Gloria, Shiprock Spirit Woman

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 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.

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.