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My wife and I lived at Mescalero, New Mexico, then, but sometimes we did consulting, mostly on Apache reservations. Strictly speaking, the Navajo are Apaches. Were Apaches. The Spaniards got the name Apache from the Zunis, who used it for all the Athapaskan-speaking tribes that raided them. The Spaniards called the biggest of those tribes "Apache de Navajo," Apaches of the Fields, because they cultivated corn and squash. The Spaniards never did conquer them.
If you know much about Indians, you might guess from my name, Carl Boulet, that I didn't start out as Di
But that's not what you want to hear about. You want to know what it was like to come in exile to this world, and what it was like here in the old days. I will tell you the best I can. I did not talk English for many Earth-years till you came here. Once it was my best language; I had three university degrees, and talked it like you do, better than Chippewa. Better than Mescalero. Now it comes forth differently, even though my words are English. That's because I have come to think differently, living as we do here.
The September before the army came to Lukachukai, my wife and I-her name was Marilyn-established a program in applied domestic ecology in several Navajo schools, on a trial basis. It is strange to remember things like that. I was a different person in those days. At the end of January, we went back to see how it was going. On February 6, she was at Window Rock while I'd driven up to Lukachukai the day before.
It was noon. I'd eaten lunch, and was in the gym shooting baskets with a couple of teachers. I have not remembered shooting baskets for a very long time. Then the principal hurried in. The army, he said, had just landed at Window Rock, and federal marshals had arrested the tribal government. Troops had landed at Tuba City and Di
Just then it was snowing hard at Lukachukai, which may have been why they hadn't landed there yet. The men I'd been shooting baskets with didn't even look at each other. They started for the door. Lemmi Yazzi paused long enough to call back to me, "Maybe you better come too."
I hesitated for maybe a second, then grabbed my parka where it hung in the teachers' lounge and followed them outdoors. They scattered; I stayed with Lemmi and we trotted to his pickup; we got in, he lifted it on its air cushion, and we left the parking lot in a hurry.
"Where are we going? I asked him.
"A place we've set up in the Chuskas," he said. "One of the places."
Instead of going northeast into the Chuska Mountains on the maintained road, he drove west a little way, then turned north on a small dirt road, not made by engineers but cleared through junipers and pinyons by stockmen, for their trucks. You couldn't see very far through the snow, which was fine with us. The snowfall thi
I worried about Marilyn. It sounded as if, at Window Rock, there'd been no warning. I wondered if I was doing the right thing to go with Lemmi Yazzi. But if she was interned at Window Rock and I was interned fifty miles away at Lukachukai . . . I turned the radio on in the pickup and got the tribal station out of Window Rock. It was playing "America the Beautiful." In English. That made it real to me; the government had taken over.
We'd been warned, kind of. The summer before, a rumor swept the reservations all over the United States, that the government was going to start taking over and selling Indian lands and relocating reservation Indians.
Ten years earlier, hardly anyone would have taken a rumor like that seriously. But in '72, the Soviets had begun rounding up some of the Turkic and Mongol peoples in Asia and relocating them by force to a world called Haven. It was scary to read about.
Countries had been sending volunteer immigrants to Haven for years, and once, out of curiosity, I'd read up on the planet. Not in the newsfax, but in technical journals. Haven sounded like a bad place.
Some tribes, the Mescaleros and Navajos among others, had set up unofficial committees of resistance. Not that we thought it would really happen, but just in case. Hideouts were built or dug in, in hidden places in canyons and forests, and supplies were hidden in them. It was to one of those that Lemmi was driving us.
We were the first ones to reach it. It was two hogans topped with a foot of dirt and twenty inches of snow, on one side of a shallow draw, shaded by pines and firs. The hogans would be hard to see from the air, with the naked eyes. Maybe an instrument search would show them.
Until that day there'd only been a rumor, and the Navajo Reservation hadn't seemed like the place where the government would start. The Navajos were the strongest and most populous tribe, and most of their land was poor. The White Mountain and Mescalero reservations had much better land. And the Nez Perce; even the Pine Ridge. I suppose the government decided that if they took the strongest first, and relocated its people, the other tribes would lose heart and do what they were told. I used to wonder if that's how it worked out.
Within forty minutes there were ten of us in the two hogans. Everyone but me had clothes stored there, and boots, and a rifle. I was lucky to have worn boots that morning instead of oxfords; the weather forecast had given me that. And two of the pickups had rifles racked in them, so there was one for me. I didn't know who I would worry with an old .30 caliber Winchester hunting rifle. Two infantry riflemen had more firepower than the ten of us.
Of course, the idea wasn't to get in fights anyway. It was to make little armed demonstrations, get on the television and in the newsfax, and get the American people on our side. That had been the strategy of the Indian rights movement for more than a century. But the government was paying less and less attention to the people.
It stopped snowing that night. Meanwhile the government had shut down all the tribal radio stations, and Navajo language programs on other stations, and ba
The guys I was with talked it over. They decided to sit tight and take it a day at a time. If we didn't hear anything tonight, maybe we'd send out pickups in the morning to visit the nearest groups. Maybe we could work something out.
No one asked my opinion; I wasn't Navajo. I wasn't any kind of Apache-any of the Di
As it turned out, the army came to us, at about 3:30 in the morning. I suppose their instruments picked up the heat from our stovepipes, even though we kept very small fires. They'd have taken us entirely by surprise, except that I had waked up and had to urinate, so I pulled on my boots and went out of the hogan. And heard the soft, rumbling hum of landing craft settling into a meadow in the woods-what the Spanish and Anglos in the southwest call a cienega-a hundred or so meters downslope. I went into both hogans and woke everyone up.