In the Sun's House Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  ONE - THIS IS BORREGO

  TWO - SCHOOL DAYS

  THREE - THE ROAD TO CROWNPOINT

  FOUR - WALKING

  FIVE - THE TRADING POST

  SIX - THE WOLVES OF THE MOUNTAINS

  SEVEN - CARDINAL RULES

  EIGHT - THE HOGAN

  NINE - THE EASTERN NAVAJO AGENCY SPELLING BEE

  TEN - THE LAST BEST WALK

  ELEVEN - ROMEO AND JULIET

  TWELVE - GOODBYE, BORREGO

  REX LEE JIM

  Select Bibliography

  Copyright Page

  This book is for my family

  especially for my father and mother

  for Rebecca, Wally, Tyler, and Troy

  for Cari, Chadd, Drew, and Leah

  for David, and for Maxine

  Acknowledgments

  The names of most of the people who appear in this book have been changed to protect them from further scrutiny or criticism, hopefully not from praise.

  The first chapter of this book, “This Is Borrego,” was first published in a slightly different form in the inaugural issue of Unbound Press, 2006.

  I wish to express my deepest gratitude to the following people who gave generously of their time in reading early drafts of this manuscript and offered exceptional advice and suggestions toward revision: Margo Aragon, Spike Bighorn, Sven Birkerts, Matthew Bokovoy, Tracy Ane Brooks, Steve Cassells, Scott Dewing, Jerry Gidner, Donna Glode, Debra Gwartney, Brett A. Houk, Phillip Lopate, Barry Lopez, Bob Shacochis, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Susan Tomlinson, and Jeff Williams. To Mary Juzwik, whom I depended on so ardently during my time at Borrego. To Phil Sittnick, and especially to Lauren Sittnick, who made numerous essential suggestions, corrections, and additions.

  I am grateful to Barbara Ras, my editor at Trinity University Press, for believing in me and in this book. And to Sarah Nawrocki, also at Trinity, whom I worked with on a final, deep revision.

  I owe the greatest debt to the people of Borrego Pass, New Mexico, whose stories commingle here with mine.

  Preface

  When I sat down to begin work on In the Sun’s House, I did so with an impassioned host of feelings that aligned in complement as often as they came into conflict. I felt a deep desire to again walk the dry, desert country around Borrego, where I had wandered day after day, up and down the arroyos and through the tall pines, scrambling over rocky ledges and up through cracks in the mesa top, roaming with my dog, Kuma, under the open New Mexico sky. I wanted to engage again with the students there who so challenged me, to hear their playful joking and innocent questions, their sometimes cruel antics. I wanted to be immersed again in a foreign land, in a culture I did not wholly understand, in a mystery. I wanted to see coyote slipping out of my sight, the brush of his tail disappearing in the young pines. Though these were lonely times, they were vivid too, and clear and pure in a way that only comes in your youth, and perhaps later in fleeting catches when you wake to a new sun after restful sleep, or the scent of baking bread from the oven allows you to believe in eternity, or you crystallize your love for someone into an embrace, a look in the eyes, a word.

  When I sat down to write, I felt an urgency to bring alive the stories of the people I had lived and worked with at Borrego, to honor them by bringing to light the way their struggles and triumphs inform us all about friendship and community, about self-definition and individuation, about beauty, about endurance. I felt that my year at Borrego had transformed me, and to understand how, I needed to write about it. The story of that year had taken up a place at the edge of my imagination and would not be dislodged. To move beyond it as a writer and as a person, I had to move through it. So I began to tell the stories I knew best.

  I don’t presume to be an expert in Navajo or American Indian culture, history, mythology, or cosmology, and I claim no American Indian heritage. As far as I know I’m a white boy from Oregon, a concoction of Danish, English, and German peoples, maybe other heritages as well. I admire, but do not idealize, American Indian spirituality, and several years after I lived at Borrego I participated in regular sweat lodge ceremonies with my neighbor in Northern California, Charlie Duncan, a man of Cherokee and Scots descent. You don’t have to be an Indian to appreciate a good sweat lodge run by someone properly trained in that tradition. I hardly believe in miracles or life events that are “meant to be”; in general, I’m a skeptic. I enjoyed a rural and wild boyhood, mostly in Oregon, and if I have a god at all, it’s a god of nature, a god of the earth.

  So I began to write the stories down. As I did so, I was aware that I was writing about a younger person, a younger me, who had grown and changed over the decade from that time to this. I was writing about me, but I was also writing about someone else. Surely you know what I mean. I didn’t want to write about how I might have done things differently, about my year at Borrego as a series of errors I might have corrected, to fabricate a regret I didn’t feel. I can’t imagine how I could have done things differently. I was the person I was in that time and place. Besides, holding on to a world that might have been is the best way I know to live inside an illusion. No one lives very well for very long in an illusion, and after a while regret becomes a bore for you and everyone around you, especially the people you love best.

  It is true, however, that as a teacher I have learned a great deal since then. I’ve worked in two private high schools and a community college in Wyoming, and I’m now an assistant professor at a major research university in Texas. I’ve come to believe, and I have testimony from former students, that education, that the classroom combined with life experience, can and does change people’s lives for the better. Though I don’t regard teaching as easier, except that it is more familiar, I know that if I were to take a position at Borrego Pass School now, it would be a very different kind of year.

  As I was writing, one story led to another, and the book began to take shape. I wrote the stories that persisted most ardently in my memory first, helped along by the notes I kept in my journal, by talking with some of the people I shared that year with, by files I retained from the classroom, by school work my students had given me, by maps, and by books I read then and later. Many of the stories centered on struggle and violence and sorrow, and some on joy and light. I don’t see them as reports of gossip or tales of how bad things were. I put them down, page after page, as I experienced them, working hard to honor the events of that time and the people and the place by getting it right.

  At some point I began to ask how I might regard the book if I were one of its subjects—well, indeed I am, but I am so voluntarily. I began to ask, How would I respond to these stories if I was from Borrego Pass, a parent of one of these children, say, or one of the students in my classes? How would I respond if I were a Navajo from another part of the reservation, or another part of the country? How would I respond if I were a teacher at Borrego now or then, or at another school nearby? For several months I was convinced that I could not finish the book, that the stories were too personal, too sensitive, too raw. No matter how I strived to get it right, it was getting it right that was the problem. Was I violating people’s privacy by writing about them? Perhaps every writer faces this question. I changed the names of people to protect them, which seemed to help, but in a small community like Borrego I was sure people would recognize themselves and each other. They would recognize their stories. I wondered if it was ethical to continue.

  I kept writing anyway, unable to leave the work unfinished, bound for the reckoning. And as I did so, I began to regard the story as my own. Certainly there were a number of other people involved, but I w
as trying to tell the story of my year teaching on the Navajo Reservation, not the story of people who live on the Navajo Reservation, and certainly not the story of the Navajo people. I think it is a mistake to think of In the Sun’s House as a book about Navajo people. That story belongs to them, and it is, for someone like me who is not Navajo, nearly unknowable. In writing this book, I had only my limited point of view, informed by my personal experiences and the experiences of the people who lived it with me. I had the accounts of writers and scholars who lived and worked with Navajo people in former times and in this one. And I had some of the published stories of the Navajo people. In this spirit, then, I finished.

  For my part, any errors or misconceptions in this book, any flaws or gaps in understanding, are my own. I have worked hard to be true to the story, and I feel good about saying that, for me, during this time, this is the way it was.

  Kurt Caswell

  Psychiatrists, politicians, tyrants are forever assuring us that the wandering life is an aberrant form of behaviour; a neurosis; a form of unfulfilled sexual longing; a sickness which, in the interests of civilization, must be suppressed....

  Yet, in the East, they still preserve the once universal concept: that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

  —Bruce Chatwin

  And so it now is that the Navajo people never abide in one dwelling.... Instead they migrate constantly from place to place, from place to place.

  —from Diné Bahane’: The Navajo Creation Story

  ONE

  THIS IS BORREGO

  “You wanna be an Indian?” Charlie Hunter asked.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to be an Indian.”

  “You wanna be a cowboy?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You wanna be a bronc rider!?” Charlie asked.

  All the boys laughed.

  “No,” I said. “You wanna be a bronc rider?”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “We all wanna be bronc riders.”

  And then they all laughed again.

  Charlie wore jeans with a big shiny buckle on his belt, cowboy boots, and a western-style shirt, red with a white yoke. He was rail thin, and his eyes were focused and lean, his face dark and pure. He and the other boys who had gathered with him there in the cafeteria my first morning at Borrego Pass School would all be students in my sixth-grade language arts class, and later I would come to know their names: Shane Yazzie, Joseph Jones, Kyle Bigfoot, and John George.

  They all wore their hair cut short, and Shane wore his in a military buzz with a little rooster tail in the back. I had worn my hair long for several years now, and today I wore it down and loose, defying advice given me by a friend: Navajos equate loose hair with loose thoughts. I wondered if this was the reason for Charlie’s first question. Did he think I was a New Age Indian wannabe?

  “You gotta horse?” Charlie asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  “You gotta truck? A real big one, like a big Ford truck?”

  “No,” I said. “A little one, like a little Dodge truck.” I tried to talk like him a little, to make a joke on him, but he didn’t notice, and kept right on talking.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “I seen you wash it.”

  “Yeah,” Joseph Jones said. “You always like to wash it.”

  “Hey Mr. Caswell,” Shane Yazzie said. “That’s your name right? Mr. Caz-well. You ever go over there to Gallup?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes I go to Gallup.”

  “Yeah, I seen you over there,” he said. “They got a real big Wal-Mart over there. And I seen you over there in a sheepskin runnin’ a hun-dret miles an hour!” and they all laughed again.

  Then Charlie said, “Hey. You ever seen a skinwalker?”

  “No,” I said.

  That’s what Shane meant by my wearing a sheepskin—that I was a skinwalker, a Navajo witch.

  Then Kyle Bigfoot spoke up. He said he had. He’d seen a skinwalker just last night. Then the little circle at the breakfast table got real quiet and serious. And we all leaned in as Kyle told his story.

  He was home alone, he said, because his parents were out somewhere, he didn’t know where, and it got cold and dark real fast because it was fall and winter was coming. Kyle heard something outside. And then he heard the dogs barking, a sure sign that skinwalkers are about. So he looked out the window of the little hogan. He didn’t see anything at first, he said. But he kept looking. He stood on a chair and crouched down so that his eyes were just above the bottom edge of the window; he could just see out over the bottom of the window. He didn’t want anything to see him. And then he saw it, a skinwalker moving from behind the woodpile to the little shack out there, just a dark shade floating above the ground. And when it came into the clearing there between the two hiding places, it stopped. And Kyle froze, he said. He held his breath. He didn’t breathe at all. And the dark thing turned toward him and looked at him. Their eyes met for a moment, and then Kyle sucked in his breath and made a sound, and the skinwalker opened its mouth and Kyle gasped and ducked down below the window, shaking and scared and mewling like a kitten. And the dogs barked outside and one of them yelped a little. And Kyle closed his eyes and hugged himself with his arms and shook like a leaf in the wind.

  And after awhile he peered up over the edge of the window again. And there was nothing there.

  Then Louise Fairchild, the fifth-grade teacher and vice principal at Borrego, yelled from the doorway that it was time to go to class. “It’s time to go to class!” And all the boys jumped, and then they all moved back in their chairs like they hadn’t.

  And John George said, “Ah. That ain’t nothin’.”

  And then all the boys scrambled for the door to line up behind Mrs. Sittnick, their reading teacher, so she could lead them to class. And I heard Charlie Hunter say, “Hey Mrs. Sittnick. You wanna be a bronc rider?”

  I was twenty-six when I taught sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade language arts at Borrego Pass School in northwest New Mexico. I never intended to be a teacher. I didn’t have any real devotion to or belief in education. I had finished my undergraduate degree in English and taken a teaching job in Hokkaido, Japan, because, like a lot of young men my age with literary aspirations, I wanted to travel and see the world. After two and a half years in Hokkaido, journeys in Korea and China, a few days in Morocco, a few months in Europe, my romantic adventure began to feel like everyday life again. I was just going to work and paying my bills. Maybe it was time to choose. Not to stop traveling altogether, but to at least decide where I was going to make my home. I could make a go of it in Hokkaido, and I considered that, but I felt drawn to my boyhood landscape in the Cascade mountains of Oregon, and of course to family and old friends. I left my teaching job in Japan, left Sakura, my Japanese girlfriend, too, and headed back to the American West.

  Following that, my path to Borrego was part accident, part necessity. I needed a job, and this one presented itself. I might well have chosen some other profession upon my return, but with my teaching experience in Japan, I found that schools were receptive to me. Beyond that, taking a job at Borrego Pass was attractive because I would have friends nearby whom I knew from graduate school. Mary Juzwik was teaching in a Navajo middle school in Ganado, Arizona, about a hundred miles west of Borrego, and Lauren Sittnick would be my colleague at Borrego. She and her fiancé, Phil, who taught at Laguna Pueblo just east of Grants, had alerted me to the job in the first place.

  But those are practical considerations. I cannot deny that the thought of living with Navajo people in the New Mexican desert sounded like another great adventure to me, another thing to do that later I would be proud to say I had done. I wasn’t ready, or perhaps I wasn’t able, to give up the thirst for discovery that had taken me to Hokkaido. I wasn’t ready to live a settled life in suburbia. Those two words—settled and suburbia—frightened me. Yes, I did want to make my home in America, but at the same time the last t
hing I wanted was a home in America. It was with this kind of youthful ambivalence that I arrived at Borrego.

  Borrego Pass, New Mexico, is on the Continental Divide, sixteen miles up a dirt road, north off Interstate 40 at the Prewitt exit, which is about halfway between Grants and Gallup. The surrounding landscape is a vast desert of high sandstone mesas and low escarpments covered over in cactus and spiky shrubbery. As you drive that lonely road, a coyote might cross in front of you—ragged and thirsty, scrawny and hungry—or become visible for a moment in the distance moving fast over the dry earth. A red-tailed hawk might appear gliding low on the hunt, or high and away, a black spot against the still, vast blue. It’s possible that another vehicle will come up behind you, hug your bumper until the blind corner straightens into forever, and then speed by in a twisting tornado of dust and kick stones into your grille and windshield. It’s possible that a vehicle will pass by headed in the opposite direction, the driver lifting one finger off the wheel to wave hello, to let you know that you’re not alone. But you are alone, mostly, because not many people live out this way. Because you’re a stranger and no one knows you here. Because you’re a white person, a bilagaána, in an Indian land. You may find some comfort in passing the few hogans and houses scattered about near the school and the community of Casamero Lake, which sounds like a nice place, a green place, as the Navajo name means “water waves among the rocks,” but that water, the lake, dried up years ago.

  Borrego is the Spanish word for “lamb,” and the Navajo name for this place is Dibé Yázhí Habitiin, which means “little sheep’s path.” The Navajo people, and likely others, used this pass to move their sheep herds over the Continental Divide to Crownpoint for at least as long as people have lived in that town, about a hundred years, and perhaps as long as Navajos have kept sheep, about three hundred years. Before that, long before that, the Anasazi came this way traveling the great roads in and out of Chaco Canyon. The elevation at Borrego is about 7,000 feet above the sea. The top of the mesa behind the school is just about 8,000 feet. It doesn’t rain much here. Like most of the desert Southwest, it gets less than ten inches each year, but that’s enough to support juniper, pinyon pine, and a few ponderosa.