It is strange that in the name of science many folklorists have abandoned history for events they can observe, while many historians have abandoned folklore for facts they can count" (11).
Indeed, Glassie's text as a whole makes the case that history and stories are thoroughly dependent on one another, as they each contextualize and flesh out what the other attempts to convey. As so continually happens in this class, I found myself thinking back on a personal experience that seems related to the week's material. Like many of you, I've become a storyteller myself in the process of sifting through the semester's readings, which, incidentally, I'm thoroughly enjoying. Each of your personal anecdotes and stories are a rich, wonderful addition to the semester as a whole! But I digress...my story, then.
Back at the turn of the century, I embarked on a wonderful cross-country trip with a group of fellow college students. We traveled in a 15-passenger van from North Carolina to the "four corners" states: Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. For several days of this trip, we stayed in Chinle, on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. For the ten or so preceding years, our college's annual group of travelers had been offered housing in the student housing blocks of Diné College, the community college run by the Navajo. However, just two weeks or so out from our expected date of arrival, our instructor received a rather terse message from our contact at the college, who informed us that they were very sorry, but no housing was going to be available after all. Mr. Bryson was perplexed at first--our housing had been specifically arranged a few months prior to this, and there had been no suggestion that any other event would be taking place at that time. When he pressed the contact for a reason for this change of availability, she informed him that many students were usually staying in housing throughout summer breaks, as this housing was their only housing at all, year-round.
This seemed perfectly reasonable and was accepted at face value. However, through an unrelated contact on the reservation, Mr. Bryson soon learned this wasn't the real reason for our being denied housing at the college. For one thing, Indians in general, particularly those in reservation communities, tend to have a thoroughly open-door, my-food-is-your-food, come on in kind of approach to other people. This trait of good-natured generosity is so prominent in many Native communities that it's overtly mentioned in many pieces of Native-authored literature. For example, Sherman Alexie's stories and films often demonstrate this social generosity among characters. This was mentioned to Mr. Bryson by Contact #2 as a lead-up to telling him the real reason behind the now-closed doors at Diné College. What was the real reason?
It seems that during the previous year's trip, some of the students from our college had thrown into the garbage in their campus housing rooms numerous partially filled bottles of water. Rather than pouring the unused water down drains or onto the ground, students tossed the sloshing bottles into wastebaskets. The bags of garbage in these wastebaskets were in turn collected and disposed of by generous college maintenance staff, who volunteered to do a sort of housekeeping service for our busy student group. Contact #2 explained that these water bottles--the throwing away of water on a reservation that frequently suffered from water shortages that they simply couldn't afford to supplement by buying bottled water--had thoroughly offended the hosts at the college. They deemed this throwing away of precious water as evidence that not much had changed in non-Native tendencies to pillage the resources of the earth. What was worse, they (and the college itself, by extension) were being compelled to join in and assist this throwing away of water by virtue of having agreed to dispose of garbage from the dorm rooms. Their solution to this problem could not include simply refusing to remove the garbage--regardless if they physically gathered trash from dorm rooms or not, the garbage still had to be disposed of where all other trash went on the reservation (if you've never been to the Navajo rez, it is VERY remote). So, these practical people decided that the simplest way to deal with the problem was to eliminate it in the future--no more allowing students from our college to stay in student housing on the reservation.
Now, did this actually solve the problem, considering that my own group instead stayed in the Native-owned and operated hotel at Chinle? In theory, no--we could of course simply throw away water there, rather than at the college. However, in practice this did solve the problem, as the community made sure that Mr. Bryson was aware of the offense and of the privilege that had been lost within that community. He was no longer blind to the offense of the actions of some of his students, and our own group was well prepared for cultural sensitivity on the water issue when we arrived for our stay at the reservation hotel. We were utterly meticulous in making sure that we never left water unused--we drank it all, every time.
The point of all of this is that, as Glassie so beautifully demonstrates in the breadth of his book, historical underpinnings provide context for things that happen in the here and now, and the here and now inevitably points to a history that gives those observable events meaning and depth. In this sense, the everyday is itself an inevitable offshoot of history.
Another brief story before I leave the Navajo. At that same reservation hotel, there are two contextual "historical" features that provide much insight into the everyday practices one can observe there. The first is found in the hotel restaurant, which serves as a hustling little hub of community interaction in the evenings, as it's much more populated by locals than by visitors to the reservation. Their community and history is represented inside of the restaurant with three things:
1. Photographs of Navajos who have served in the U.S. armed forces--framed photos of rez members in dress-uniform hang on every wall.
2. Providing a contrast to assimilation into wider American culture, you also find numerous items representing each clan of the Navajo. If memory serves me correctly, these things are some type of woven rug and belt (but don't quote me on that, I may be misremembering the exact items) that are hung in orderly rows, evenly spaced throughout the entire dining area. These items demonstrate Navajo culture that predates European arrival in the Americas.
3. More photographs, these of winners and runners-up in the Miss Navajo pageants. The young women in the photos are in modernized versions of authentic Navajo dress--usually powwow regalia--and who are engaging in a Native version of a very Western form of female pageantry. Pieces of contestants' elaborate jewelry are also on display. Interesting stuff!
All told, these pieces together paint a rather complicated picture of the layers of Navajo cultural experience, both in the present era and in years past. In fact, if you are lucky enough to get a conversation going with one of the World War code talkers who frequent the place (I was!), you'll find yourself discussing how the presence of clan designators, signs of war service, and beauty pageants all point to the complex system of everyday life that the Navajo experience.
The other interesting side note on the reservation can be found in the book rack inhabiting a rather central place in the lobby of the hotel office. It's one of those old spinner racks that have paperback novels filling the ranks. However, what's interesting about this rack is that ALL of the books--and I mean ALL, at least in the years that Mr. Bryson has taken students to the reservation--are the novels of Tony Hillerman, a non-Native who writes fiction with Navajo lead characters. On the one hand, many Natives object to non-Natives writing Native characters, as there is often a sense that sacred community information is appropriated and Indian people often miscontextualized. However, that isn't at all the case with Tony Hillerman and the Navajo. Although there are exceptions for everything, Hillerman is rather abundantly embraced by the residents of this reservation. As one community member told us, Hillerman "gets the ordinary details right." That statement has an uncanny resonance now, as our class material has given weight and meaning to the word "ordinary" that it didn't have for any of us on that trip. In the case of Hillerman, in order to understand why it's amazing that he's so well-received on this reservation, it's necessary to first understand the rub that many Natives have with Western representations of them and the appropriations that have taken much from Natives without giving anything back to the community in return. You also need to know that Hillerman's stories often critiqued differences of opinion concerning assimilation versus traditionalism, frequent sources of Indian-on-Indian problems in many Indian communities. The fact that Hillerman "got" this problem gave him great credibility with the residents of the community he was writing about. Further, he consistently represented crime and negative behaviors as being disruptions to the beauty and harmony of life and the natural world, which represents a core feature of Navajo ontology. It is also important to understand that Hillerman made a point of giving back to the Navajo community--he was a frequent, welcome visitor to the rez and had personal relationships with a number of community members. Or, to put it into modern military terms, he talked the talk, but he also walked the walk, and in a way that respected the culture he explored in his works of fiction.
In summation, as Glassie posits, being aware of the historical opens up deeper understanding of the significance of things that seem "ordinary" and empty of significant meaning beyond a perfunctory functional purpose. As with this seemingly nondescript rack of faded Hillerman paperbacks in the office of the hotel at Chinle, combining observation with the folklore attached to particular objects, people, and places provides a deeper, richer, more contextualized experience of the everyday.
Connie
Photos of Canyon de Chelly, on the Navajo Nation:
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