers of its meaning. She said, "You and Dad always loved them so much. I felt like there wasn't any room for me to love them."

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All rights reserved.

 

This is the final installment of Chapter IV of Fissure: A Life Between Cultures, "In the Girls Room."
Serialization of Fissure, will continue on Friday, 3/8/24 with the first installment of

Part II, Chapter V, "Naturalization."

If you are just joining this serialization, you can use the Table of Contents to find your way to the beginning.