The Land is Full of Stories: Navajo Histories in the Work of Luci Tapahonso

Abstract

Notes

¹“This Is How They Were Placed for Us” is in Blue Horses Rush In (39–42); in subsequent references this title will be shortened to Blue Horses. “In 1864” is in Sáanii Dahaatal: The Women Are Singing (7–10); in subsequent references this title will be shortened to Sáanii Dahaatal.

²In her preface to Blue Horses, Tapahonso explicitly indicates that the stories and poems are not necessarily autobiographical (xiii–xiv).

³From the beginning, Tapahonso's writing has been grounded in the knowledge that “I cannot divide myself or separate myself from . . . my home, my land, my people” (One More Shiprock Night 94), and in a review of her first poetry collection, Geary Hobson observed that her work frequently “deal[s] with coming back home . . . or . . . thinking about going home . . . [or] “not being able to go home” (64). What Tapahonso's more recent books signally reveal, in this regard, is the power both to return home, and to maintain the connection with home, wherever one might be.

⁴I have identified the mountains as Tapahonso does in “This Is How They Were Placed for Us.” These seem to be the generally accepted designations today, though there have evidently been some differences in the past. See Beck et al. 80; Jett 31; Link, Introduction (no page number); Morris 36, 40, 97; Reichard 20; Zolbrod 86; and Wyman 16–20.

⁵See Morris 12–13 and Zolbrod 87. The names of the associated deities may vary, and some accounts include more than two of these holy figures for each mountain. See also Zolbrod 86–90; Beck et al. 79–81; and Carmean 59–65. Navajo creation stories recount the origins of other similarly embellished sacred geographical formations; two of these, Huerfano Mountain (Dzil ná’ oodilii) and Gobernador Knob (Ch’ óol’íí), both in northwestern New Mexico, figure in Tapahonso's “This Is How They Were Placed for Us,” along with the four directional mountains.

⁶I use “respond” and “recall” to describe the poem's relation to the creation stories, in keeping both with Tapahonso's text itself, and with her explicit statement in response to an interviewer's question about “bring[ing] traditional stories into written text”: “I don't do that. I can write about . . . [a] ceremony . . . but it's just surface; I won't go beyond that. . . . I would never take a creation story and rewrite it or re-tell it; I don't think that's my place to do that . . . a lot of things are alluded to, but that's the extent of it” (Penner 9). See also Moore, especially 638–40. In keeping with Tapahonso's sense of the propriety of allusion, as opposed to direct retelling, it might be possible to think of “This Is How They Were Placed for Us” as an allusion to Changing Woman's story of the creation of the Navajo world, as reported by two children in the Blessingway (Wyman 237, 462–64).

⁷As Allen describes such scenes, they typically draw attention to “the grandparent-grandchild bond,” a bond that Tapahonso frequently emphasizes, to varying effects. “In 1864,” as well, can be described as enacting a “scene of indigenous instruction.”

⁸Clearly, we who are outside the circle of Navajo speakers and readers are reminded that all is not available to us; I believe that even those who can read or speak the language must be reminded, in this context of Navajo and English, that perfect, complete translation is rarely, if ever, possible. When the matter at hand concerns a people's spiritual knowledge, that recognition is important for all of us.

My response to Tapahonso's use of Navajo differs from that of Susan Brill, who (in an essay that does not treat “This Is How They Were Placed for Us”) considers “the open use of the Navajo language . . . a means of sharing the Navajo worlds of the writers with their readers”; thus, “when Luci Tapahonso shifts to the Navajo language . . . she does so as a means of inviting her listener-readers . . . into the worlds of her stories and poems” (138), and “to enable . . . as well, our very real transformations as participants in those written tellings” (150). I agree that orally influenced texts like Tapahonso's and those of many other Native writers are moved by commitments to transformation, in part by engaging listener-readers as participants. To some extent I agree that “even if the Navajo is neither translated nor otherwise glossed and if the reader does not know Navajo,” we may be invited “into the Navajo worlds of the poems and stories through reading/hearing the sorts of linguistic shifts that one would normally hear among many Navajo people today” (142). However, especially in a poem like “This Is How They Were Placed for Us,” where the primary (even if not majority) audience seems to be other Navajos, I believe that Tapahonso's use of the language functions in part to remind us non-Navajos that there are limits to our access and our welcome. “In 1864,” which I believe is also addressed in the first instance to other Navajos but which uses the Navajo language in a way to be overtly accessible to non-Navajos, might be read as illuminating the importance of such limits.

⁹For Norla Chee (“Spirit Mountains”), Nia Francisco (“Kayenta Times Yet Dreaming On”), and Laura Tohe (“In Dinétah”), too, Navajos’ relationship to the mountains is essential to continuance.

¹⁰Witherspoon 154; also see Witherspoon 23–25 and 151–52.

¹¹For the mountains’ associations with Changing Woman, see also O'Bryan 71–74; Wyman 404; Kelley and Francis 24, 166. See also Wyman 32–33, 437–52, and 469; Morris 14–15; Fishler 85–94; Reichard 406–14 and 494–97. For the centrality of Blessingway in Navajo life, see Wyman's Introduction, especially 3–9, and 465–66. For the purposes of this article, it is particularly helpful to know that the “rite is concerned with peace, harmony, and good things” (4), that its “practice . . . embraces birth and adolescence [and] the home or hogan,” and that its name, “hózhóójí,” includes the word “hózhó” (7).

¹² A Breeze Swept Through 3. In subsequent references, this title will be shortened to A Breeze.

¹³For example, Tohe's and Belin's books of poetry are significantly infused with the experiences of, respectively, boarding school and relocation, while Morris's fiction and nonfiction prose recounts and responds to his sojourns away from Dinétah. Tapahonso's concern with the politics of Indian-white history is evident as well in interviews. Asked about the meaning of the “commemoration date 1992,” she responds, “I think that it allows us to realize that we have survived a lot. Ever since Europeans came to our continent, there have been various kinds of programs and various kinds of policies that were all designed to make sure that we would not exist any more. Everything that has happened has been with that in mind. . . . It's amazing that we're all here” (Binder and Breinig 120). Elsewhere she observes that “it's real difficult for general America to finally acknowledge the existence of Indian people. Ideally, according to history books, we've all been banished or become part of the American ‘melting pot,’ which is not the case” (Dunaway and Spurgeon 213).

¹⁴Kelley and Francis 18.

15On the events leading up to the Long Walk, the Walk itself, and the aftermath, see also Trafzer, Roessel, and Oral History Stories of the Long Walk Hwéeldi Baa Hané.

16See also Olson and Wilson 43, and Oral History Stories 8.

17Trafzer 242. Trafzer cites Martin Link's Introduction to Treaty Between the United States of America and the Navajo Tribe of Indians with a Record of Discussions That Led to Its Signing (Las Vegas, Nevada, 1968), 1–2.

18Some see the contemporaneity of the history in terms of the ongoing Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute. See Roussel 153.

19See, for example, Roussel, Foreword xii, and 103 (Curly Tso).

20See note 13.

21Trafzer discusses “one of the most common themes running through the Navajo oral tradition: if Navajos became too tired or too sick to travel, they were either left behind or killed.” He continues, observing that “[n]o American officer who guided the Navajos on the Long Walk recorded the cold-blooded killing of a single Indian, but almost every historical record made by the people who took the Long Walk tells of such murders. It is difficult to assess the discrepancies: if an officer or a soldier killed an Indian . . . [unable] to keep up, there would probably be no record of such an atrocity.” Trafzer concludes, “There is little doubt that the Navajo stories have a basis in fact” (193). As examples of the oral histories’ reports of such atrocities, see Howard W. Gorman (30) and Curly Tso (103–104), both in Roussel.

22See Tapahonso, “Singing in Navajo” 39: “it is by this knowledge [of stories and songs] that an individual is directly linked to the history of the entire group.” Such a link is essential to individual and communal survival, for Navajos and other Natives.

23In his discussion of Ella Cara Deloria's novel, Waterlily, Allen observes that the “intimate relationship of ‘blood’ [as identity] and ‘memory’ figures an ongoing spiritual relationship . . . between indigenous ancestors and contemporary American Indians” (90). This observation is particularly suggestive regarding “In 1864,” both in terms of the poem's multiple voices, and in view of its references to the frame speaker's daughters.

24See Roussel 32 and Oral History Stories 29 and 63, for examples.

25Compare Caskey Russell on the dual functions of celebration and warning in Tlingit writer Nora Marks Dauenhauer's “How to Make Good Baked Salmon” (37).

26As Tapahonso says in “Just Past Shiprock,” “This land that may seem arid and forlorn to the newcomer is full of stories which hold the spirits of the people, those who live here today and those who lived centuries and other worlds ago” (Sáanii Dahataal 6).

27See Beck et al. 76 and 221; Zolbrod 177–83; Wyman 145 and 473; O'Bryan 71–77; and Fishler. For the continuing presence of Changing Woman/White Shell Woman see Morris 15 and Zolbrod 293.

28See also Morris 14–15 and Wyman 437–45 and 468–69.

29This recognition allies Tapahonso as well with other Native writers such as Simon J. Ortiz, who has insisted upon the ability of Indian peoples to appropriate the colonizers’ languages and use them creatively “on their own terms” (10), and Craig Womack, who argues that “English ceased to be the language of the colonizer the minute it landed in the New World” (49–50).

30Thus, as Howard W. Gorman describes his ancestors’ flight from the soldiers he tells us that they heard of Carson and his troops “over near Nazlini, at a place called T'iisnidiitsooí (Yellow Cotton Slope), up near the ridge near the white rocks where my ancestors lived. . . . I don't know which month it was; it could have been January. The Navajos headed north toward Chiihligai (Red Clay). Canyon de Chelly was their only hope of survival. . . . They reached a place called Tsé Náá’deezbáál (Blanket Wall Cave) in the canyon, where, below the cliff dwelling, they built a fire to warm themselves” (Roessel (25)).

Oral History Stories of The Long Walk Hwéeldi Baa Hané by The Diné of the Eastern Region of the Navajo Reservation. Crown Point, New Mexico, 1990.