In the summer of 1955 Holbrook was a small Arizona town on the main East-West U.S. highway between Flagstaff, AZ and the Arizona border with New Mexico. Not much has changed.  The town is bordered by Navajo Nation reservation land, occupied by our country’s largest registered Indian tribe and is the largest reservation by square miles.  

God, ever mysterious in His ways and reasons, had ‘called’ my Dad to save the Navajo. When my Dad was called, as he often was, it meant that we all moved.  God never failed, but success could look like failure in human terms. As it turned out, God had neglected to inform the Navajo that help was coming, so we arrived unannounced, and mostly ignored by the Navajo people.  God had also failed to coordinate our mission with the local Catholic Church, the LDS, and the U.S. Society of Friends, those known affectionately as Mackerel Snappers, Mormons, and Quakers.  Those organizations had already claimed most of the spiritual turf on the Rez, and had no apparent interest in sharing the mission field  with a self-anointed, self-appointed, evangelical “voice crying in the wilderness.”

Our initial stay in town started, as all stays did back then, in one of the independently owned motels on the main business loop of the main highway, during which time we looked for cheaper, more permanent housing.  “Permanent” in my family was a vaguely defined term which meant between 6-weeks and two-years, though two-year stays were rare.  After two or three days in the motel we found a spartan rental on the edge of downtown, South of the Southern Pacific railroad tracks where freight and passenger trains rocketed through town without slowing.  Standing in what passed as our front door, one could see the State Route highway 77 overpass, and hear the traffic’s tires on its seams.  I don’t recall what the inside of the rental looked like.  I do recall the city police regularly visiting a sometimes noisy drunken Indian neighbor who was vigorously abusing his wife and at least one kid on a regular basis, and made a huge to-do whenever his lady locked him out.  It takes a majority practice, and minority exceptions to create a stereotype...in fairness, we would only look at individuals, instead of subsets within larger groups.

I pretty much had the run of the small downtown.  One favorite activity was to stand between the main rail line and the loading dock of an abandoned warehouse as the trains rushed by, their draft almost pulling me under the speeding cars.  But, mostly I just explored, in that aimless way that a rodent explores its surroundings.  I don’t recall that I ever did anything that should have caused trouble for me or anyone else. My motivation was just youthful curiosity, one event just leading to the next in an aimless fashion.

On a certain Sunday, as I remember soon after arriving in town, we left home and headed North in our dull green four-door 1949 Hudson, which we affectionately had named “The Tank.”  I remember seeing the spires of Monument Valley from my low vantage point of The Tank’s back-seat, but I think that is likely a false memory which has been mixed in to my Sunday memory in error from a different day.  Back then the trip out took much longer than the trip back, and I remember that the trip home after our morning was pretty quick. 

I don’t recall how we happened to be invited for a home church service in a traditional Navajo hogan.  I think adults assume that kids are paying attention to conversations and somehow glean information from what they hear, but I can assure you I was not one of those kids.  Adult-speak formed a low, rolling rumble of background noise in my presence, unless I was guilty of something and anxiously listening to find out if I had been discovered.  I was not listening to adults talking unless and until someone spoke my name.  So when we pulled up to a small wood and mud structure, a pickup truck parked beside it, I became vaguely interested because this had never before happened.  

Having heard us arrive, the occupants of the hogan streamed out to greet us, though in a quiet, almost dignified fashion, led by an adult male wearing what I now know to be an expensive “cowboy” hat.  The irony of an Indian wearing a cowboy hat was lost on me at the time. I don’t recall what the rest of the family looked like but I do remember that the family did not resemble the town Indians in appearance, except in skin color.  This family appeared to belong here, whereas the town Indians always seemed to me out of place. I don’t recall whether this was a three-generation family or not.

When we stepped through the low door, I was immediately amazed by the visual feast of colors and texture.  Every inch of walls and what was no doubt a dirt floor, was covered with weaving and tapestries. They were, as it turned out, the families heritage and endowment, handed down over the years to sons and daughters.  The hands of their ancestors had chosen the dyes to make these colors, indeed grown the sheep which produced the wool, and had woven this art from designs deeply embedded in the generations, and yet the weaver had left their individual marks while observing the traditions. This family on this day could tell the story of each piece of heritage which hung on their octagonal walls, or covered the desert-dirt floor.

As I look back now I know that this Sunday morning was my beginning of seeing Indians as individuals, not just a social "problem" and generality, not just as a source of guilt and anger for white society.  Had I been more astute I would have known that this place, this traditional home, this desert, and this history was why this family so clearly belonged here and now, not just to some vague time in the past.  All of that thought came later, most recently as a behavior therapist for an agency trying to improve the mental health of Tohono O’odham People, the nation’s 2nd largest tribe by membership and land-area.

The White man didn’t cause all of the issues and unproductive behavior of the Indians.  One of my native clients pointed out to me that the “noble savage” is just another mistaken white view of native reality.  As he put it, “There’s nothing more noble about Indians than anyone else!  We’re as fucked up as anyone, and we were enslaving and killing each other, beating our wives, and stealing from each other long before the white man showed up, illegally occupied and settled our land, and tried to wipe us out!”

But, on that Sunday in the Summer of 1955 a small fissure formed in one small developing brain, at that time in one life when that brain is forming, and all the dots are yet to be connected into almost irreversible values and beliefs.  And, on the ride back to Holbrook in the back-seat of The Tank something had shifted, only slightly, and that shift would allow the next possibility to become a question seeking an answer, instead of a conclusion, and simple answer for a couplex issue.  And, one day, far in the future an adult brain would ask in effect, “If we are wrong about that what else did we get wrong?” 

Maybe Custer did die for our sins.