One Utah

Last night, I watched The Long Walk: Tears of the Navajo on KUED - a history of the forced relocation of thousands of Navajo from their homeland to Bosque Redondo.  If I’m reading correctly, the show is a production of KUED which is great - it’s time we uncover these parts of our history, that we refuse to remain ignorant of what was done as often as not in our names.

As part of the show, they interviewed a number of Navajo - historians, poets, average persons.  For the Navajo, the forced relocation is a very real, very present part of their history, something few of the rest of us know anything about.  The Navajo people were shaken to their core by the events of 1864 - then found themselves in over of a century of Kafkaesque torment as their children were shipped away - as far as Pennsylvania - to be educated in white run boarding schools where they were punished for speaking Navajo.  The Indian School in Brigham City was such an intitution. 

The boarding schools were a century long war against Navajo identity.  Many of the boarding schools were open until the 1980s and although, as the show pointed out, the boarding schools’ legacy is a complex one, the attack on Navajo language was singularly cruel.  Language carries culture - the deliberate attempt to stamp out native languages was part of a larger war against Native American identity.  (FWIW, they interviewed several native speakers of Navajo and I was struck by the beauty the Navajo language.)  Many of the boarding administrators saw their job as “civilizing” the students in their care - which in their minds meant stamping out their Native American identity and replacing it - pictures of Native students in proper Victorian dress were considered signs of success.  For the students, the schools were uniquely horrifying experience - places of brutality, inhumanity, loneliness and disease.  There were stories of students running away form the schools and being killed by weather or run down by trains. 

The producers interviewed graduates of these schools.  They told stories of being beaten for speaking Navajo, of having bars of soap shoved in their mouths for daring to utter a word of their own language, of having their names forcibly changed.  One person compared it to boot camp - you were destroyed in the name of being rebuilt.  The former students talked about the ways in which the negative experiences of the Indian Schools are still with them - feelings of shame, sense of loss of identity, the emotional scars of loneliness and dislocation.

Several of the interviewees began stories with phrases like, “My grandmother told me about what it was like to be on the Long Walk . . .” 

When we think about history, it sometimes feels as if it is a long way away, but in fact, it is very much present, shaping the lives of each of us in ways we often fail to consider.  The tragic history of the Navajo is uniquely their own, but it reminds me that history is present.  How many of us grew up grandparents who lived through the Depression and World War Two?  How many of the attitudes of today’s leadership were shaped in the crucible of the Vietnam war debates?  How many of our attitudes and beliefs have been shaped by history and we’re not even aware of it? 

This entry was posted Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 9:40 am and is filed under Bullying, Civil liberties Infringement, Democracy, Equality, Genocide, Human Rights, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.