Reflections on "Home"

Reflections on “Home”

In 1868, a weary band of 8000+ Navajos began their long walk BACK after four years of relative captivity at Ft Sumner, NM – back to what they left behind. HOME.

It is nearly impossible to understand a culture when unless you are born into it. We outsiders can appreciate it, learn from it, and perhaps even adopt some of it for our own, but it will never be fully ours. What a treat it has been to spend last week with the Navajo people who did their best to show us, and tell us, and encourage us to understand and feel what it means to be Navajo and why Canyon de Chelly is so important to them.

To them, this is and will always be, home, no matter where they may be living. It’s the land, stark, but beautiful, combined with their sense of kinship with all things, their traditions, their stories, their music and ceremonies, and their history. 

I won’t bore you with all the details – if you want to learn more about the canyon and its people, please go online or check out a book. Instead, I will tell you what this Road Scholar program shared with us, what the Navajo people who ran the program shared with us, and how we reacted to it.

Through various lectures and experiences, we learned about the archeology of the Canyon, about Navajo creation stories and spiritual beliefs, about the clan system (every person represents 4 clans – mother, father, and two grandfathers), the Long Walk (one of many shameful episodes in U.S. history we never learned about), the World War II Code Talkers, native music and ceremonies, traditional foods, and native arts and crafts (jewelry making, silversmithing, rug weaving, pottery making). 

And, of course, we explored the Canyon itself via 2 rim drives and an exciting 4x4 jeep ride in the rain (complete with rising waters and waterfalls). Lew and I, along with another couple, had the added delight of hiking 900 feet down into the canyon itself (and back) – awesome.

It was, however, the totality of the experience that was so meaningful. The Navajo people are resilient, talented, funny, and very open. They are a culture that has “adapted” and “adopted” over the centuries – adapted to changing circumstances and adopted features of other cultures with which they’ve interacted.  After the talk on what the Navajo people had to endure on the Long Walk in 1864, I was nearly brought to tears. I kept asking myself “why”? Why are we so cruel to one another? Why don’t we listen? Why do we treat people who are different from us with such contempt, with such disregard for their humanity? And how is it, with so much pain in their past, that these people endure and many even have renewed hope for the future?

The land is hauntingly beautiful, but it no longer provides for the people as it has in the past. Drought. Invasive species. Loss of livestock. Failed policies. And yet they persist, and dream of a better future. This is home, the home of their ancestors, and this is where they will remain.

What is “home” to me? It’s not where I grew up – I no longer have familial ties there, nor do I care to go back to Los Angeles. It’s not where we raised our own family – we moved around in the Air Force, so no one place stands out as home, and the kids have scattered. It’s not where we live now, although we plan to remain there. And, of course, now that we are nomads, home is where we happen to have parked our RV for the time being.

Home to the Navajo is a visceral feeling – this is where I belong, this is where I find peace, this is where the ancestors lived. This is part of my being. I used to have that feeling when I returned to California, but not anymore. I suppose Colorado comes the closest, but in reality, it’s the mountains that call to me, that give me that feeling of peace – any mountains. Or when we're with our daughters and grandchildren, wherever that may be. That is where I feel most at “home”.

Lew’s addendum:

Two thoughts:

I was seriously impressed by the Navajo attachment/reverence surrounding family and home as defined as a place of their ancestors, their elders.  They carefully trace family and clan based on matriarchal lineage and tenaciously maintain those family ties.  The sense of “home” as a specific place, a place where my elders, my ancestors, lived and worked has made that place sacred.  I must maintain that sacredness for my family and for future generations.  Is there something for the rest of us to learn from their tenacity to these values?  Most of us were raised with the trite concept, “Home is where the heart is.”  I have no particular reverence for “home,” but Home is where my family love resides. 

 

We all learned a bit of American history in school, but we probably didn’t get the Native American version.  Nor did we receive the level of detail involved in what instigated the Navajo Long March.  We certainly weren’t taught the kinds of changes to Navajo culture that the return from the march caused.  Yes, some results were positive, but the process provides a new chapter in my understanding of man’s inhumanity to man.  But that’s a discussion for another time.