Medicine Song

Two days ago, I sat and pondered the situation my busmates and I had found ourselves in. As I drove west across the bleak and sandy desert, three Navajo men, two brothers and their uncle, bellowed the heart song of their sacred cactus. We were bringing them to some dinosaur tracks, a few miles outside of Tuba City, and had spent some good time listening to them sing the archaic songs of their tribe. They told us of their language, their home, their view of the outside world, and their ceremonial use of desert plants - rubbing on the knees, head, and chest.


We'd ventured into the Navajo reservation hoping to learn some about this people that we know well by name, but not much else. A short while after we took aboard our three hitch hikers and given them water and canned fruit, it wasn't long before we had a solid 5 Navajo tribes men, prodding us about our lives back in Texas, asking us to sing songs in exchange for theirs, sharing with us the quirks of their home, and all the while bantering in Di' neh, keeping us from really grasping the holistic picture of what the hell was happening.


The reservations are well a part of the third world. The way of life I observed in Tuba City sported obvious parallels to the Native Americans of South America. The dirt lot in the middle of town had been converted by early morning into a market square, with men, women, and children out to sell piles of used clothing, construction tools, herbal medicines and spiritual remedies, and spectacularly random assortments of tea kettles, hats, blankets, and hammers. To the side, women prepared grilled mutton, blue corn mush, stewed squash, fried bread, grilled peppers, and several spam dishes on home made and portable kitchens, all set under and onning and next to foldable tables, like the gypsy restaurants of La Doma.


It's so strikingly obvious, straight from the start, that this is another country. People live in conditions that Americans could never imagine forming a part of hour motherland. In the household that I visited, and infant lie sleeping on her back, atop a folded wool blanket with a pillow beneath her head, as all the 8 or so members of the family sat around the room they had to sit in. It's life in the third world (although the people themselves half-jokingly recognize themselves as a part of the fourth world - the onle left completely behind).

Neighborhoods are mostly void of plant life - an attribute accredited to earlier Americans' quest to find the nation's worst and most inhospitable land for the indians to inhabit. They are ghettos, with most homes, as I can tell, build by the hands of the inhabitants, of stacked stone, mud and wood. If not, they are trailers made imobile and left to disentigrate under the ware of desert heat and populants seeking refuge.


Our first night on the reservation, we picked a cliff overlooking the Hopi village of MoenKopi to sleep. From the canyon walls, we sat and gazed downwards at the many farmers pushing plows through their small family fields. The valley settlement consisted of a small hillside stack of adobe and stone houses, built long ago by the canyon's earlier inhabitants, that cascade motionlessly down the side of the canyon wall. As you reach the flat dry bed between the cliffs, the land transforms into a jigsaw pule of family farms, all small enough to be worked by a farmer and his wife and kids. The fields are irregular in shape - not perfect squares or rectangles - a testament to the laborious man hours that had been put into tilling, raising, and digging irrigation for the farmland.


The consistencies I find between these places and the farming communities of Bolivia and Peru through which I've past spotlight what I can see as the culture, philosophy, and ways of life that radiated amongst Americans before the first European ever made an appearence. It's a lost philosophy. As distinct as we would find Western thought from Oriental, Muslim, or Hindu, that is how much the roots of American society differ from our own. My fascination is in the continuity of the people's ways across the continent. That, more than anything, brings to attention the cohesive mass of many different peoples, tied together by the common thought and regard that distinguished the Americas. In the ways they think of eachother, of the Earth, of the world outside, of friends, of family, of spirituality, there always exists the same fundamental tweaks that differentiate any major world culture from another.


And this is all something the we've lost. The Navajo disparingly recognize themselves as a people with a stolen future. Imagine everything that's become of Western society since the turn of the 19th century. Think of our developments in science, humanity, spirituality, thought, and in life since then. The indians here know well that their people had a future before them that was taken away, and they were left to unknowlingly wonder what the Navajo could have become.

So our Navajo friends stepped off the bus after a full day of we're-not-quite-sure-what, but we met some people we learned well from. Our following days put us in through the Grand Canyon, and Flagstaff, AZ, where we replaced our camera and left rear shock. Hooray. We're trucken northwest towards the other part of the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas where Antoine comes flies in to meet us.