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I read this article in the NY Times today: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/us/for-some-the-path-to-navajo-values-weaves-through-the-mormon-church.html?hpw&_r=0 ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/us/for-some-the-path-to-navajo-values-weaves-through-the-mormon-church.html?hpw&_r=0 I grew up in N Utah, and we had two different Navajo children come and stay with us during my childhood – one boy who was a bit older than me, and one girl who was younger. I’m not going to sugar-coat it – it was hard sometimes. They boy had a hard time fitting in to the school, but fit into our family fine. The girl was the opposite – she loved school, but had a hard time with my parents and sister. Despite having participated in the Navajo school project, I’m not sure if it was a good thing or not – the kids got a better education than they would have, but had to spend significant time away from home. Very hard for kids, I think.
Essentially based on a misguided and outdated idea, that to improve themselves they should lose their language and culture. Wasn’t there a Navajo GA who had to resign?
Jwald is Navajo…grew up on the reservation in the 70s and 80s. Mom was convert. Jwald was the valedictorian of her English speaking school, could speak Japanese, Spanish, and was a French translator at Disneyland.
She can’t speak a word of Navajo. Her “Mormonism” parents and culture completely discouraged her generation from participating in the Navajo culture.
Good thing? Bad thing? The right thing to do?
???
I know that she has some regrets, as well as some gratitudes…..
I’m going to think about this before I respond further.
George, a long time stayldser is Navajo. Be interesting to see if he pops in on this thread.
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From what I hear, Navajo is an extremely complex language, and, oddly enough, better suited to express quantum physics and certain temporal and abstract positions than English. Unfortunately this makes it hard to learn. Its loss is a tragedy. As an old Irish saying goes a country without a language is a country without a soul.
Tacitus, the Roman historian also said “the language of the conqueror in the mouth of the conquered is the mark of a slave”… kind of, but ideally Navajo should be fluent in their own tongue AND English, Spanish etc. They are a conquered nation, but they can get beyond that.
Thirdly, the Navajo have a connection to their land, know the stories about places, what their old names are etc… white folk are recent interlopers, it means less to them. There is less of a sense of place. Destroying Navajo language destroys that connection to land that goes beyond New Age cliche.
Another situation that was not simple. Lots of good things – lots of bad things – lots of things in between the extremes. I agree the ideal would have been to remain fluent in both languages and retain cultural heritage, but that is an incredibly hard ideal to attain.
I would like to hear from George and jwald.
As an outsider, all I say here is from an outsider’s perspective and viewpoint… I can speak personally from the viewpoint of my own minority language and culture though.
The flipside I suppose is that there are economic and social problems on many reservations – partly as a result of colonial history – and it may have been good for the kids to see the alternatives. Some of the school facilities may have been much better. I don’t think the white folk who took them in were bad folk, but they may have held misguided views.
But I can’t agree with the destruction of Navajo language and culture. I am a speaker of a minority language myself, and am well aware of how it ended up as one. People were thrashed for speaking it in school, and
the government discriminated against it. Prejudice against our culture is still rife and to be heard in mainstream media and from politicians. We are also subject to romanticisation and appropriation by New Agers. In these respects, I can empathise with Navajo, although as a white, I cannot appreciate fully anti-Indian racism.
Assimilation is not improvement. Integration is.
Years ago I remember watching a Pascua Yaqui indians perform an easter celebration….a mix of native and Catholic customs, beliefs. Interesting and sort of the same mix of two cultures and religions. I guess they made it “work” for them when the Spanish came….and reminds me of the other thread about Halloween in our own predominantly Judeo-Christian. Not entirely related, but I had a Navajo friend in college. I remember something came up about the first day of school when we were kids, to which I remarked, “Yeah, my mom made me ride the bus for the first day of kindergarten–she didn’t even accompany me to school.” He replied, “I remember my first day. I was taken from my crying mother off the reservation to a boarding school a hundred miles away.”
Sort of made me put my own experience (even my entire experience as a child) in a different perspective.
I have been employed by 4 different Native American tribes over the last decade. In imagining what my life might be like as a member of one of these tribes, I imagine a tension between “striking out on my own” for the traditional American model of success vs. staying rooted in family and community tradition.
I imagine that if I lived on the reservation, I might never escape the legacy of my family name, my father and father’s father, and all the bad choices I might have made in my youth. On the other hand, to choose to live off the reservation places a cetain distance between myself and that heritage – for better or for worse.
Perhaps the best case scenario would involve leaving the reservation to get an education/make a name for myself and then returning with a proven track record of leadership and responsibility under my belt. No matter how you slice it, it would be a tough balancing act.
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