Trip of the Tongue (7 page)

By the eighteenth century Canyon de Chelly was already an important Navajo population center. The Spanish were also well established in the area by this point, but their settlements were typically located some distance from Navajo settlements, and at first interaction between the two groups was fairly limited. Which is not to say they weren't aware of one another. The first Spanish references to the Navajo date all the way back to 1626, when Fray Gerónimo de Zárate Salmerón, a Franciscan priest, first wrote of “the Apache Indians of Navaju.”
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But perhaps not unexpectedly, as the years went by relations were not always cordial between the two groups. The Navajo would on occasion raid New Mexican settlements, and Spanish soldiers frequently captured Navajos and sold them into slavery. In 1805 these tensions boiled over. As part of a series of military operations designed to strengthen Spain's presence and discourage increasing Navajo aggression, a number of Spanish troops entered Canyon de Chelly, determined to make a show of force. To their surprise, however, the canyon was deserted. They were alone.

Or so they thought. As a matter of fact, a group of women, children, and elderly Navajo were hiding in a cave in an adjoining canyon. According to Navajo oral tradition, this group gave away their position when an old woman, thinking herself safely out of firing range, began shouting insults at the Spanish forces—in Spanish. The Spanish attacked, and though the Navajo attempted to hold them off, their defenses were no match for the Spanish guns. More than a hundred Navajo died. You can still see the marks the bullets left in the stone in what is today known as Massacre Cave.

But this wasn't the last time the Canyon de Chelly was visited by hostile forces.

At the time of the Civil War, Navajo lands were part of the New Mexico and Utah territories, and Canyon de Chelly had become known as something of a Navajo stronghold. General Edward Canby, the regional military commander, was convinced that the only way to control the Navajo and put an end to hostilities was to forcibly remove them from their traditional lands. In 1862, Canby handed over his command and his convictions to a general named James H. Carleton, a man who would become one of the most—if not
the
most—reviled figures in the history of the Navajo people.

Carleton's philosophy toward indigenous peoples was fairly representative of American thinking at the time: he advocated the “civilization” of the Navajo. He believed that once the Navajo were exposed to English and Christianity and separated from their traditional culture they would abandon any raiding campaigns and set aside their differences. “The old Indians will die off and carry with them the latent longings for murder and robbing,” he wrote. “The young ones will take their places without these longings: and thus, little by little, they will become a happy and contented people.”

He also believed there was gold to be found in the area. But I'm sure that never factored into his thinking.

Carleton eventually decided to relocate the Navajo about 300 miles east to a new reservation in a place called Bosque Redondo. Despite being advised that Bosque Redondo was remote and difficult to supply and, moreover, that the Pecos River was prone to flooding and too alkaline to be used for drinking or irrigation, Carleton requested congressional authorization to build a fort here. Around this fort—which was named Fort Sumner—he established a forty-square-mile reservation.

Unsurprisingly, the Navajo were reluctant to move. Carleton needed a new strategy. “The Navajo Indians have got to be whipped,” Carleton explained in an 1863 letter. He ordered Colonel Kit Carson, a famous frontiersman, to find a way to force the Navajo to Bosque Redondo. Carson's men burned fields, chopped down orchards, and confiscated livestock and food. But even this was not enough to force the Navajo to Bosque Redondo. Instead, many retreated to Canyon de Chelly.

And so in early 1864 Carson and his men advanced on Canyon de Chelly, the Navajo's last stronghold. Carson ordered the complete destruction of any settlements in the canyon.
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It was this attack—in concert with Carson's promise not to harm anyone who surrendered—that finally persuaded most of the Navajo to turn themselves in. You could say, then, that it was in Canyon de Chelly that the Long Walk of the Navajo officially began.

Between 1863 and 1866, 9,000 Navajo and Mescalero Apache were relocated to Bosque Redondo; roughly a third died during the walk and confinement. At Fort Sumner, the Navajo found barren land and clueless agents. There weren't enough blankets, firewood, or food. Disease ran rampant, and Comanche forces attacked regularly. To this day the Navajo call this place Hwéeldi—“place of suffering.”

In 1868 a treaty was finally negotiated that allowed the Navajo to return to their traditional homelands. This treaty—the Treaty of Bosque Redondo—ended hostilities between the groups, freed the Navajo from their captivity at Fort Sumner, and established the boundaries of the new Navajo Indian Reservation.
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But though the experiment at Bosque Redondo was over, General Carleton wouldn't be the last government official to try to force cultural assimilation. The series of hardships to be visited upon the Navajo by the U.S. government was just beginning. The next time, however, the government would target not only the Navajo people but also the Navajo language.

I had known when I arrived in Chinle that there were a few places I wanted to go. I knew I'd go to Canyon de Chelly and swing by tribal headquarters in Window Rock. I knew I'd go to the interactive museum in Tuba City and to Monument Valley and the Hubbell Trading Post in Ganado. What I didn't expect was to spend so much time looking at and learning about schools. But it is in the Navajo schools of past and present that the recent history of the language is to be found.

The history of Navajo schools begins after the Civil War, when President Ulysses S. Grant appointed “peace commissioners” to bring an end to the Indian Wars. This 1868 report provides a fairly detailed view of the sorts of ideas these commissioners came up with:

Naturally the Indian has many noble qualities. He is the very embodiment of courage. Indeed, at times he seems insensible of fear. If he is cruel and revengeful, it is because he is outlawed and his companion is the wild beast. Let civilized man be his companion, and the association warms into life virtues of the rarest worth. Civilization has driven him back from the home he loved; it has often tortured and killed him, but it never could make him a slave. As we have had so little respect for those we did enslave, to be consistent, this element of Indian character should challenge some admiration.… Through sameness of language is produced sameness of sentiment and thought; customs and habits are moulded and assimilated in the same way, and thus in process of time the differences producing trouble would have been gradually obliterated.… In the difference of language to-day lies two-thirds of our trouble.

Such statements seem particularly preposterous in light of the fact that, just a few years earlier, the country had been in the grip of a vicious war fought between two groups that spoke the same language. Nevertheless, the government was set on its course. The Indian would be “educated.”

That this was a strategy born of no small amount of self-interest is obvious. The schools that the government established for the Navajo and other Native children were not pure acts of charity or social responsibility. The need to civilize the country's Native population was, rather, treated as an issue of national security. Educational matters even factored into diplomatic negotiations. In the Treaty of Bosque Redondo, for instance, the government extracted a promise from the Navajo that for the next ten years they would send their children to reservation day schools built and run by the government.

These schools were just one part of the educational reform efforts undertaken by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The U.S. government also built dozens of boarding schools both on and off reservation land to help advance their general strategy of assimilation. The first of these Indian boarding schools, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, opened in Pennsylvania in 1879. It was founded by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, the man who famously said, “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Many Native families were understandably hesitant about sending their children away, but the government brooked very little opposition. If families were unwilling to send their children voluntarily, then officials found ways to encourage compliance. In 1883, for instance, the government threatened to withhold rations from any Crow families who refused to send their children to school. The next year, nineteen Hopi men were sent to Alcatraz for the same infraction. In some instances the authorities simply ignored the parents' wishes and forcibly removed the children from their homes.

Once they arrived at these boarding schools, willingly or no, the children typically had their hair cut and their clothing taken away. They were given uniforms and new names and were strictly forbidden to speak languages other than English.
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Anyone caught “speaking Indian” was punished—sometimes with a slap on the wrist, sometimes with a stick to the mouth. Some students suffered more severe punishments such as having their mouths washed out with soap or being made to stand with arms outstretched and a heavy dictionary in each hand. An early-twentieth-century BIA teacher named Albert Kneale summed up the pedagogical philosophy neatly: “Children were taught to despise every custom of their forefathers, including religion, language, songs, dress, ideas, methods of living.”

Manuelito, a Navajo leader during the time of the Long Walk and the Navajos' incarceration at Bosque Redondo, made a famous statement I came across again and again while I was in Navajo country, a statement that drives home just how profound a betrayal these boarding schools represent. “My grandchild,” said Manuelito, “the whites have many things which we Navajos need, but we cannot get them. It is as though the whites were in a grassy canyon and there they have wagons, plows, and plenty of food. We Navajos are up on the dry mesa. We can hear them talking but we cannot get to them. My grandchild, education is our ladder. Tell our people to take it.”

In 1882 Manuelito sent his two sons to Carlisle Indian School. They both fell ill—one at school, the other as soon as he returned home for a visit—and died.

In the midst of all this misfortune, there were some small signs that education might one day fulfill Manuelito's vision. One of the first of these came in the form of a school founded in 1902 by Katharine Drexel and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.
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Located not far from the center of tribal government at Window Rock, St. Michael Indian School is to this day the only Catholic school in Navajo Nation.

I visited the town of St. Michaels on a crisp, sunny day in early August. The museum, a former trading post and the first building to be used by the mission, is a small stone structure set apart from the sprawling complex that makes up the convent and school. As I walked up I saw that they were refinishing some of the woodwork on the outside of the building, and I stood frozen in place for several long minutes, trying to decide just how much of an inconvenience I might be causing for the man in charge of the repairs. When he saw me, frozen in place, he gave me a strange look and gestured me inside. I couldn't say if he was wondering why I was standing so still or why I was there in the first place.

As soon as I walked in, it was clear to me that St. Michael's museum is not the most popular attraction in Navajoland. There were two women keeping watch over the exhibits, a smiling middle-aged woman and an extremely quiet older woman I suspected was her mother. While I explored the museum, they sat together and listened to a Navajo-language broadcast on the radio.

Although the land for St. Michael was purchased by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1895, it was unused until October 1898, when three Franciscan friars arrived to establish a mission. They moved into what is now the museum and, realizing that their work would be hindered and not helped by an ignorance of the local language, quickly applied themselves to the compilation of an English-Navajo dictionary. They began simply, offering food and coffee to visitors in return for help naming nearby objects. When they had exhausted their proximate vocabulary, they pulled out a Montgomery Ward catalog in order to ask after a wider variety of words. Slowly but surely, they were able to create a small dictionary. This handwritten volume is kept in one of the museum's glass cases, and as I looked at it that afternoon I marveled that something so small and ordinary could once have represented a momentous shift in outside attitudes toward the Navajo language.

The dictionary was far from the friars' only contribution to their adopted community. Father Bernard Haile developed the first Navajo orthography, published a number of linguistic materials, and was considered to speak so well that “he might have been more Navajo than Anglo.” Father Marcellus Troester conducted the first census of the Navajo people. The photographs of Father Simeon Schwemberger provide an unparalleled look into the Navajo traditions of the early twentieth century. And Father Anselm Weber tasked himself with extensive surveys of Navajo territory, personally petitioning the U.S. government for the return of the tribe's traditional lands. His efforts helped lead to the return to the Navajo people of nearly 1.5 million acres of land.

In this way, the mission was over time able to secure the trust and assistance of its neighbors. Similarly, the St. Michael Indian School went a long way toward improving Navajo opinion of outside educators.