Latest Musings

Posted on

Loving Basketball with Reservations

When I was a novice teacher on the Navajo Nation way back in the day, I was concerned about a particular student who rarely showed up in my fifth grade classroom. Our school principal offered this encouragement without a hint of irony: “Don’t worry about him,” he said. “That kid’s a good basketball player. He won’t miss a game.” The kid in question was ten years old.

Basketball is beloved on the Navajo rez. When played in a large high school arena the game is a community magnet. In an expansive desert homeland where one’s closest neighbor could be miles away on unpaved and rutted roads, community gatherings are a challenge, especially in the winter. In the old days during the months that now define basketball season, relatives would come together to play the Shoe Game and tell the ancient Navajo creation stories, stories of ancestral emergence through past worlds into this, the “Glittering World” of today. The Shoe Game, a sort of shell game where a small ball is hidden inside one of many moccasins, is seeing a revival, but basketball is the thing that really pulls in a crowd from far and wide.

NY Times sportswriter views life on the Navajo rez from the vantage point of high school basketball

Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation, a new book by NY Times sportswriter Michael Powell (Blue Rider Press) (https://www.amazon.com/Canyon-Dreams-Basketball-Season-Navajo/ ) and the Netflix Original docuseries Basketball or Nothing developed by pro golfer Rickie Fowler both poignantly portray the trials and triumphs of the Chinle High School Wildcats, a Navajo Nation basketball team coached by Raul Mendoza. The team’s brand of basketball is rez ball. When played at its best, rez ball spectacularly coalesces skill, speed and mind meld into a force as mystical and uplifting as the Navajo landscape. With all these elements in sync, players of slight build can put away more muscular, towering challengers, especially under Mendoza’s direction.

Both Powell’s book and the Netflix series juxtapose the young Chinle players and their coach against the too familiar tropes of reservation despair. Alcohol and substance abuse, joblessness, broken families, transgenerational trauma form the backdrop of many players’ lives. The game gives them a chance to control their destiny for 32 minutes of play while living in a land that, though magnificent and awesome, threatens to be devoid of promise for many if not most of them.

Part Navajo pro golfer Rickie Fowler developed the popular Netflix series

Between Powell’s book and the Netflix series, Basketball or Nothing may be the more cynical of the two titles, but it’s not far off. Because what doors will open for the kids of Chinle, AZ (area population about 5000; poverty rate 50%) when high school basketball days are over? For the academically talented, good colleges await if the kids are helped to navigate the scholarship application process and their families don’t dissuade them from leaving the rez and their roots. One player featured by both Powell and Netflix gets a free ride to ASU, but not to play basketball (he’s only five feet six). He’s a good, solid student aiming to study electrical engineering, and he’s also good at track and field.

Michael Powell writes about one Harvard-bound kid, Keanu, an avid learner with superhuman drive. Keanu lives in a trailer with his grandmother and writes his essays on his cellphone due to a lack of internet connection. He opens all of his college admission responses on his laptop when on break from his cashier job at Burger King. Besides Harvard, Keanu was accepted at Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, Swarthmore and Case Western Reserve. Here’s the thing: he never played basketball, but he’s a devoted fan. Per the Netflix series, two players who landed actual basketball scholarships are headed to a place called Southwest Indian Assembly of God University, where the majors offered on campus are countable on one hand (Ministry is one of them).

Back to that ten-year-old student of mine who rarely showed up in class but wouldn’t miss a game. The summer before school started, his grandparents and his father all perished in a single car accident that involved their two vehicles in a head on collision.

For many years of Raul Mendoza’s long career of coaching high school basketball, he was also a guidance counselor. Coach Mendoza, a septuagenarian master almost Buddha like in wisdom and patience, told this to Michael Powell: “Do you know what I’m proudest of in this life? Not a single one of those teenagers I counseled committed suicide. They lived, every single one of them.”

The Navajo Times recently reported that Basketball or Nothing will be filming its second season. Let’s hope that the Chinle Wildcats and all young basketball players on the vast Navajo Nation will realize many dreams in their upcoming seasons on and off the court, on or off the rez, within or outside of the canyons where they dwell. Let’s hope their futures will be blessed with lots of good somethings beyond basketball.

Posted on

No Kicks on Route 66

Before heading out to the Southwest, my sister and I had buttoned up our itinerary and had marked it with highlighter on the AAA Indian Country Guide Map.

Here’s how one segment of our trip was supposed to go:

After exploring Mesa Verde on its opening day of the season, we’d planned to hang out in Cortez for a night and enjoy the company of artists Ed Singer and Sonja Horoshko. The next morning we were to head down to Shiprock for a visit with artist and poet Gloria Emerson. From there, we were to  head south to Gallup, New Mexico on the old Route 66.

Statue of Indian Chief lying face down in gravel next to a STOP sign
Statue toppled by a wind storm at a Gallup trading company. The Gallup Sun, the town’s alternative news source, credited the photo to “one of our readers.”

I had lived just outside of Gallup in the 1970s, and I had wanted to see how it had changed.

For one thing, I knew that since the long ago days when I taught at an Gallup/McKinley County elementary school,  an Arab community had grown in Gallup to the point of building a mosque. Arab trading in Gallup and nearby Zuni had been in its infancy back in the 1970s. It seemed worth it to drive down to Gallup just to see a mosque in a town that now wore with pride a new moniker of “The Most Patriotic City in America.” This new banner must be an uplift for a town burdened for years by quite another nickname: “Drunk City.”

Islamic Center in Gallup, New Mexico
The Gallup Islamic Center. Uncredited photo.

Gallup, New Mexico has a population of about 20,000. It has almost 40 liquor licenses.

These days, Gallup also has just under 50 payday loan establishments. Back in the day when I lived in Gallup, the traders were the main moneylenders, doling out cash for pawn. Often, the lender and the borrower knew each other by name, and in some cases inquired about each other’s families. Could that be true in an establishment named “Cash Cow” or “Check ‘n Go” or “Fast Bucks”? I had read that some Navajos were paying over 1000% interest to payday lenders in Gallup, borrowing from one to pay another.

Bleak times, but I was nostalgic nonetheless. Despite envisioning how things had deteriorated for so many in Gallup since the 1970s, I had expected that some good memories would be jolted awake by seeing the place again. I am in my sixties, a time of reaching back to the glory days of youth. Besides, I really wanted to see that mosque.

The school where I had taught right out of college in the ’70s served a small Navajo village east of town. The school principal’s principal interest was selling Navajo jewelry out of his briefcase when attending school administrator conferences. He let all of us teachers teach anyway we wanted, as long as his elementary school team won basketball games. My classroom was filled with student art, weaving, and overall happy times.

Some of my students, many in traditional Navajo dress, mid-1970s
Some of my students from back in the day. Where are they now?

The Outlaw Trading Post in Church Rock, New Mexico, mid-1970s
Where I used to get my mail

Soon after I left, the community where I’d lived and taught suffered what remains the worst nuclear disaster on US territory. (See  The Church Rock Uranium Mine Disaster of 1979.) The nuclear situation apparently resolved enough for the tribe to open a casino near the disaster site in 2008.

But having done a bit of research before our trip, I felt that I had to see that Gallup actually had a Starbucks these days, and maybe even a decent restaurant. To the strains of a virtuoso female fiddler from Japan, I’d learned to do the two-step at a country western club in Gallup back in the day. Was the club still there under a different name? Was the railroad station, now the cultural center, as attractive as it seemed in the pictures?

Per our trip itinerary, I was going to find all these things out after leaving the town of Shiprock.

But then we actually arrived in Shiprock, where we met up with Gloria Emerson in the parking lot of the medical center. From there we drove around the corner for a bite of lunch before heading out to Gloria’s property east of town. It was time enough to see that the times had not been kind to this grey Navajo town, which looked pummeled by a ruthless fighter, its bones cracked from the impact.

Shiprock restaurant in corrugated metal building behind a chipped concrete wall
The restaurant where we had lunch in Shiprock. Uncredited photo.

Shiprock ranks third in the United States in the percentage of Native Americans living below the poverty line. The Navajo Housing Authority had built a set of over 90 homes there that had to be torn down due to poor construction, high wind damage, and vandalism. There’s a casino nearby that might be helping the local economy, though it’s hard to tell.

My sister, niece and I were all too anxious to follow Gloria out of town to her desert oasis.

My niece and artist-poet Gloria Emerson outside her adobe house
Gloria with my niece in an oasis outside of Shiprock

“Why do you want to go to Gallup?” Gloria asked when the topic came up during conversation. “I haven’t been there in a long time.”

I told Gloria about wanting to see the mosque.

“I don’t know about that,” she said. I showed her a picture of it on line. She nodded. “Looks interesting. You know, there’s a community of nuns who are trying to do some good work in the north side of town.” I remembered the north side of Gallup. That’s where the bars were that we teachers were warned about.

We told Gloria that we were heading from Gallup to Chinle, to Canyon de Chelly.

“There’s a beautiful road down through the Red Valley,” Gloria said. “Route 12. You should take it. It’s so, so beautiful.”

Gloria is 80 years old. She knows every corner of Navajoland.

When we were heading away from Gloria’s, my sister asked the question: “How important is it for you to go to Gallup?”

I know what she wanted me to answer, and I looked at my niece who had been much saddened by Shiprock.

I thought a few seconds. What would I actually learn that I didn’t already know? What were the chances that the town would ignite a spark of joy  over some memory from days long past? I was with my niece, who is the age I was when I lived in an around Navajoland. I was seeing things through her eyes. And all I could envision  her eyes being filled with in Gallup were tears.

“Let’s take Route 12,” I said. “It’s just out of town, on the right.”

The road through the Red Valley was one of the most spectacular any of us had ever seen. Thank you, Gloria. Thank you, wise woman.

I can look at pictures of payday loan storefronts to my heart’s content on Google, should I ever get nostalgic for the place where I began my adult life.

An NBC News photo of several payday loan signs along a Gallup, NM thoroughfare
Payday loan establishments in Gallup. Photo courtesy of NBC News.

Posted on

Denny’s is the Best Restaurant in Town

Rock formation in Canyon de Chelly kissing the midday sun
Canyon de Chelly: A Light Shines on the Navajo Past and Present

When we saw “Salisbury Steak” listed on the cafeteria “Specials” board at the Thunderbird Lodge near Canyon de Chelly, my sister logged into Trip Advisor for restaurant recommendations.

This wasn’t my first time in Chinle, so I was rather amused at the oxymoronic concept that Chinle appeared in the headline of  anyone’s “Best Restaurants” list. The last time I was in this small town in Navajoland, the restaurant of choice for the locals was the A&W.

Based on Trip Advisor ranking, my sister, niece and I went to The Junction, and we ate what we ordered until our hunger subsided. We’d had a full breakfast in Cortez, been on the road since morning, and it was now after 7 PM. There isn’t much to say about the restaurant Trip Advisor designated as No. 1 in Chinle except for one remarkable thing. Earlier in the day, a friend had read us a poem about the disappearance of black hairnets, but it was clear at The Junction that black hairnets hadn’t disappeared at all from Navajoland. Rather, they had swarmed onto the heads of the restaurant’s busy servers like delegates at a national hairnet convention.

In the morning, Dave Wilson, our Navajo guide into Canyon de Chelly, pointed out the new Denny’s sign on the way to the park. Denny’s  beamed out its shiny red and yellow welcome high above the essential emptiness that is Chinle.

“It opened last year,” Dave Wilson said. Though his tone betrayed no excitement, the fact that he mentioned it at all gave us a clue that perhaps we should go there before leaving town.

Exterior photo of Denny's in Chinle, Navajoland
Denny’s in Chinle, Navajoland

“You know, the good Mexican place closed down,” Dave said, and I wondered if the Mexican place he was talking about was where I had a Navajo taco back in 1980.

Dave Wilson and his family have a long history in Chinle and in the Canyon. They were the cultural consultants on the video shown at the Canyon de Chelly Visitor Center. Dave still nurtures fruit trees on the canyon floor—“peaches, pears, apples . . .couldn’t do grapefruit or oranges, though. Not enough year round heat.” He pointed out his house on a small rise in town.

Dave’s father lived to the ripe old age of 102. Dave sighed after he told us this, betraying that reaching a milestone like that didn’t happen much anymore. “We didn’t know about drugs back then. Drugs and alcohol . . . that’s what the kids know.” In the canyon, Dave explained that the tribe had to take down the wooden ladders that tourists used to climb to the ruins in the rocks. “We got to protect,” he said. “There’s vandalism. We got to protect the homes of the ancients.”

My niece asked Dave about Kit Carson and the atrocities he led against the Navajo in the canyon in the 1860s. “He was a friend to a lot of tribes,” Dave said. “Cheyenne, Arapaho. He was a scout. Then the US government paid him a lot of money to round us up. He starved us. He blocked us off in the winter with boulders.”

I tried to wrap my head around the fact that Canyon de Chelly, one of the most spectacular and spiritual places on earth, had been the Navajos’ Warsaw Ghetto.

“He retired comfortably up in Taos, you know,” Dave continued about old Kit. “He settled down, had fun, watched his videos.”

Petroglyphs on a sunlit rock in Canyon de Chelly
The rocks with tell their tales long after we’re gone

The Navajo signed a treaty and made it back to their borders marked by the four sacred mountains in 1868.

And now there’s a Denny’s as bright as day in Chinle. We had lunch there. Its hostess was cheerful and cheering. “I need to tell you it may take 30 minutes for your food to come out, because we’re so busy,” she said. We assured her that was fine.

The patrons were mostly Navajo. A health care worker sat at the table across from us. She wore a crisp, colorful uniform designed to brighten a patient’s mood. She was wearing a red ribbon HIV awareness pin. The health center in Chinle is a big employer. “160 beds,” Dave told us.

Our Denny’s server was energetic and eager to please. I had a club sandwich, and, compared to my hamburger at The Junction, my Denny’s sandwich was a piece of heaven. Make note: Denny’s now sits at No. 4 on the Trip Advisor’s “Chinle’s Best” list.

Red Beautyway Tours jeep and my niece in Canyon de Chelly
My niece ponders the dramatic history of the canyon

Posted on

Gloria, Shiprock Spirit Woman

The Shiprock--Tsé Bit’a’í--literally, the Rock that has Wings
The Shiprock. In Navajo, Tsé Bit’a’í–literally, the Rock that has Wings.

Gloria Emerson, Navajo artist, poet, educator, entrepreneur, hired me in the late 1970s to work on Navajo school curricula for reasons that remain out of grasp. When I visited with her last week for the first time in over 30 years near Shiprock in the Navajo Nation, neither of us could remember what brought us together all those eons ago. Since our long gone days as boss and employee, we have traveled many roads. We each published a book. Mine is now passé; Gloria’s is a timeless and bountiful collection of color, wit and humility.

Gloria’s book “At the Hems of the Lowest Clouds” is filled with  poetry and paintings she created after the age of 50, when she decided to go to art school. She took this path after leaving the curriculum gig to serve as director of a school for unwed teen mothers, and then as head of a community service organization in Navajoland.  Gloria says that at 50, she was viewed by the much younger student body at art school with suspicion. “They never saw me with my protest signs,” she said.

Gloria Emerson's painting of horses loping through the seasons
Gloria’s pastel, “Four Seasons.”

Gloria is around 80 now. She likes to joke. Her humor is dry, like the land she lives in. If you’re not sure she’s joking, the sparkle in her eye gives her away. She lives alone, some eight miles from Shiprock, in a home as open and welcoming as the spirit of the woman who lives there. She recently sold eight paintings at a show in Farmington. She’s sticking with poetry now, saying that painting has gotten harder. Her house is alive with the works of her past, paintings and ceramics, and with objects acquired by a sharp and whimsical eye.

Gloria once had a café cum gallery off New Mexico Rte. 491 that she’d opened after leaving Santa Fe. Her cafe had boasted the only espresso for miles, and she’d made a go of it by putting up a sign saying “Espresso.” The road through her community is flat, and the sign could be seen from miles away. “I got lots of tourist business,” said Gloria. But the cafe was robbed too many times and so she shut the doors.

It is grey with foreboding, the landscape where Gloria lives. The waste water spill from the Gold King Mine in 2015 hit her neighbors hard. Shiprock, the closest town, has an undercurrent of rage at a hopelessness that rears up to strike its own.

Gloria lost her younger brother to cancer last year. Her brother helped shape the family home where Gloria now dwells and writes and entertains. Folks come, give impromptu barbecues. During our visit, my niece gave her impromptu tech help on her new computer, with its all new operating system.

My sister fell in love with one of her paintings, and Gloria sold it to her, naming a price that underestimated its value. It’s hanging like a ray of sunshine at my niece’s in Colorado now.

Outdoor display of Gloria Emerson's wood and stone collectibles
Touches of a desert poet

Gloria’s home had a recent break in, but she can still joke in the face of it all. She writes her poetry, reads it to her audience with a playful wink. She read us this poem on our visit:

Blackbirds in Shiprock

Grace put her black hairnet on her dresser before she left.

No one wears black hairnets anymore.

The old women who used to wear them

Seem to have all left Shiprock.

But the black hairnets return every winter,

Stretched out, twirling in the sky…

Forming cylinders, diving, bouncing onto brown farmlands,

And just as suddenly

Bouncing back into the cold blue sky,

Diving, playing

Perhaps remembering the old women who wore them

When the women were young and joyful

Laughing and dancing even in the coldest winters in Shiprock.

Gloria herself doesn’t wear a hairnet. Her gray hair falls gently down her neck, her long, still agile fingers fold gracefully in her lap as she tells her stories.

The world should listen.

Gloria Emerson sitting at her table
Gloria at Home

Posted on

A Senior Citizen Returns to Navajoland

The author in her youth, sitting in the shade in Canyon de Chelly, Navajoland
Me, age 20 something, resting in the shade in Canyon de Chelly, Navajoland, 1980

After graduating from Vassar College in 1975 with a degree in Sociology, I moved to a village on the Navajo Nation outside of Gallup, New Mexico to teach at an elementary school. After leaving the village, I moved around New Mexico and Arizona, always remaining within day-trip distance from Navajoland and its sacred spaces, for several years more.

During my itinerant time in the Southwest, I was an editor at a regional press, a contributor to a curriculum project led by Gloria Emerson for Navajo Nation elementary schools, and an employee of a marginally dubious publishing brainchild of Forrest Fenn (of recent “Fenn Treasure” fame).

I reluctantly but abruptly left the region in 1982 to head back East. But Navajoland, and the Navajo people who’ve called it home for over 1000 years, have remained my muses to this day. I’ve written about the region (published a “Santa Fe” novel back in the day), but in my elder years, I find myself focussing on Navajoland and its people, who first inspired me to take pen to paper.

Nearing the age of 65 in the spring of 2018,  I travelled to Navajoland to reconnect with old Navajo friends and old feelings about what I have come to understand is as this Jewish American girl’s Jerusalem. It is in this parched yet glorious part of the United States where I am touched by an eternal landscape that breathes its ancient power, where I am touched by the Navajo people who  continue to live up to its challenge and strive to reflect its holiness.

Petroglyphs on a sunlit rock in Canyon de Chelly, Navajoland
The rocks tell their stories

A confession:  I am a privileged visitor who can bask in the sacred spaces of Navajoland,  physically and psychically, at my pleasure.  But Diné, the Navajo people, struggle to maintain balance, harmony, and beauty, the Navajo ideal of sa’ah naaghai bik’eh hozho (long life happiness) in their parched homeland.

The Navajo are plagued with diseases relatively new to them, like cancer and diabetes, from their uranium mining past and the drastic lifestyle changes of today. There is little for their livestock to eat, little opportunity to see beyond a day to day struggle. 

I write now in prayer and love and hope that the beautiful and indeed holy Navajo people can dwell in sa’ah naaghai bik’eh hozho far into the future.

The author on horseback today, in Monument Valley, Navajoland
In Monument Valley, 2018, reconnecting . . .

Posted on

Cortez, CO: A Town Blossoms with No Trees on Main Street

Main Street in Cortez, CO
Cortez, CO, where food and company make up for missing trees

We were sitting on worn leather benches at Gustavos, the best Mexican restaurant in Cortez, Colorado. Sonja Horoshko–artist, activist and journalist–was explaining why the Cortez city council was cutting down the trees along the sidewalks of the town’s two blocks of business district on Main Street.

“One tree caused stress on a building as the roots grew under the sidewalk, so the city cuts down all the trees on the block. But there has to be another solution besides cutting down the trees, right?” she said, nearly pleading, over dinner.

Later, while Sonja and my friend and Sonja’s partner, Ed Singer–artist and activist and onetime Navajo political figure–feasted with us on Gustavo’s great dishes, the conversation turned to the topic of a wind farm that had once been in development in Gray Mountain near Cameron on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona.

About ten years ago, when Ed was president of the Cameron Chapter (governing body of his home community), he had gone into head-to-head battle with Joseph Kennedy II. A wind farm project approved by the community that had elected Ed Singer to lead them was well on its way to fruition. But then young Joe Kennedy, armed with a big check from which Ed’s people in Cameron would gain a pittance, landed in Window Rock (the Navajo Nation capital) to work a separate deal with the Navajo central government.

I’d read the articles that covered the ensuing scandal, which was ugly, and which revealed Kennedy as something of a spoiled brat. Kennedy, who’d played up to Joe Shirley (President of the Navajo Nation at the time),  flew to Cameron in his private plane. He fed the Cameron community helpings of stew and fry bread. Then, in the course of trying to convince the gathered audience that his Citizen’s Energy Corporation was better than the company they themselves had chosen to build their wind farm, Kennedy degenerated into chastising his listeners for questioning his good will.

That was back in 2008. The wind farm project was stymied by the dispute. As of now, there is still no wind farm in Gray Mountain.

Ed Singer moved to Cortez, where he now lives with Sonja and paints.

Bare and bleak on the surface, Cortez, gateway to Mesa Verde, hosts artists like Ed and Sonja, who gather in restaurants that serve great food suggesting that something delicious is happening behind closed doors of a town that can be missed in the blink of an eye. One restaurant, Once Upon a Sandwich, does double duty as Ed Singer’s gallery. The owner opened for us early so we could have a showing before we hit the road.

The works that sparkle from the restaurant walls are filled with humor, vibrancy and metaphor. Ed’s latest work, not yet shown, has turned a bit angrier in step with the mood in the country overall.

Painting of Navajo cowboy by Navajo artist Ed Singer
“French Postcard” by Ed Singer at Once Upon a Sandwich in Cortez, CO

Ed and Sonja hosted us for Easter dinner, which was delightfully informal, with folks coming and going, a small, cheerful home filled to the brim with animated conversation and laughter. An archaeologist from Zuni Pueblo, a contractor and overall right hand to one and all from Princeton, New Jersey, Sonja and Ed, and all of us, had many tales to tell.

Main Street in Cortez may be losing its trees, but, weeks away from the start of tourist season, the pulse at its core is alive and well.

The author and Navajo artist Ed Singer
Saying goodbye to Ed Singer and Cortez