A Season on the Rez

Millenniums ago the Anasazi built a village here, and Pueblo tribes followed, and then the restless and roaming Navajo. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, the Spanish conquistador, galloped through looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola. Consumed by gold hunger, he wandered north until his fever extinguished on the plains of Kansas.

I drove this way weeks earlier in the company of a ruminative medicine man with a handsome flush of white hair and a buckskin cowboy hat, and he talked of the melancholy that gripped his generation in autumn. This was when bilagáana operatives from the Bureau of Indian Affairs fanned out across the reservation in search of Navajo children to dispatch to distant boarding schools. Parents watched cars bounce along rutted roads for a long while before the agents arrived and asked if they had children. The federal agents acted as if they owned the Diné, peering inside the eight-sided hogans with dirt floors that represented home and womb.

Children came to know what the lengthening shadows of autumn presaged. When he was 7, he spotted a B.I.A. school bus trailing red dust like a bridal train and took off running barefoot into a canyon. Agents found him and packed him off to school in Oklahoma. He looked out the back window of the bus as his parents receded into the distance. The founder of the B.I.A. schools, an American army captain, distilled the mission in 1890: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

That boy was a grandfather now, and spoke fluent English and tonal Navajo, with its hundreds of vowel sounds, a language no easier to shed than his skin. The Indian inside did not die. It was memories that arrived unbidden. “The past cannot be unwoven,” he said.

Source: The New York Times

Powered by NewsAPI.org

Keywords:

Rez (video game) • Ancestral Puebloans • Puebloans • Navajo • Francisco Vázquez de Coronado • Spanish Empire • Conquistador • Zuni-Cibola Complex • Gold • Malnutrition • Great Plains • Kansas • Medicine man • White Americans • Buckskins • Cowboy hat • Bureau of Indian Affairs • Navajo • American Indian boarding schools • School bus • Red Dust (1932 film) • Bridal Train • Oklahoma • Bureau of Indian Affairs • Native Americans in the United States • English language • Tone (linguistics) • Navajo • Vowel • Phoneme • Language •