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.
