In the spring of 1990, I spent two months driving clock-wise around the United States - from my grandfather’s house on the Jersey shore through Delaware and Maryland to the Florida panhandle and zigzagging across the South before heading up the Pacific coast and back through the northern prairie states to New England.
I stayed with cousins and friends, and friends of friends. I saw many things and learned just how large the US is. But one experience influenced my understanding at a smaller scale. I learned about the importance of the "local" - local culture, local identity and the importance of being part of one’s community.
Friends in my knitting group back east had told me that I had to go to the Trading Post in Tuba City, Arizona to buy some of the beautiful hand-dyed Navajo wool for sale there. I arrived at the Post on a sultry weekday morning. There hadn’t been much traffic on the road and there were no cars in the dusty parking lot. The middle-aged woman behind the counter was clearly having a lonely morning and she was eager to talk to me about how the wool was dyed and how much they shipped across the country.
I asked a few questions about the Navajo culture, if she used the yarns herself, whether she spoke the language, that kind of thing. As our conversation expanded, she began to tell me ruefully that her own children had learned very little of the Navajo culture; schools and the tribal leadership had discouraged ‘backwards ways’ and it was felt that children would have a better future if they pursued formal training for a career or trade. The result, she said, was a lost generation; many young people were underemployed or unemployed and living on tribal lands with very little knowledge of their own heritage. Alcoholism and drug use were a growing problem.
She and other grandmothers realized that the attempt to modernize their culture had been a huge mistake; their children were tetherless, not committed to their tribe and outsiders in the United States. These grandmothers had now banded together to ensure that their grandchildren learned what they hadn’t taught their own children - a foundation in the Navajo traditions. The grandmothers were teaching them the Diné language, they were teaching them their stories, they were teaching them to love the land and to value their heritage. Her face had softened and her eyes were shining. I could tell that she was determined in her endeavor.
As I selected a few skeins of the rich gold and turquoise yarns, I asked if she was teaching them to make the beautiful traditional rugs, examples of which were hanging on the walls of the trading post. She smiled and said one of her granddaughters was learning to spin yarn the way her grandmother had taught her.
Before I left, she told me there would be a festival on the weekend. The grandchildren would be participating in traditional games and dances and, if I was around, I could come to watch.
I had to turn down her invitation, as I was on my way to the Grand Canyon and then to my cousin’s in Phoenix the following morning. But her story made a deep impression on me and I have returned to it often as I travelled and lived in a number of different places. The health of a community is crucial for the well-being of its members. If a community loses its understanding of the past, it has no way of assessing its place in the present. If a community doesn’t know its heritage, then it cannot protect that heritage from outside forces. Individuals within that community are in danger of having no point of reference from which to view their role, neither in their community, nor in the larger society.
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