The Nizhoni Diné

In 2001, I made a move that changed my life.  I left the city that I had lived in for 25 years and moved out to the Navajo Reservation.  Moving from the clean, hectic and brightly lit city with its malls, street lights and miles and miles of homes to the austere lands of the Diné, where the communities may have had one small strip mall and were comprised of small clusters of homes lightly peppered around it, was a stark change.  A few may know that living on a reservation is hard, having some awareness of the distinct poverty that many of the tribal nations face.  As much as I learned to somewhat deal with the frequently grisly scenes of dead wild dogs strewn across roadways, the poverty surrounding me was something that never ceased to move me.   While I lived there, the average income per family was a little over $6000 a year.  Long before homelessness due to the 2007-8 financial collapse occurred in the rest of the nation, the Diné struggled with their own housing crisis with estimates of a shelter shortfall being as high as 100,000 homes needed on the Navajo Reservation. 


Now you may think that the level of homelessness on the Navajo Reservation because of these figures would have been atrocious.  If this was the average state in my own city, it wouldn't be difficult to imagine slews of people sleeping, huddled in dirty sleeping bags along the streets.  Not out there, never out there.  In my 7 years of living on the Navajo Reservation, I only ever saw one homeless person--just one.  It wasn't active policing that kept people from sleeping alongside the sparse buildings.  It was simply that the Diné did not normally allow people to go homeless in the first place. The one homeless man that I met was an exception, not the rule, and for him to be homeless out there was an unequivocally strong testimony to the likelihood that he had done something truly terrible.  For the Diné, the sentiment is that you take care of your own, regardless of mental stability, alcoholism, drug use, or physical violence.  These were all things that the Diné families grappled with, sometimes individually and sometimes collectively.  If a family member should lose his job and home, then there was no question of that person becoming homeless.  They would be moved directly in with another family member, regardless of room to spare.  In my own experience, I lived for 3 months in a three bedroom home with 5 adults and two children.  Some similarly sized homes that I knew of had upwards to a dozen living within them.  Homelessness was not something that you allowed family to encounter.  Homelessness within the family was shameful for the family as a whole.  Instead of focusing on the homeless person, the anger and blame would fall on the family--how could you let your brother, sister, mother, niece or nephew live out in the open?  What is wrong with you that you would be so cold?

On the Navajo Reservation, even for families whose homes had been filled to their maximum capacity, there were still solutions.  I knew of families that lived in shacks or hogans without heat, electricity, or running water.  During the job slump after 9/11, I personally knew a fellow bilagaana--white man, Dave, and his Navajo family that lived for two years in a dirt floor hogan on his wife's family property.   Dave had been a systems administrator up until he lost his job and then, his employer owned home.  With jobs normally at a shortage out there, it had taken him nearly a year to find another.  Unemployment on the Navajo Reservation and within its surrounding border towns was huge.  When an Applebees restaurant opened up in relatively nearby Gallup, NM, the manager was swamped with thousands of applications on the first day alone.  My friend Dave was competing with thousands for the rare job while he, his wife and two children lived in that dirt floor hogan.  I remember him saying once to me that it was unbelievably hard. That if it had been simply up to him, he would've tried finding a job elsewhere but this was where his wife's family was.  This was where his children's tribe was.  Even when he had looked regardless of these motives to stay, there had been nothing.  He had no choice but to stay and comfort himself with a dim awareness that this was once the norm for us all.  If they could do it, so could he and he did.  He was grateful that he had the shelter of the hogan and a stove to build a fire in.  If he had been anywhere else, he and his children would have been living out of a car.  He was grateful for having shelter, that he was living someplace where people cared.

In contrast, we walk through city streets, ignoring children and old alike huddled for warmth during the winter months against buildings and on sidewalks.  We willfully look away to ignore the old man sleeping on a park bench.   Perhaps somewhere the reality of their existence rattles our cages and makes us wonder, where is your family?  Most of the time, I think we just largely shun them as if their homelessness was an infectious disease.  We live in times of nearly unprecedented homelessness due to years of job loss and years of foreclosures.  We are confronted with an issue that the Diné have long struggled with as the number of homes foreclosed tops 1,000,000 in the last few years.  Families, children, adults, individuals, the elderly--these, too, now comprise the homeless, not simply drug addicts, the mentally ill or alcoholic.  Unlike the Diné, we leave them on the streets.  We turn our backs as we watch them evicted from their homes.  We provide no shelter while their shelter is taken away.  Why is it that we cannot stop ourselves for one moment and see them for the people that they are?  Cannot we not find another way instead of condemn them to an even worse struggle from which they may not be able to survive to climb out of?  Why is it that we have empty homes and yet so many without a place to live when the Diné had so few homes and nearly everyone had a place to live? 

Dinehtah.  The land of the Diné.  The land of the people with its abject poverty and grisly scenes of roadway carnage.   Austere, dry, and at times painful to see, their world is far more beautiful than our own.  With no concept of property, they provide shelter.  With no concept of property and all the concepts of love and what it means to be a family or a community, they provide shelter while we turn our backs.  Nizhoni Diné, beautiful people in comparison to our own greedy ugliness. I would never return to Dinehtah for reasons personal and all my own.  Yet, if I could, I would bring this little part of Dinehtah here with me for I cannot, with moral conscience, look away.  Looking through the eyes of the Diné has unalterably changed my worldview.  No longer simply bilagaana, not quite Diné, I can only hope that somewhere within my own people, we find our way back to being nizhoni Diné--beautiful people.

In beauty I walk

With beauty before me, I walk

With beauty behind me, I walk

With beauty above me, I walk

With beauty around me, I walk

It has become beauty again

Hózhóogo naasháa doo
Shitsijí’ hózhóogo naasháa doo
Shikéédéé hózhóogo naasháa doo
Shideigi hózhóogo naasháa doo
T’áá altso shinaagóó hózhóogo naasháa doo
Hózhó náhásdlíí’
Hózhó náhásdlíí’
Hózhó náhásdlíí’
Hózhó náhásdlíí’

Today I will walk out, today everything negative will leave me

I will be as I was before, I will have a cool breeze over my body.

I will have a light body, I will be happy forever, nothing will hinder me.

I walk with beauty before me. I walk with beauty behind me.

I walk with beauty below me. I walk with beauty above me.

I walk with beauty around me. My words will be beautiful.

In beauty all day long may I walk.

Through the returning seasons, may I walk.

On the trail marked with pollen, may I walk.

With dew about my feet, may I walk.

With beauty before me, may I walk.

With beauty behind me, may I walk.

With beauty below me, may I walk.

With beauty above me, may I walk.

With beauty all around me, may I walk.

In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.

In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.

My words will be beautiful.