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Group learns of Navajo culture

• An Episcopal rector tells Dougherty County Rotarians of one of the nation’s Native American subcultures.

Joshua Brown

ALBANY — During a mission trip to Arizona this summer, Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church Associate Rector Wallace Marsh and about 20 of his high school church patrons got to see a very different nation.

The group stayed in Fort Defiance Arizona, a Navajo reservation city, to do mission work, Marsh told Dougherty County Rotarians Tuesday. He described a poverty-stricken people living with a Navajo- American cultural dichotomy.

“I’ve never seen poverty like this; I’ve never seen a mindset like this in the greater 48 states,” he said.

He presented some data that showed 40 percent of Navajo live below the poverty level, 20-30 percent live without electricity and only 7 percent have beyond a high school education.

“What little economy there is is driven by trading,” Marsh said. Popular items made by the Navajo include mostly jewelry, he said.

Those Navajo that had any level of wealth were members of the armed forces. The militaristic nature of the nation helped provide the United States with much-needed help during World War II, Marsh said, when the U.S. had Navajo men serve as codetalkers to keep foreign nations from understanding intercepted U.S. communications. The 2002 movie “Windtalkers” was based on their role in the war.

Of the 290,000 Navajo in the United States, 200,000 live on the reservation, which covers the corner of four Midwestern states: Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, Marsh said.

He described a rift between the younger and older generations, with the older Navajo wanting to keep strictly to Navajo tradition while the younger generation wants to become more culturally American and still retain a Navajo identity.

Because of that rift, the streets are often littered with trash, for which a large portion of the mission’s purpose in coming was to clean up the reservation. The older generation cares deeply for nature and has a strong interaction with it while the younger generation doesn’t, he said.

“There’s a huge war going on in the Navajo nation between the old and the young,” he said. “(The younger Navajo) don’t want to live on the reservation, but they want to live the American way.”

Marsh told the group about an older medicine woman (in her 80s, he said, though he didn’t know her exact age) named Grandmother Alice who would guide the church missionaries during their stay.

He recalled a particular incident in which she had been upset because three pet wolves she owned had eaten three of her pet goats.

“She would stop on the trail and she would smell bears, she would smell snakes,” he said. “She was crazy — she could have taken me easily, and she was 80!”

Because the Navajo are a matriarchal society, the missionaries were asked to focus on the women of the bible, such as Eve, Mary of Magdalene, Ruth and Naomi as they helped with the Episcopal church’s mission on the reservation, Marsh said.

Navajo families, he said, can be as large as 20-50 members, though they include cousins as their brothers and sisters in their family counts. Each family lives on a several-acre tract of land, which usually has a hogan, or sacred home, though the family often lives in mobiles homes, Marsh said.

The challenge of getting Christianity to the people, he said, was that it was generally adapted to fit the culture. He then quoted parts of the Navajo prayer, which refers to Jesus as “young chief, God’s son in power,” as evidence of the adaptations.

When the sermons are delivered in the churches, the oldest woman will get up behind the preacher and translate the sermon into the Navajo language, Marsh said.

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