Code Talker (10 page)

That morning, I had helped collect the finest sand from the riverbed, carrying it to the lodge and placing it outside the door. Now Father, Uncle, and Grandfather built a fire outside the lodge. They searched for rocks, especially dark volcanic rocks, and threw them into the fire to heat. Coolidge and I then carried the hot rocks into the sweat hut, balancing them on the fork of a stick. We piled them inside, to the left of the entrance, in a shallow depression, approximately four inches deep.

We and the men then entered the lodge on hands and knees, an act of humility. A special prayer was recited upon entering. We wore just a breechclout. When the entrance blanket lowered, sudden darkness filled the room. I couldn't see the others inside the shelter. Grandfather poured water mixed with sage and juniper over the rocks, and billows of steam rose in the dark lodge—entering deep into our lungs.
¹⁸
Aromas of juniper and sagebrush filled the small room, the sage smelling much like Vicks VapoRub and having the same effect. Nasal passages opened, and congestion cleared. Father had made medicines from the two plants. Each of us drank some. We smeared the rest on our bodies to discourage things like arthritis or swelling.

I sat at the back with my brother. Hot steam made me groggy, and I wondered how the adult males stood it, sitting so near the steaming rocks. The three men and we two boys filled the compact, heated space.

The men sang traditional songs, celebrating our relationship to the four compass directions. Coolidge and I joined in on the songs we knew, but on many we just listened to the men. Heat grew more intense, like a fever, melting away energy and any thought of the outside world. Sweat streamed down my forehead, stinging my eyes.

Coolidge and I knew we couldn't leave until the adults had finished singing. Only then would the ceremony complete its work, uniting us with the physical world so that nature became a part of our hearts, bodies, and systems. This assured that impurities left us and that we were taken care of from sunrise to sunset and through the nights to come.

After an hour, we emerged, saying an exit prayer. I squinted in the bright sunlight, and late-summer air cooled my body. Standing on a blanket, I splashed sand carried from the riverbed over myself. The sand, fine as powder, didn't stick, but it removed the sweat. No towel was needed.

I felt good. Lighter. A sweat bath was not to be taken heedlessly, and I had prepared carefully, examining my life both at school and at home. I knew I'd entered into the sweat hut with the proper attitude. So I felt sure that the ceremony had provided me with what I sought—protection, strength against bad influences, and a cleansing of the soul.

Many products of the earth were utilized in the bath. Sand, rock, fire, air, water, and wood all went into the building of the sweat lodge or the ceremony itself. We, as participants, created a connection to the earth by utilizing its products. The four principal elements—earth, water, fire, and air—were an honored part of the sweat hut ceremony.

Like all Navajo ceremonies, participants had their own individual reasons for taking part. The benefit gained depended upon the seriousness of the individual partaking in the ritual. Bad thoughts could spoil everything. Only those who threw their hearts and minds into the ceremony, invoking the Right Way, received the fullest blessing.

When I did that, the sweat bath cleaned my soul and everything else in my day-to-day life.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Great Livestock Massacre

The summer day at
Chichiltah
sizzled with heat and expectations. Father and Grandma counted the days and months of summer, making sure they knew when my school resumed in the fall. Hot days filled with freedom raced by, and that back-to-school date would come too soon. But right now I was free again—of teachers, of that heavy feeling that I was about to answer a question incorrectly, and of volatile matrons.

I rattled the fence I'd just mended to test its strength.
Good.
It formed part of the family sheep corral. I stretched and sipped from a canvas jug of water.

The far-off rumble of heavy equipment, a sound not often heard in Navajo country, gave me warning. If I had known what was coming, my heart wouldn't have pounded with eager anticipation. But the sound, and then the sight of a flatbed truck carrying a huge bulldozer, was uncommon—and intriguing. I wiped the sweat from my eyes. What could it be for?

Then in my thirteenth or fourteenth summer, I didn't connect the heavy equipment with any kind of problem. I raced down to the dirt road to watch. Navajo men dismounted from the flatbed. They worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, government employees, they said. With a good deal of sarcasm, reservation Navajos called government workers “Washing-done.”

Grandmother and Grandfather looked at each other, numb expressions frozen on their faces.

The men drove the heavy-duty bulldozer off the flatbed, down a hastily placed ramp. My family and I watched. The big machine lumbered across Grandma's property, raising clouds of dust. It stopped not far from the hogan. We heard scraping sounds as a huge trench was dug. When the trench was complete—about 150 feet long and four or five feet deep—the men and machine moved to a plot of land inhabited by another family and dug another long hole in the ground. They dug three or four trenches, each on property owned by different neighbors.

Were they preparing for some new ceremony? The workers left with no explanation. I imagined a huge sing with multiple bonfires. But my adult relatives were strangely quiet.

A week or so later, the BIA men returned on horseback. My family gathered at the hogan.

The BIA workers blocked one end of the trench on Grandma's land, leaving the other end open. “You need to round up your sheep and goats,” one man said. “Herd them into the trench.”

Grandfather's face had turned to stone. “But—”

“Do not protest, Grandfather,” one of the BIA workers said, using the polite form of address for a younger man addressing an elder. “Haven't you heard, you'll get thrown in jail?”

My stomach knotted as I helped herd all but three hundred of Grandmother's sheep and goats into the deep trench. The willing, domesticated animals moved readily into the trench through the open end. Then the BIA workers sealed that end. A flammable material was sprayed on the animals, and they were set on fire.

We couldn't believe what we were witnessing. I covered my ears, but could not block the shrieks of the animals, especially the goats, who had a high, piercing cry. The stench of burning wool and flesh filled the normally fresh air.

That night, as I lay sleepless, the screams echoed in my head. Across the hogan, Grandmother and Grandfather cried softly.

Through years of hard work Grandma's herd had grown to around a thousand animals, mostly sheep, with a scattering of goats. The entire family had worked hard to build up our herd, and we were happy and grateful for our healthy animals. In Navajo country, sheep were a measure of wealth. So, despite the Depression afflicting the rest of the nation, my family had worked their way to success. I knew that Dora and I had helped. With the herd reduced by seven hundred head, all those years of labor came to nothing.

I lay in the dark, tears sliding down my cheeks. Many of the animals had been pets, greeting their humans with bleats and head butts. I missed them. And Dora missed them. Those animals deserved respect, not such a terrible death at the hands of cruel men. Finally, exhausted from the terrible day, I fell into a deep sleep.

I woke up feeling groggy, but knowing that something was wrong. Then the stench of burned livestock filled my nostrils. I dressed and went outside. Auntie was already up, working. Together my family performed the tasks necessary to care for our remaining animals. We moved like machines, unable to process what had happened.

Late that night, I again heard Grandmother's and Grandfather's stifled sobs. I overheard their whispered words to each other. They could not imagine how they would make up for their loss.

Father, working at the trading post, learned that families all over the reservation and the Checkerboard were devastated by the massacre of their livestock. Any family with more than a hundred head of sheep and goats was subject to the “reduction.” The number of animals killed varied on a sliding scale, depending on how big each herd was. Horses and cattle were also killed, but their deaths were more humane. They were shot rather than burned.

The shocked families warned one another not to protest. There were rumors of arrests.

 

 

A historical perspective on the politics of this disaster doesn't soften the blow still felt by the families who were deprived of their livelihood. The program may have been well intentioned, but like many other political decisions, the results proved disastrous.

It was during the Great Depression, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in 1932, was president. His legislative agenda, the “New Deal,” initiated many programs and public-works projects designed to help employ the needy. The disastrous livestock reduction might never have occurred if four things had not come together.

First, reservation and Checkerboard land, aggressively grazed by livestock, was less productive than it had been. Sheep were the primary animals raised, and they graze close to the ground, often killing the roots of plants. The dust bowl in the southwestern Great Plains had created a more serious problem than the problems on Navajo land, but still, overgrazing was then under the microscope of public awareness. As John Collier wrote: “The Navajo reservation is being washed into the Boulder Dam reservoir.”
¹⁹
This government project, begun in 1931, is now known as the famous Hoover Dam.

Second, the overgrazing coincided with a federal New Deal push for a huge park to be created on Navajo land. The proposal, first made in 1931 by Roger Toll, died, but was renewed when Roosevelt was elected. People argued that the park would create jobs, but it would also absorb land needed for grazing Navajo livestock. The National Park Service decided that the Navajos could continue to live on the parkland, but they would have to retain their “quaint” ways of life, continuing to raise sheep and implementing no improvements. This would do nothing to relieve the already overgrazed conditions. It was driven home to officials that fewer animals would mean fewer demands for grass.
²⁰

Third, John Collier, the new Commissioner of Indian Affairs, felt pressured to do something to rehabilitate Navajo grazing lands. He opposed the Navajo National Park, but proposed a stock reduction program as the solution to the overgrazing problem.

And fourth, Collier also promised to expand the land area of the reservation in return for the reduction in livestock. He wanted to incorporate lands already used by the Navajo for grazing, making their stewardship official. This would include at least some of the Checkerboard Area. The idea seems somewhat contradictory, since with more land, more animals could be supported, but the land was, by then, so poor that Collier felt a livestock reduction would still be in order.

As planned, Collier's recommendation for reservation expansion lessened the vehemence of Navajo objections to his proposed stock reduction. The stock reduction proposal passed.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs jumped in, employing Navajos to execute the reduction mandate. In an attempt to make up for the diminished income from their liquidated livestock, the government also promised the Navajos an education that would lead to jobs with various New Deal public-works programs.

But then John Collier proposed the “Indian Reorganization Act,” a proclamation of “cultural freedom” for Indians which basically proposed to make the various tribes into corporations administered by the United States government
²¹
. The act was passed by the Pueblos but rejected by the Navajos. Still, Congress passed the act in 1934, leaving the future of the Navajos poorly defined in the eyes of the government.

Once the livestock massacre was completed, with the Navajo sheep population having been reduced from a high of 1.6 million in 1932 to only 400,000 in 1944,
²²
the promised geographical expansion failed to take place, although, to his credit, John Collier did fight to obtain more land for the reservation.
²³
The proposed national park was also defeated, a small blessing for those who kept sheep and other livestock. Only a few Navajos were given public-works employment. And the education program that was promised—preparing more Native Americans to work on the numerous public-works projects—did not materialize for the members of the Navajo tribe, the tribe that had rejected John Collier's Indian Reorganization Act.

It was odd that in Depression times, the mutton of the slaughtered animals was not preserved as food. Nor were the wool and leather utilized. A small portion of the meat was canned for later use, although the meat from Grandma's herd and neighboring herds was simply destroyed. Three or four years later, some canned mutton was distributed to chapter houses on the Checkerboard and the reservation.

Some Navajo families were paid a pittance for their destroyed livestock, less than three dollars per head of sheep, when the market value vacillated between eight dollars and fourteen dollars per head. Other families were never paid. I am not sure whether my family received any money for their dead animals.

There are historians who suggest that the government's stock reduction program was aimed at making the Navajos less independent and more dependent upon the “generosity” of the government in Washington, D.C. I don't know about that, but I do know that for us Navajos, the government's “livestock reduction” program ended in failure.

Historians name John Collier, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945, as the instigator of the massacre. But I remember another man, E. Reeseman Fryer, who, during the New Deal, worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as the superintendant of the Navajo Reservation under John Collier. He served from 1936 until 1942, and was personally responsible for implementing much of the livestock reduction program. This man was especially resented. He was a white man, enjoying a position of power over the Navajo tribe.