the sad red earth

Robert Yazzie and Amber Kanazloah Crotty don’t like to say that Navajos have “lost” their knowledge of their native traditions. They might say that some Navajos are not in “relationship” with elements of their culture. The knowledge is there somewhere, as a part of who they are – like a vague sense of “coyote” as a fundamental of experience, along with the two sides, male and female, of experience – but their recognition of this essential knowledge and their understanding of what to do with it have been disrupted. It is part of the mission of the Diné Policy Institute to foster a renewed understanding and use among the Navajo people of Navajo traditions and values.

The Diné Policy Institute has its home at Diné College, in Tsaile, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation – the first of the Tribal Colleges, founded in 1968. Yazzie, a J.D. from the University of New Mexico Law School and the Chief Justice Emeritus of the Navajo Nation Supreme Court, is the institute’s director. Crotty is a graduate student in Native American Studies at UCLA interning at the Institute.

Robert Yazzie (by Julia Dean)

According to its website, “The Diné Policy Institute is established under Diné College as a research institute to ‘mesh’ Western research practices with traditional Navajo values, Natural, Traditional, Customary, and Common laws … and principles to advise (by recommendation) the Navajo Nation law and policy-makers.” Further, “DPI will also develop the student’s ability to learn and live the Navajo Life Way consistent with Sa’ah Naghai Bik’e Hozhoon (SNBH), and assist them in gaining command of the Western learning and living skills, through its curriculum.” Another purpose “will be to develop a four-year degree program that focuses on Nation-building with the emphasis on making Navajo laws and policies grounded in tradition, customs, values, spiritual beliefs and practices.”

Every Indian nation has its unique story of catastrophic contact with the expanding European settlement of the continent. Nonetheless, there are reoccurring patterns in these stories, like the forced removal of Native communities by foot to distant reservations so that their more favorable native grounds could be taken by the government, settlers, or commercial interests. For the Navajo, this was “The Long Walk” to the Bosque Redondo reservation in Southeastern Arizona of about 10,000 people, a walk during which over 200 Navajo died. Scandalously conceived in its nature and similarly ill-conceived in its practical effects, the resettlement, like others, was a disaster, and the Navajo were permitted to return home in 1868.

Navajo Warriors at Fort Sumner (Bosque Redondo), New Mexico, 1864-1868. Photograph courtesy National Archives.

Another recognizable pattern is a kind of cultural dislocation. Along with the poverty, unemployment and ill-health that have been products of conquest and envelopment by a profoundly different and adverse dominant culture, there has been the separation for many Navajos from their sustaining traditions and values. All Tribes confront this issue, however they may deal with it, or fail to. It is not surprising that the Navajo, the second most populous nation (after the Cherokee), on the largest reservation, have conceived the ambitions of the Diné Policy Institute. To be a resource in Native ways of thinking to the Navajo government and nation. To educate young Navajos in how to live, as reality suggests they must, within the wider American culture, but how to do it as Navajos. To be an expanding resource, too, for research in Navajo issues – not just by providing a home for more academic research by Navajos (Diné – “the people”), but also through a “policy process and methods of analysis” that are “Diné based.”

(by Julia Dean)

Interestingly, as we sat through a primer in Diné ideas at the Institute, generously offered by Yazzie, Crotty, and undergraduate Shaundena Litson, we struggled with the concept of “Coyote.” Yazzie had already warned, as is always so, that the ideas don’t translate with comfortable accuracy into another language. “Man” and “Woman,” for instance, in Diné thought, are not adequately conveyed by notions, in English, of duality or opposites. Still, one could perceive some familiar notion of paired fundamentals to hang onto. But where did “coyote” come from? How did it fit in as a third fundament? Yazzie tried to find ways to explain it to us. He offered practical representations. Then it occurred to him.

“Consequence,” he said. “Coyote is consequence.”

AJA

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 10:52 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Indian Country, The Political Animal.

When the United Nations passed its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in September 2007, only four nations voted against it: Australia, New Zealand, Canada – and the United States. Not difficult, historically, to understand why, but what millennium is this? Of course, Bush was president then. But while the Obama administration recently and laudably signaled its intention to reverse the Bush position against endorsing the U.N. Statement on Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, it has not yet indicated a course of action on the indigenous peoples declaration.

While the administration ponders that course, it will get a first bite at a second apple. The Organization of American States (OAS) has produced a Draft American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples specifically aimed at conditions in the Americas. You can send letters urging adoption of the Declaration at the Indian Law Resource Center.

(Thanks to Native America, Discovered and Conquered for bringing this to my attention.)

AJA

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 5:27 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Indian Country.

Don’t know why I’ve only just discovered him, don’t know how he isn’t bigger than Kos and Instapundit combined, but Patrick Barkman, blogging as The Local Crank, is my current blog throb. Barkman offers “Musings & Sardonic Commentary on Politics, Religion, Culture & Native American Issues.” About himself:

Just a simple Cherokee trial lawyer, Barkman has been forcing his opinions on others in print since, for reasons that passeth understanding, he was an unsuccessful candidate for state representative in 2002. His philosophy: “If people had wanted me to be nice, they should’ve voted for me.”

Someone catch me as I swoon.

AJA

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 3:51 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Indian Country, The Political Animal.

Desert Assault

Gearing Up for the Final Advance

I said, Cut the Wire, Now!

JD & AJA

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 10:45 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under On The Road.

Julia and I are often asked what this experience is like – traveling around the country in our motorhome with our two dogs, doing the work we love, writing and photographing.  I first caught the bug of motorhome travel nearly twenty years ago, when I toured the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming, including Yellowstone, in a twenty-eight footer. If you have the moving gene but are not entirely vagabond, it is a joyful union of two kinds of life. You wander wherever you wish, always stirred and invigorated by the natural and the new, yet you’re always home. You sleep in the same bed every night, retain all the conveniences of home, and you can have your “stuff” around you. It is a limited amount of stuff, but you can take everything essential, including the most sophisticated communications and office equipment, and you learn, as a consequence, how little stuff you really need. We left 98% behind. I miss none of it.

You can also pick up and move on whenever you like. In a few hours you pack up, unhook, and disconnect. The disconnection would be the challenge for those who need to feel always rooted in place, in community, in relationships. Instead you float over the earth. Through the panoramic window of, say, a thirty-seven footer now, the world spreads out before you, changing by the moment, offering the constant vista of the new.

And you drive. You test your skills. In ’91 it was winding up through South Dakota’s Black Hills to Mount Rushmore. It was ascending the 10,300 feet of Montana’s Red Lodge Mountain switchbacks at sunset, and white-knuckling them down in the dark. Two days ago it was driving from Albuquerque to Gallup in 30 mile an hour winds with 50 MPH gusts and passing outside of Gallup another motorhome gone over the edge and on its side. Cranked the music up real loud and held on tight.

Travel – extended travel – changes your relation to the world and your life. The flow that fixed walls and property lines and routine seek to shut out washes over you and you feel a part of it. You feel it in you and around you, and you know you will wash away in it, to some kind of mouth, through some kind of delta, into a new geography where everything is altered. The world, you sense, in every moment, is vast, and the multitudes you pass among great, and so maybe, as Julia did in India back in 1993 – and so unlike those Wall Street “masters of the universe” who looked down from what they thought great heights on so reduced a prospect – you begin to feel like that “speck on the surface of the sad red earth.”

There is a tension in all we do between the large and the small. Traveling, you may begin to see the line, and the tautness in it, that tugs between them. Here is Ted Kooser, Julia’s fellow Nebraskan, one-time U.S. Poet Laureate, and, by the way, in his pre-retired, salaried life, an insurance man, about a different kind of travel:

FLYING AT NIGHT

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.

Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies

like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,

some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,

snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn

back into the little system of his care.

All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,

tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

AJA

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 9:51 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under On The Road.

Apropos Kerouac’s Sal Paradise feeling like “a speck on the surface of the sad red earth,” the following from John Updike on the influence of science on our sense of our place in the universe:

The non-scientist’s relation to modern science is basically craven: we look to its discoveries and technology to save us from disease, to give us a faster ride and a softer life, and at the same time we shrink from what it has to tell us of our perilous and insignificant place in the cosmos. Not that threats to our safety and significance were absent from the pre-scientific world, or that arguments against a God-bestowed human grandeur were lacking before Darwin. But our century’s revelations of unthinkable largeness and unimaginable smallness, of abysmal stretches of geological time when we were nothing, of supernumerary galaxies and indeterminate subatomic behavior, of a kind of mad mathematical violence at the heart of matter have scorched us deeper than we know.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan, A Far Distant Howl, and biophemera all, for leading me this passage.

AJA

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 12:53 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Culture Clash.

If you missed it, the February 9 & 16 issue of The New Yorker offered representative samples of Updike’s over fifty years as a contributor of short stories, poetry, essays and criticism. This excerpt is from his memoir A Soft Spring Night in Shillington, in which he ruminates on the pleasure of finding close shelter from the rain.

Early in his life, the child I once was sensed the guilt in things, inseparable from the pain, the competition: the sparrow dead on the lawn, the flies swatted on the porch, the impervious leer of the bully on the school playground. The burden of activity, of participation, must clearly be shouldered, and had its pleasures. But they were cruel pleasures. There was nothing cruel about crouching in a shelter and letting phenomena slide by: it was ecstasy. The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives forever. If we keep utterly still, we can suffer no wear and tear and will never die.

AJA

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 12:47 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Culture Clash.

Prior to 1907 there existed in the United States an area referred to as the Indian Territory, an area, ultimately reduced to the Oklahoma territory, to which various Indian Tribes were removed from their native grounds in order to make way for white settlement. These relocations became famously dramatic through the Trail of Tears that resulted from the Indian Removal Act of 1830 under President Andrew Jackson. The Cherokee, the Choctaw, and the Chickasaw Indians were among the tribes removed to the Oklahoma territory who reside there to this day.

The Pawnee were relocated to Oklahoma from another territory, that of what is now the state of Nebraska. Now, Kevin Abourezk of the Lincoln Journal Star (and blogging as Redclout) reports about a spiritual and symbolic return of the Pawnee to their native territory made possible in part by an extraordinary act of conscience and restitution by the Nebraska writer Roger Welsch.

AJA

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 1:13 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Indian Country.

The Veteran's Cemetery at Window Rock, AZ, the Navajo Reservation. By Julia Dean

Photographer Julia Dean and writer A. Jay Adler are traveling the U.S., visiting all the corners of Indian Country, as we attempt to document the nature and state of Native American life in the country today, the most neglected and underreported social story in the United States. This blog, the sad red earth, is an account of our experiences as we live them. At the end of our travels we intend to produce a book of photography and prose entitled Native Now: the Lives of Native Americans in the Twentieth Century. Please vote for us by clicking the “Dream Assignment” button at right to help us win $50,000 to finance our work.

AJA

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 6:20 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Indian Country.

If you are new to this blog, you may not yet know it’s main and driving purpose. Photographer Julia Dean and writer A. Jay Adler are traveling the U.S., visiting all the corners of Indian Country, as we attempt to document the nature and state of Native American life in the country today. This story remains, unfortunately, the most neglected and underreported social story in the United States. This blog, the sad red earth, is an account of our experiences as we live them. At the end of our travels we intend to produce a book of photography and prose entitled Native Now: the Lives of Native Americans in the Twentieth Century.

Currently, we are financing our travels and work entirely ourselves. But there is a chance to change that. The gaudy “badge” or “button” just to the right represents a photo competition being sponsored by Lenovo and Microsoft. The prize: $50,000 to finance a “dream” photography assignment. Native Now is that dream for the two of us. If you would, please take a look around the blog. Explore and read. You can learn about the work we have already done, and you can learn about who we are. If the work we are doing seems worthy of support, then take a moment to click on that outrageously yellow button, in order to vote for us. (Julia, technically. It is a photo competition.)

The project needs to make it into the top 20 to become a finalist eligible for ultimate selection by the jury of professional judges. You’ll be taken to the competition website where you will have to register for your vote to count. We hope you will think it worth the effort. Thanks so much for your time.

JD & AJA

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 1:08 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under Indian Country, The Political Animal.