Mountain Embodies Navajo Will to Stay

It’s late morning. Already the heat is oppressive, the sun intense. Clouds of tiny, biting gnats and big blue flies swarm everywhere.

A young Navajo with wrap-around sunglasses and a sheathed knife on his belt stops vehicles as they enter the compound and explains the rules: No alcohol, drugs, guns or cameras.

“If a cop comes up here we’ll let him in and feed him, but he can’t take his gun in. He’s got to leave it right here,” says the young security guard, who declines to give his name.

This is Big Mountain, long the symbol of resistance to the government-ordered relocation of thousands of Navajo families caught living on the wrong side of the line when this vast, disputed area was partitioned between the Navajo and Hopi tribes.

Hundreds have gathered atop this large, flat mesa for the annual sun dance, a grueling four-day ceremony during which young Navajo men will dance in the searing sun until they lie prone from exhaustion and puncture their skin with sharpened pegs, tearing out chunks of their own flesh.

The ritual, introduced to the Navajos a decade ago by northern Plains Indians, has become an annual event, drawing Indian and non-Indian spectators from dozens of states and a scattering of foreign countries.

“This is a spiritual gathering,” says Louise Benally, who lives in a traditional Navajo hogan a few yards from the improvised outdoor kitchen.

But the annual event has become a social gathering as well. Navajos from far-flung corners of their 25,000-square-mile reservation attend the ceremony to visit with friends and relatives.

The wind-swept mesa is dotted with Indian tepees and Coleman tents, Volkswagen buses and Ford pickups. There are nearly as many whites as Indians, mostly bearded men in cutoffs and sandals and women with long braids and shapeless dresses. Many have come as a statement of their support for the Big Mountain resisters. Others simply are curious.

Military-style camouflage nets provide minimal shade for the outdoor kitchen and at the site about 100 yards away where the ceremonial dances are performed.

Numerous campfires smolder, even in the midday heat. A man showers with a hose attached to a large, portable water tank. There are no other sanitary facilities in evidence.

The Indians are mostly young, although several older men and women lounge under the camouflage nets and in the scant shade of stunted pinon and juniper trees.

Children scamper about, oblivious to the heat and the voracious gnats.

Benally says the sun dance symbolizes the unity of her Navajo neighbors who have resisted every attempt to move them off the lands where they’ve lived for generations.

“If they really want this land so bad, they can come and pull me out, uproot me. That’s how committed to the land we are,” Benally says.