Celebrating Centennial

Destination: Navajo Reservation, Ganado, Arizona

Book: Navajos Wear Nikes: A Reservation Life by Jim Kristofic (Chosen as a Top Pick in the Southwest Books of the Year, 2011.)

It is impossible to talk about Arizona’s history without referring to some of the first people who inhabited this land.

A memorable moment at a Centennial Celebration at the University of Arizona in Tucson demonstrates the point.  The President of the University welcomed the crowd and pointed out that the University of Arizona had been here 27 years before Arizona became a state. Then the Mayor of Tucson responded by saying that the city of Tucson had been chartered 7 years before the University was founded.

The next speaker, Ophelia Zapada, a Tohono O’odham (formerly known as Pima Indian) poet and linguist spoke next.  She said, “I couldn’t help overhearing our distinguished speakers talking about how long the University and the city have been here….”  She was interrupted by a roar of laughter from the crowd which made it unnecessary for her to make her point that there were people here long, long before any of our own short measures of history.

Of the many American Indian tribes in Arizona, the Navajo is the largest, inhabiting a land bigger than West Virginia, spreading over parts of Arizona and New Mexico. This book focuses on the Navajo.

A lifetime of surprises awaited Jim Kristofic.  His mom loved anything to do with American Indians and she wanted her two sons to share her obsession.  But as an eight-year-old, Jim Kristofic only knew stereotypes he had learned in the East from movies and comic books.  Indians were dangerous, blood thirsty savages, and he would be in danger when his mom got a nursing job at Ganado Arizona.

In the stories that he tells in Navajos Wear Nikes, Kristofic aims to open people’s eyes to Navajos and life on “the Rez.”  As a new resident of Ganado, just entering the second grade, he was shocked to learn that Indians didn’t wear eagle feathers, live in teepees, beat drums and shoot arrows–not every day any way.  And the Indians around Ganado weren’t “Indians,” anyhow, they told him. They were Navajo.

He and his brother made a couple of friends who played in the washes with them, and told them the truth, but at school the kids called him Bilagáana Bilasáana and he believed it was an insult.

Seeing the other students at the school, he thinks,

These were Indians, a dark-haired tribe in jeans and Nikes that stowed Tomahawks in their backpacks among their three-ring binders.  They were savages who scalped with flint-knives, burned houses, buried cowboys to the neck and laughed while colonies of ants gnawed away their swollen tongues like ripe plums beneath the desert sun.

Jimmy has to fight with his tormentors every day and the constant boy-contests get rather repetitious.  In a delightful book that otherwise reveals much that is unique about the Navajos, these fights seem pretty standard boy struggles between the established playground order and the outsiders. That, however, is my only and minor complaint about this book, which definitely belongs in the travel library of anyone planning a road trip in the West.

The young boy gradually learns the Navajo language and also falls into the Rez-accented English that he explains in detail.  A Facebook page dedicated to Rez English gives endless amusing examples of the Navajo-speak like these examples from Navajos Wear Nikes.

If we wanted to go someplace, we said “skooverdairden” (Let’s go over there then) and pointed in the direction with our lips, in true Navajo style.

If I wanted my friend’s Dr. Pepper, I said, ‘letshavesome.’

Dank your mudder for dis one cake here dat she new I liked back den. (Thank your mother for this cake that she new I used to like. Pronounced this way because the “th” sound is generally rendered as “d”.)

He finally learned that bilagáana bilasáana meant “White apple” and the other kids only persisted in calling him that because it bothered him.  Typical kid meanness–not a secret Navajo curse after all.

Rarely, you get an opportunity to meet real life on the Navajo reservation, particularly as seen through the eyes of a biligáana who comes from the same starting point of ignorance and half-truths as most non-Indians.  Kristofic, who grew up to be a teacher who continues to share his knowledge of the Navajo Way, provides a fascinating guidebook to the people he came to understand and appreciate.  He does not sugar-coat problems on the Rez, nor does he get all “woo-woo new agey” in his admiration.  He just tells it straight, the way he has experienced it.

The book is made even more valuable by the addition of a glossary and a bibliography that lure the reader into further research.You can learn more about Jim Kristofic in this extended interview. You can meet Jim Kristofic at the Tucson Festival of Books.

Another non-Indian who proves to be a terrific guide to the Navajo nation is Tony Hillerman’s collection of mysterys set on the Rez. And Arizona last year chose Hopi Summer by Carolyn O’Bagy Davis as the Arizona Reads book.  Hopi Summer talks about an eastern woman’s friendship with a potter on the Hopi Reservation, researched through their letters and pictures.

Have you traveled to any of the Indian Reservations in Arizona? What surprised you most?

This is the last of our celebration for Arizona’s Centennial. Next week we move on to celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens. Come back and travel with Charles Dickens to London and to Italy.

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