Lesson in Controversy : Teaching the Navajo How to Be Navajo

Every morning at daybreak, as the farthest hills turn purple, then gold, then quietly blue, a young man with a diamond earring runs east toward the rising sun. Running is his prayer.

He calls out his name to the Holy People. “Here I am,” he says. “I’m running. Look at me.”

Ronald Horse Herder is 17. He eschews his family’s four-bedroom, solar home at Hard Rocks to live in a hogan with his grandmother at Big Mountain, and he spends a lot of time with a hataalii , a medicine man, asking questions about the Navajo Way.

But then there is the earring.

Different Worlds

Ronald Horse Herder also is a junior at Tuba City High School. During the week, he boards at its dormitory, and that is just a quick walk to McDonald’s, Rent-A-Flick Videos and Basha’s supermarket, which sells heavy metal cassettes--all staples of the American way.

The earring is a diamond on a stud. It pierces his left earlobe. “This is today, “ he says with the smart-eyed look of the worldly wise. “This is saying, ‘I’m baaaaad.’ ”

The earring?

Or the hataalii ?

These are the questions of a teen-ager in conflict. They are the questions of a divided high school and a troubled tribe, the questions of concerned state and national educators. What is it to be Navajo, the Dine ? How is it changing? What should tribe members retain of their past? What should they pass on to the next generation?

Losing Way of Life

Indians fear they are losing their way of life. Tuba City High, in this northeastern Arizona reservation town, responded this past year by bringing in someone to help preserve Native American culture. The school hired Roger Dunsmore, 51, a poet and retired professor from the University of Montana. He was named the humanities scholar in residence. Roger Dunsmore is bilagaana --he is white .

For a time, his presence threatened to split the school, its faculty and the Indian community. This is the story of Roger Dunsmore, the bilagaana visiting professor, and his effort to help save the culture of the largest Indian tribe in the United States. It is the story of the biggest Indian school in the country and how it got itself tangled up over the concerns of young people like Ronald Horse Herder.

At first, armed with a $23,000 grant from the Arizona Humanities Council, Kyril Calsoyas, assistant director of curriculum, tried to hire an Indian--a Chippewa who had established a nationally recognized Indian education program in Minnesota. But the Chippewa begged off. So Calsoyas renewed his search and found Dunsmore, a published poet who had just retired as a professor of humanities at the University of Montana, where he had devoted himself to Native American culture.

When Calsoyas asked him to take the job, Dunsmore accepted. “I felt obligated,” he says. “Not to him or the place, but to the issue of cultural maintenance. If I was needed and could be useful, I couldn’t say no to that.”

What Dunsmore found when he got to Tuba City was a high school of 1,350--about 95% Navajo, 3% Hopi and 2% a mixture from a half dozen other tribes. There were only 30 white students. He found some Indian-related classes: Native American literature, for instance. He found Indian members of the staff who included Indian perspectives in classes when they could. And he found some science workshops with Native American respect for nature: Biology classes, for example, did not dissect frogs.

Tuba City, Dunsmore learned, was named after a Hopi chief called TIvi. Some public buildings were decorated with Navajo yei --stylized figures of the Holy People, who travel by rainbow, on bolts of lightning, in clouds and across the rays of the sun, and whose masked impersonators danced in the Night Chant, a nine-day Navajo healing ceremony. In addition, he found a trading post built in 1860 and an open-air market, where Indians came from the nearby red hills of layered sandstone to sell mutton stew and kneel-down bread and hand-tooled saddles and silver bracelets.

White Culture

But these things mostly signaled the past. Besides the McDonald’s and the Rent-A-Flick Videos in this town of 6,000, near the western edge of the 25,000-square-mile Navajo Nation, Dunsmore also encountered a Taco Bell, with its brown and yellow plastic sign; a Kentucky Fried Chicken, with its picture of Col. Sanders; a Dairy Queen; two convenience stores; skateboards; cable television; satellite dishes; a Sounds Easy music store; Checker Auto Parts; a True Value hardware store and a Twin Cinemas theater, where the fare included “Rain Man,” “Leviathan” and “American Ninja III.”

If the town had been imprinted with the tastes and values of whites, then Tuba City High School had been overwhelmed. Inside its long, gray, brick buildings with their red-orange trim, Dunsmore discovered that a disproportionate number of teachers were white, that all of the Indian-related courses were electives, that only 10 students were taking Navajo and that as few as four were enrolled in Native American literature. Virtually every book in the school, including the student yearbook, was written entirely in English.

He found football and baseball and basketball and cheerleaders and pep rallies and beauty contests and a prom. He found students in T-shirts that said “Metallica” and “Ozzy Osbourne” and “Iron Maiden.” On a cinder block wall, he found spray-painted graffiti.

If Tuba City High School had been in Phoenix, it could have been Central High. It was so white it had an Indian Club.

Determined Teacher

Roger Dunsmore is an informal man. He shuns ties, wears Western boots, lets his beard get rumpled and peers through simple, gold-framed bifocals. He nonetheless comes from a lengthy line of determined Scots. He got right to work.

At his first meeting with the faculty, he took issue with the “arrogance of Western humanism” that caused European/American culture to consider itself superior to the culture offered “in, say, the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life, or the Chinese Book of Changes, or the Arabian Nights, or the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita or the Navajo Nightway Chant.”

“Increasingly,” he said, “that kind of cultural provincialism is unforgiveable.”

His purpose in Tuba City, he told the faculty, was to foster an atmosphere in which Native American culture was accorded its due--as a respected value system and as a culture from which much could be learned.

He studied Navajo, to absorb its structure, sound, complexity and beauty.

Faculty Seminars

He convened a faculty seminar twice a week. Teachers who attended read “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” by Paulo Freire; “Dine bahane,” the Navajo creation story, and “Ceremony,” by Leslie Marmon Silko, a Laguna whose novel is celebrated as a classic Indian story about healing. The seminar discussed seeking out Navajo and Hopi elders who were recognized keepers of tribal culture and inviting them into the school regularly.

Dunsmore brought in outside lecturers who addressed both students and faculty and taught in classes. They included Joy Harjo, a Creek poet and associate professor of English at the University of Arizona; Nia Francisco, a Navajo poet, weaver and sheepherder from New Mexico; Ramson Lomatewama, a Hopi educator and poet from Third Mesa; Luci Tapahanso, a Navajo poet who teaches creative writing at the University of New Mexico, and Ray Williamson, an ethnoastronomer who wrote “Living in the Sky, the Cosmos of the American Indian.”

Francisco and Tapahanso told the students: “Use your language, and write in your language. If your teachers don’t understand it, that’s their problem.”

Dunsmore ordered videotapes of Bill Moyers’ series of Public Broadcasting System interviews with Joseph Campbell, an authority on the power of myth. He played the tapes for the faculty and discussed them. “Myths,” he said, “are the stories that tell you what the sacred consciousness of a people is.” Around the videotapes, he and faculty members planned a junior-year humanities course for this fall designed to place Navajo culture in perspective among other world cultures.

He arranged to have a poem by an Indian writer read aloud every Friday as part of the daily school bulletin. Along with “Seniors, retakes for senior pictures are scheduled for Jan. 9” and “Warriorettes, basketball T-shirts are still on sale for $8,” students heard the “Story of How a Wall Stands,” by Simon Ortiz, an Acoma from New Mexico, and “The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee,” by N. Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Kiowa.

Word spread.

Almost instantly, critics took exception.

Dunsmore felt opposition in small things. There was resistance, for example, to his effort to give distinction to the Native American collection in the school library by having it featured separately from the rest of the books.

He got caught up in the politics of the school. It is run by two organizations--the Tuba City Unified School District, a state entity, and the Tuba City High School Board Inc., which is under contract to the Indians. He had been hired by the contract group. Some officials in the state-run district took offense. “It bothers me,” said Harold Begay, an associate superintendent for the state district, “that this is being put together and being, in a sense, taught, I guess, by someone we really don’t know.”

Finally, Dunsmore felt resistance in larger things. When he presented items for discussion at his faculty seminars, opponents took them to be formal proposals, and they questioned his authority. He encountered at least one outright rejection: No one would go on record, but word got around that some English teachers in the language arts department accused him of trying to take the school “back to the cave.”

Stephen Shapiro, chairman of language arts, became Roger Dunsmore’s main and enduring antagonist.

“Students are students, and cultural differences are a bunch of baloney when it comes to saying that they (the students) are Indians and we have to treat them differently,” Shapiro declared. “They’re kids, and kids are kids.”

He dismissed any possibility that Indian students might learn all subjects better, including English, if they were taught in the context of their own culture. “Kids will learn just like any other kids given the opportunity . . . ,” he said. “If kids don’t do well, it’s because they’re lazy, not because they can’t.”

Moreover, Shapiro said, there was no time for Indian culture. “This is a public school, and we only have eight hours a day to teach, and our main function, as far as I’m concerned, is reading, writing and arithmetic.”

Finally, he said, for Navajos, culture and religion are too closely related to separate. “We shouldn’t teach Navajo religion in the school. These are things the parents teach. And 99 out of 100 Navajo parents don’t want it taught in school, either.”

Shapiro, who is white, speaks no Navajo. Did any of his English teachers?

“A word here and there,” he said. “There’s no need.”

Indians Divided

While Shapiro’s estimate of 99 in 100 seemed high, Indians were, in fact, divided. By far, most Hopis seemed to feel that teaching culture should be left to parents. The Navajos were more evenly split.

Some, like James Peshlakai, a cultural resource instructor at the school, thought classrooms were a proper forum for teaching Indian culture--and might indeed be the last hope for keeping Navajo culture alive. But others, like Toney Begay, an industrial arts teacher, were strongly opposed. “If I want my kids to know my culture,” he said, “I believe it’s my job to tell them. When I send them to school, I want them to learn the requirements to be successful out there in the total society.”

Young Indians, he said, are more interested in white culture anyway--in movies, rock concerts and cable TV. Adults simply refuse to recognize reality, Begay said. “Middle-aged people see heavy metal T-shirts on their kids and they say, ‘We’ve lost our culture!’ But the progression of any society--you can’t really hold back on it.”

He also opposed bilingual classes.

“I went to boarding school,” he said, “and in boarding school then, if you talked your native language, it was a sin. You got scolded for that.

“It didn’t hurt us to be English oriented.”

Roger Dunsmore was not deterred.

He acknowledged the sensitivity of Native American religion, bound up as it was with the entirety of Native American culture. But precisely because spirituality permeated everything Indian, he said, it was vitally important to make students aware of it.

“In too many cases,” he said, “families are so shaky or busy they don’t do it.”

Teachers, Dunsmore said, are able to present this spirituality without teaching it as religious practice. Moreover, he said, it was appropriate to teach about the spiritual as an academic subject as long as both the teaching and the learning were done with sensitivity and respect. What was needed, he said, was an Indian teacher initiated into the religious practices of his tribe--and students living respectfully and maturely in the tribal world.

Ultimately, Dunsmore acknowledged, these things were best sorted out by Indians, and at Tuba City High “we are fortunate enough to have resource people like James Peshlakai and, before him, Steve Darden, both Navajos who know the traditional ways.” Both, he said, knew what parts of Navajo culture were appropriate for the classroom. Having them teach Navajo culture, he said, would give it official blessing, stance and posture--and show that the school considered it important.

“Kids have to see that this really matters,” Dunsmore said. “Otherwise, what you are doing is killing the Indian part, you’re fragmenting the cultural wholeness that these kids bring to their experiences. And to shatter that in order to make a white person out of them leaves them much less capable of learning--including English and math. It has to do with confidence, with their self-esteem. Otherwise, they get torn apart. They’re always lying a little bit to themselves, to their teachers. They’re caught between cultures. They’re confused. They’re denying part of themselves.”

Dunsmore told Indian students that knowing who they were was as important as learning English and math and science in order to be part of the white man’s world. “You do not have to make a choice between being Indian and being successful,” he said. “You can be both. You can be of two minds. In fact, you must be both.

“And, as a result, you will have advantages over people who are just one or the other.”

Indian Literature

Roger Dunsmore had not intended to teach any classes except as a guest lecturer. But he changed his mind. At the beginning of the second semester, he joined a faculty member to team-teach Native American literature. At least one day each week, they moved the class into a hogan behind the school.

On that day, Dunsmore got up early, put a big kettle on his stove, walked to school and started a fire in the hogan. He returned home, brewed tea from the flowers and stems of wild Thelesperma, took the kettle to the hogan and put it on the fire. When the students arrived, each took a cup of Navajo tea and sat cross-legged around the fire. This circle, he told them, represented the collective experience that everyone brought to what was being taught.

Nothing was read.

Instead, in the oral tradition of Native Americans, first Steve Darden and, later that semester, James Peshlakai spoke.

They taught how the land of the Dine is bounded by sacred mountains. They taught that Altsehastiin , the First Man, had said that the Holy People lived in these mountains.

They taught about the hogan, how the door of every hogan faces the rising sun, how male and female hogans are of different shapes, how the family is raised in the female hogan and the male hogan is used for ceremonies to protect the family.

Navajo Prayers

They reminded the students how they had been taught to pray: “Mother Earth.” “Father Sky.” “Mother Water.” “Father Sun.” And they taught that this was more than a doxology. “This is who you are,” Peshlakai said later, explaining how he had described the traditional Navajo belief. “You’re the child of Mother Earth, the child of Father Sky, the child of Mother Water, the child of Father Sun. And so you identify yourself with Mother Earth. Instead of saying, ‘Hello, Earth, I’m James Peshlakai,’ I say, ‘Mother Earth, I’m your son.’ That’s the relationship. And this is who you are.”

The essence of what the Navajo seeks is hozho . Similar to the Greek arete, it is a condition that includes all forms of human excellence and implies wholeness, harmony, beauty, perfection and well-being. Peshlakai said Navajos aspire to a way of life that brings this fullness of harmony. Some scholars call it the Blessing Way, he said, and others call it the Beauty Way. Whites call it the Navajo Way.

“When Navajos talk about it,” he said, “they say, ‘The Way.’

“It is the foundation of all the things that we do,” he said, and its requirements range from not taking another’s life to stopping all activity during an eclipse. Some are essential to life: to plant at a given time, for example. Others are items of respect: Do not speak about elders at certain times. Defer to the coyote and the snake.

Healing Ceremonies

“When you lose The Way,” he said, “then we have the ceremonies to bring you back on course. They’re healing ceremonies. Let’s say you went to war and had to kill somebody. And now you feel that something is wrong with you.” The first step is to go to a Hand Trembler, he said. “They are people that diagnose what’s wrong--what kind of a ceremony you need. Maybe it’s a ceremony called the Enemy Way. So then the medicine man performs the ceremony.”

For a ceremony, or a sing, the medicine man needs several items: corn pollen, herbs, different kinds of earth, a variety of wild tobaccos and prayer sticks--short sections of reed wrapped with leather, beads and feathers. “We give a prayer stick as an offering to a god, and then we pray to that god, and then the god goes with you to the other world. In some ceremonies, they do different sand paintings . . . and each one has a prayer and a song for a different god . . . and this god will take you on a journey to that world . . . to where that person is, whoever is on the other side that’s bothering you.

“It could be the person that you killed in Vietnam, that you never knew. And you go and you talk with him, make a peace treaty. And the god will kind of act like your lawyer or your advocate . . . . So you come to terms . . . and everything is now at peace.

“And then the gods dance. This is when everybody gets together. There’ll be people from various parts of the reservation dancing. People come and they put masks on, they dress like the gods and they dance all night long, especially at the Night Chant ceremonies. They come, and there’s lots of food. At the end it’s kind of a celebration, because the person is healed.”

There are more than 40 different ceremonies. Although Peshlakai himself is the apprentice of a hataalii --one of the grandfathers of his clan--he was careful not to teach any of these chants in class, and careful not to teach any of the other things reserved for the hataalii -apprentice relationship. He did not teach the ritual way of skinning a deer, for instance.

The point, Peshlakai said, was to show young Navajos enough to keep them from turning into “Indians with briefcases.”

That was exactly what Roger Dunsmore had in mind. And, finally, he prevailed.

Student Support

Young Indians--including Student Body President Olivia Scott--spoke highly of him and what he was trying to do. Most administrators supported him, too. “I’m all for him,” declared Andrew Tah, the superintendent/principal, a Navajo and the chief administrator for the contract school board. Bill Lehman, a bilagaana and the acting principal for the state school district, proclaimed it imperative to get behind Dunsmore and his efforts.

Lehman cited tests showing that average academic achievement at Tuba City High School had stalled well below national standards. Lehman blamed it squarely on the cultural fragmentation and consequent loss of self-esteem. The only way to reach national achievement standards, Lehman declared, was to restore Indian identity--and thereby to restore cultural wholeness to Tuba City students.

In the end, Lehman even went further than Dunsmore had thought he would: English teachers should be required to take a year of Navajo; students should be offered two years, instead of just one, and administrators, including the principal, should be required to study the language for a year themselves.

Program Continued

Kyril Calsoyas, who had brought Dunsmore to the school, arranged to continue the humanities scholar-in-residence program for another year. Dunsmore wanted to return to Montana and to his young son and his poetry, so Calsoyas set about making it possible for Ramson Lomatewama, the Hopi poet, to succeed him.

That pleased Dunsmore, particularly because of the encouragement he thought Lomatewama’s presence would give to the school’s Hopi minority.

To Ronald Horse Herder, all of this was welcome news.

On one hand, he wanted to be a hataalii. On the other, he was taking classes to be a welder. But more than anything, he was interested in his own people. He wanted to honor Ruth Benally, his 78-year-old grandmother back at Big Mountain. She had advised him, “At least learn, one of these days, how to read and write your own language.”

That he was doing.

But it was not enough, he said. “I want to learn more.”

Times researcher Nina Green contributed to this story.