Many if not most of the world's religions are sustained by legends that reflect a deep sense of place.
Christianity, Islam and Judaism took root in the deserts of the Middle East. According to tradition, Brigham Young, the prophet of the Mormon Church who led the Saints into Zion at the close of the Mexican-American War in 1846 and 1847, said of the geographic area now known as Utah, “This is the place.”
Utes and Shoshones thought it was their place at the time; many still do.
For Navajos, parts of what is now Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah have been “their place” for much longer. Ancestral Puebloans claimed it their place long before Spaniards Hernán Cortés and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in service to the crown came along with their galleons and guns.
Colonization was almost always bloody: The powerful, merciless and technologically sophisticated literally called the shots, armed as they were with an unquestionable and sacred mission to save the lost souls of heathen savages, discover their cities of gold for God's glory or die trying.
Yet the atrocities – most notably, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 against Franciscan priests and their horrific practice of Christian imperialism, the Bear River Massacre of the Northwestern band of Shoshone by the U.S. soldiers posted at Salt Lake City and abetted by Mormon colonists in 1863, considered by historians to be the worst slaughter among many over the course of the Indian War period, the middle and late 1800s, and The Long Walk toward Navajo genocide in 1864 – have not been forgotten. Tribal oral traditions have helped ensure survival of culture, languages and religions and the value of tribal sovereignty faced with what can be described as systemic extermination.
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(Parts of this report were first published in 2020 by the Canyon Country Zephyr. Its chronology has not been updated)
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The distinct Diné oral culture and spirituality that evolved after a centuries-long migration from western Canada into Dinétah (the traditional homeland of Navajos in what is now known as the Four Corners region of the Southwest) and mingling with contemporaneous inhabitants cannot be separated from the place in which it evolved, writes Utah journalist and historian Tom Harvey in “Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley: Creating the Modern Old West.”
The landscape even now sustains the Diné, The People.
It’s hardly surprising then that Utah Diné Bikéyah, a Salt Lake City-based nonprofit run mostly by Native traditionalists representing tribes from Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, would tap its rich heritage to reclaim from Anglo-American "modernism" the geographical space of Navajo origin stories – that is, from the mythology of the American West created in large part to sate a longing for an authenticity missing because of the de-humanizing effects of industrialization on everyday life.
The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago displayed ancient and "exotic" artifacts, products of desecrated burial sites and stolen ceremonial pots. It opened outlets for a relatively few privileged urban Americans to get real, vicariously at least. The work of early cultural entrepreneurs such as writer Zane Grey ("Riders of the Purple Sage" and much more) and filmmaker John Ford ("Stagecoach" and six other films shot in Monument Valley) solidified the narrative that, although contested, remains dominant.
The ghost of John Wayne exerts a pull in the battle over Bears Ears, but perhaps not as strong as it once did. In a multiracial, pluralistic society, traditionally marginalized groups are finally part of the conversation.
Jonah Yellowman
“We oppose what they’re
doing today. The monument was already established by the Creator, way before
they took action,” said Jonah Yellowman, a Utah Diné Bikéyah board member and
Navajo medicine man, during a Bureau of Land Management meeting in late March
to discuss management plans for Shash Jaa and Indian Creek, replacements of
Obama's Bears Ears unless ongoing litigation is successful. “The confluence of
the Colorado and San Juan Rivers — female and male rivers — is where offerings,
rituals, and ceremonies were created and to ignore these natural boundaries is
basically undoing the work of the Creator.”
One of the clearest examples of Utah Diné Bikéyah’s use of Navajo spirituality
as a political tool to reclaim ancestral lands was documented by Terry Tempest
Williams, an influential environmental author, instructor at the University of Utah and board member of Southern Utah Wilderness
Alliance. In a remarkable letter found on Page 290 of her
“The Hour of Land,” Williams describes two meetings: one with graduate students
from the University of Utah who were taking her humanities class and another
several weeks later with fellow activists, both at her home in Castle Valley,
Utah.
Terry Tempest Williams
Those
private meetings toward the end of 2014 coincided roughly with deliberations of
at least one big environmentally oriented nonprofit, the Conservation Lands
Foundation, to join the tribal campaign and efforts of the San Juan County
Public Lands Council, a citizens’ group tasked by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) to
come up with a plan to protect the region.
The Lands
Council’s process — a 14-member work group representing a range of interests,
county commission meetings and a half dozen open houses along the eastern
corridor of the county — was flawed in the same way much of representative
democracy is flawed. As Winston Churchill supposedly said, “Democracy is the
worst form of government, except for all the others.”
But it resulted in a practical compromise: a mix of energy-development areas,
national conservation areas and designated wilderness and closely resembled
President Barack Obama’s eventual proclamation. The plan died when Bishop’s
“grand” Public Lands Initiative died. The group could’ve formed the nucleus of
future collaborative efforts to solve county problems had it stayed together.
Williams wrote the letter to newly appointed Interior Secretary Sally Jewell,
former CEO of outdoor recreation giant REI.
Former Secretary of Interior Sally
Jewell, left, with San Juan County, Utah, rancher Heidi Redd
“Dearest Sally,” she begins.
“It is the longest night of the year. There is a clarity to the desert in winter, especially on a starlit night like tonight. I wish you were here to share the light of these candles here in Castle Valley. Forgive my informality, but I view you not just as our secretary of the Interior, but a fellow sister in conservation.”
A virtual who’s who of Utah environmentalists attended the second meeting. Williams writes, “Jonah Yellowman sat at the head of the table. To his right was Scott Groene from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, to his left was Bill Hedden from the Grand Canyon Trust.” Other guests around the table included former Canyonlands National Park Superintendent Walt Dabney, Sue Bellagamba of The Nature Conservancy, Josh Ewing of Friends of Cedar Mesa, Williams and her husband, Brooke, and Gavin Noyes, executive director of UDB.
Yellowman channeled wisdom of the ancients at both meetings. Here’s Williams’ description of the first one:
“When Jonah arrived, coyotes began howling, a rarity at nine o’clock in the morning. He entered our home with his large presence, the students sat near him, and he began his remarks with a blessing. After the blessing, he spoke about how one learns. He shared stories about how his father taught him as a young boy to bring in wood and water at night, so that in the morning when you awaken, you will have dry wood to make a fire for warmth, and water to boil a cup of tea. These practices ensure you will not be caught short in a blizzard.
“He shared with us how he became a medicine person, how the ashes spoke to him, how if one holds a crystal up to the stars for guidance and then peers back into the ashes, one can see into the soul of the person in need. He went into great detail about these matters of the spirit. One of the students, a bit uncomfortable, asked Jonah why he was sharing this personal knowledge.
" ‘It is time,’ Jonah said.”
Higher levels of Navajo leadership, notably former President Russell Begaye and newly inaugurated President Jonathan Nez, have not embraced traditional tribal spirituality as a political tool.
Begaye has been an ordained Baptist minister for most of his adult life.
He maintains a strong connection with the Baptist church, one that formed decades ago when his father followed a fellow Native American Church roadman, or pastor, to the faith, said Begaye’s brother, former New Mexico state Rep. Ray Begaye.
After graduating from UCLA in 1974 with a degree in political science, Russell Begaye earned a Master of Divinity degree from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1977. That same year, he went to work for the Georgia-based North American Mission Board, which focuses on starting up new Baptist churches. Begaye worked with the board until 2011.
W. C. “Bill” Everett, a fellow seminary graduate of Begaye, was pastor at a church in Fort Worth and said he often called upon Begaye to take his place at the pulpit when he wasn’t able. He presided over the 1997 funeral services of Begaye’s first wife, Helen Shoemaker, a Choctaw woman who attended the same seminary as Begaye and married him in 1975.
In addressing the Utah Legislature in February 2019 after it set aside a day to recognize Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, Nez invoked his Christian beliefs. “It’s just been a great legacy for those that have returned to our Heavenly Father and we have a handful of Code Talkers left … we want to honor them while they are still here with us.”
Nez’ inauguration in Window Rock, Ariz., was a mix of traditional Navajo elements and Anglo Christianity, which wasn’t received well by everyone in the audience. A traditional practitioner blessed the the new president and his vice present, as did Christian pastors.