Christians Try Building Ties With Navajos

It was only 9:30 a.m. on this high-desert plain, but Hans Benning and his crew of believers had been pouring sweat for hours, laboring on a shelter for a small congregation of Navajo Christians.

It was their fourth day of work. Benning suddenly lost his footing and landed hard on his backside while clambering across the shelter’s partly built roof. But the 49-year-old Studio City man, who was already concealing a broken hand, barely paused. Caught up in the urgency of the mission, he shook off the pain and continued working.

“We needed to get the job done,” Benning said later.

The strength of Benning’s 35-year obsession with American Indians in general and the Navajos in particular inspired 28 members of the Osborne Neighborhood Church in Arleta to join him in the waterless desert of northern Arizona for a week of dawn-to-dark work under a fierce sun.

Undaunted by temperatures of 95 degrees and gusts whipping stinging red sand, the group built a traditional pine-and-juniper structure known as a brush arbor, conducted a Bible school for local children and added a room to the Porcupine Mesa Baptist Church.

But Benning acknowledged that his crew, who ranged in age from 9 to 69, faced an even more difficult challenge than those posed by hammer, nails, mortar and weather.

The group had to overcome the legacy of hundreds of years of mistreatment by white men, especially Christian missionaries, he said.

Even though the efforts may be well-intentioned, critics say the Navajo way of life is already threatened by the influences of modern American life, and such Christian evangelism further undermines the culture.

Indeed, some such as Studio City writer Raymond Friday Locke said missionaries who seek to convert American Indians to Christianity do more harm than good, loosening them from their cultural moorings, with potentially harmful consequences.

“As far as I’m concerned . . . all they do is create more drunks,” said Locke, author of “The Book of the Navajo,” an authoritative history. “They confuse the Navajo. They try to get them to give up their religion . . . and then they have no place in either society.”

Acknowledging those criticisms, Benning said: “In the name of Christianity, horrible atrocities have been done. My main goal is to show them a different kind of white people.”

Even though they built a church and offered Bible classes, Benning said achieving conversions was not a priority.

“We’re not there to hit them over the head with Bibles or tell them they’re going to hell,” said Benning, a violin and cello maker. “I cannot convert anybody. That’s God’s business. I can only show them by my actions and behavior and my people’s behavior that Christianity works for me.”

Benning is a member of the Arleta church and vice president of the Los Angeles-based American Indian Liberation Crusade. The church has supported Benning and the Crusade for the past five years, with Benning and other church members traveling to reservations in several Southwestern states an average of once a month.

The crusade, which raises money with a radio program called “The American Indian Hour,” also provides financial support for seven churches with Navajo pastors--including the one at Porcupine Mesa. In addition, the organization provides Christmas food baskets for hundreds of Christian and non-Christian families, sends children to Bible camp and, led by Benning, builds churches.

The Porcupine Mesa Baptist Church is eight miles down a dirt road off U.S. Highway 89A. It is located in an area of the Navajo nation that has no telephones, indoor plumbing or electricity even though it is only 45 minutes by car from the modern, growing city of Page and the huge Glen Canyon Dam at Lake Powell.

The 600 residents of the community live in isolated camps of one or more houses, either traditional round hogans or cinder-block or wood-frame rectangles.

The area is one of the poorest on the poverty-stricken reservation, which is about the size of West Virginia. Families must travel to Page to fetch water in barrels when the few balky, wind-powered wells break down.

With its isolation, the area is a stronghold of traditional beliefs. About 75% of the adults there speak only Navajo. While Christianity is widely accepted in other parts of the reservation, the church here still generates suspicion.

The church at Porcupine Mesa has only about 30 regular attendees, all of whom are close relatives of Jeanne Mexicano, whose husband, Jimmy, is the church’s pastor.

Jimmy Mexicano studied at Navajo Bible College in Colorado and began preaching about a decade ago in his small concrete-block house. A one-room stucco church was built nearby about four years ago, and the Arleta group’s goal was to insulate, rewire and drywall that structure and to build an addition to serve as a children’s room. As a finishing touch, they mounted a bell Benning had found to summon the faithful to worship.

Working side-by-side with several Navajos, the men--who included several engineers, a retired fire captain, an attorney and a car mechanic--worked 15-hour days roofing, pouring concrete, framing walls and wiring for generator-powered electricity.

The women fixed meals and conducted Bible school classes for about 40 children. The youths in the group helped with the classes, provided musical accompaniment with guitars and violins, organized recreation and pitched in at the construction site.

The group used pit toilets and makeshift showers. They ate meals under a large canvas tent. At night they slept in tents dusted inside and out with fine red sand, beneath a sky brilliantly lit by the sweep of the Milky Way.

“When you see something like that, how can you deny the existence of God?” asked Rachel Martinez, a member of the church group who works as a community liaison for Montague Elementary School in Pacoima.

But Navajo critics say they have their own explanation of the heavens and disdain missionaries who would force them to accept the tenets of Christian faith.

Harry Walters, who chairs the Dineh (Navajo) studies department at Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Ariz., is skeptical of all missionaries, including those from the Arleta church.

“That kind of help I don’t call help,” he said. “The Navajo culture is still strong, the Navajos do not need any religion. The one they have has served the Navajo nation very well.”

Walters said animosity arises because many Christians believe that all other religions are wrong. “That puts Navajo religion in the light of not being true and this is what most people don’t like, including me,” Walters said.

In addition, Christians have been involved in efforts over the past 100 or more years to wipe out the American Indian culture and language, especially through schools they established. Even Pope John Paul II acknowledged the cultural insensitivity of the church’s legacy during his U.S. visit earlier this month, when he decried the destruction of sacred objects and said that now “the church contemplates your authentic values with love and hope.”

Studio City author Locke said it took decades for Christian missionaries to even realize that the Navajos had a spiritual life.

The essence of Navajo beliefs springs from the idea that the universe is composed of four elements--fire, earth, air and water, said Walters, an anthropologist. There are numerous ceremonies--called “ways” or “sings”--to restore the balance among the elements when they have been upset by witchcraft or an individual’s misdeeds.

Most missionaries today say that many of those ceremonies can be incorporated into Christian worship, making it possible to be both Navajo and Christian.

Father Martan Rademaker is director of the 100-year-old Franciscan Mission Center at St. Michael’s Catholic Mission near Window Rock, Ariz. That church conducts Masses in the Navajo language and has adapted prayers from some of the ceremonies, including the Blessing Way, one of the most important in Navajo life.

“My basic approach . . . is to try to encourage Navajo people to look at their traditional practices as their Old Testament, the way the Jewish tradition is our Old Testament,” he said. “We have that in common. We both come out of pasts that are not completely Christian.”

Tom Dolaghan, director of the Navajo Gospel Mission in Flagstaff, said missionaries have learned from past mistakes. Now, he said, most evangelizing is done by Navajos themselves, and aspects of the Navajo culture--including ceremonies marking a baby’s first laugh, a girl’s transition to adulthood and the blessing of a new house--are incorporated into Christian worship.

As a result, the number of Christian churches on the reservation has exploded from fewer than 50 to more than 400 in the past several decades, Dolaghan said. He estimates that 20% of the 220,000 Navajos on the reservation are Christian.

But the mistrust between Christians and traditional Navajos remains strong in Porcupine Mesa, where many still subscribe to ancient beliefs. Membership is also strong there in the 100-year-old Native American Church, which combines Christianity, traditional Navajo beliefs and the use of peyote cactus, a powerful hallucinogenic drug.

“We’re not against them,” Jimmy Mexicano said of his non-Christian neighbors. “But we tell them the truth and the word of God. . . . Maybe someday they will change their minds and know that Christianity is the truth.”

Katy Spencer, who is Mexicano’s sister-in-law, said members of her family who are Christian are now cut off from their neighbors. Even nonbelieving relatives stopped associating with the Spencers until recently.

Jeanne Mexicano said that several years ago she was threatened by neighbors who practiced witchcraft. Katy Spencer recalled that her sister-in-law was told: “If you think you can change this part of the reservation, you’re not going to, ever. We’re going to tell people that you are trying to destroy our beliefs.”

Spencer, a trained social worker who has lived in San Francisco and Phoenix, said that unlike many of the residents of Porcupine Mesa, she believes it is possible to embrace both Christianity and the Navajo culture.

To illustrate, she said the 200-foot-high mesa that gives the area its name is sacred to Navajos, who still visit it to commune with the gods believed to reside there. But now, Christians also climb the mesa’s well-worn trail to pray, surrounded by the necklace of geomorphic jewels that includes the red walls of the Grand Canyon to the northwest, the Vermilion Cliffs of the Colorado River to the north and Navajo Mountain to the east.

Joyce Millikan, a Shadow Hills dental hygienist who organized most of the meals for the week, blamed missionaries for the Navajos’ distrust of Christians such as herself.

“In their self-righteousness they have . . . imposed Western culture not only on Navajos but on a lot of other cultures and tried to say, ‘You need to look like, dress like, act like, sing like and everything else like me or else you’re not Christian,’ ” she said. “But knowing what we know today, we need to accept people the way they are, even if they are not like us.”

That was the message that Benning preached all week to his group. He shared the knowledge of Navajo culture he has picked up from a lifetime of reading and his numerous visits. He encouraged the visitors to indulge in the mutton ribs roasted over an open fire and “tacos” made with the traditional fried bread.

Several in the group admitted the cultural diplomacy was not effortless and there were some awkward moments, especially when non-Christian parents brought their children for the Bible classes.

“The hard part is getting to know these people,” said Jerry Palmer, a contractor and engineer based in Sun Valley who has worked on similar projects for the past five years. “You’ve got to build that trust. When Kit Carson came, he gave them blankets filled with smallpox germs.”

Now, several Navajos stay at his house when they come to Los Angeles. “We’re like brothers,” he said.

On Friday, the last day of Bible school, Hans Benning paused long enough from his work to address the Navajo children and sum up his motivations.

“I just want to leave you with one thing,” he said. “We love you. We love you and we want to see God’s blessing on you.”