Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty: Navajos, Hózho, and Track

Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty Photo courtesy of artist Navajo Religion, by Douglas Johnson, 2006. Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty Navajos, Hózh=, and Track Work Jay Youngdahl Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 2011 Copyright © 2011 Utah State University Press All Rights Reserved Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322-3078 www.USUPress.org Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free, recycled paper ISBN: 978-0-87421-853-4 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-87421-858-9 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-87421-854-1 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Youngdahl, Jay. Working on the railroad, walking in beauty : Navajos, Hózh=, and track work / Jay Youngdahl. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-87421-853-4 (cloth) — ISBN 978-0-87421-858-9 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-87421-854-1 (e-book) 1. Navajo Indians—Employment. 2. Navajo Indians—Social conditions. 3. Navajo Indians—Religion. 4. Railroad construction workers—Southwest, New—History. 5. Railroads—Southwest, New—Employees—History. 6. Southwest, New—Race relations. 7. Southwest, New—Politics and government. I. Title. E99.N3Y74 2011 979.1004’9726—dc23 2011034427 An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978·1·60732·717·2. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. Contents Foreword, Michael D. Jackson viii Preface xi Introduction 1 An introduction to the Navajo Nation 2 Navajo railroad work 6 The legal background of Navajo railroad work 9 Language, space, and time 13 “Pastoral life” and “modern civilization” 18 The fixed and the fluid 22 The meaning and importance of Navajo strategies 24 One: Life on the Tracks 27 Meeting Jerry Sandoval 27 Wage labor and the Navajo 30 The work of railroad trackmen 33 Jerry Sandoval’s experience 39 Two: Religion on the Rez 44 A Pentecostal family 44 Religious practices on the Navajo Nation 45 Traditional Navajo religion 46 The Native American Church 53 Christianity on the rez 56 A short discussion with Harry Walters 62 The centrality of hózh= 65 vi Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty David Sangster—A conversation about the interplay of religious traditions 67 Three: A Visit with a Medicine Man 70 Meeting John Sandoval 70 John’s work as a medicine man 72 The Long Walk 76 John Wayne on the wall 79 Four: Adversaries and Advocates 82 The Bureau of Indian Affairs: Friend or foe to the Navajo worker? 82 Efforts at “de-culturating” the Navajo worker 88 The Unitarian Service Committee’s project with Navajo railroad workers 93 Five: How Did Navajo Men Come to Work for the Railroads? 103 Tom Caydaitto—Using the Blessingway and the Enemyway 103 A visit to Chicago 105 The impetus from World War II 108 The Railroad Retirement Board develops a system for Navajo railroad work 111 The RRB implements its manpower system for the railroads 113 The system matures 118 Six: Railroads, Trading Posts, and a Fatal Challenge to the RRB’s System 123 Leroy Yazzie—“Go round up some Navajos” 123 The railroads take full advantage 124 The RRB works to please the railroads 126 Contents vii Sparks fly between the RRB and the railroads 129 Issues at the trading posts 132 An important journalist takes note 135 The legal service lawyers enter 138 The end of the system 141 Seven: In the Workers’ Words 144 Tom Martinez—Following in the footsteps of the Holy People 144 The Pintos—Husband and wife healers 146 Dickie and Marilyn Sandoval—A family that followed the tracks 153 Joe Mace—Finding a personal military connection 156 The Spencers—“My crystal is like the white man’s computer” 159 Eight: Anchoring and Adaptability, Fixed yet Fluid 163 Afterword 173 Selected Bibliography 174 Index 181 Foreword I met Jay Youngdahl at Harvard Divinity School in 2004. Jay had taken a sabbatical from his work as a labor lawyer to consider sev- eral pressing questions that had arisen in the course of his career. In our numerous conversations, the Navajo experience held a par- ticular fascination for Jay. It was not only the heartrending history of dispossession and violence that Navajos had endured as a nation or the high rates of life-threatening injuries that Navajo workers suffered on the tracks of the southwest United States. It was the cultural invisibility of these people—written out of the consciousness of contemporary Americans, and often written off—that Jay refused to accept. Legal representation was well and good, but if these people were to be made more visible, Jay would have to avoid the pitfalls of construing them as victims and explore lifeways that demanded deep familiarity and firsthand knowledge. Above all, he would need to give voice to the views and visions of Navajos themselves. Jay chose to pursue this project in a divinity school because he was convinced that the ritual and religious life of Navajo railroad workers was basic to understanding how they responded to the haz- ards of their work; sustained themselves during long periods away from home; achieved a sense of emotional and intellectual equilib- rium in the face of danger, degradation, and adversity; and remained resilient despite injury, impoverishment, and loss. As Jay observes, there is no word in Navajo that directly translates our word religion. Even words like cult and spiritual- ity suggest activities and orientations that transcend the everyday, referring to extrasocial domains or “higher” powers. For Navajos, however, life is a constant struggle to countermand largely external forces that threaten the integrity of both persons and communities. viii Foreword ix One accomplishes this perpetual remaking or reordering of the world through actions that reintegrate, balance, bind, and replen- ish. Perhaps the term existential best covers the many situations in which this struggle for integrated and balanced being is enacted and experienced. But we have to be sensitive to the culturally spe- cific ways in which Navajos understand existence—the emphasis they give to connectedness with ancestors, land, and language; the creative integration they seek of old and new lifeways; and the deep sense of responsibility they feel for keeping a world of centrifugal forces, plural values, multiple personalities, and differ- ent religious traditions in balance. Yet even in practices that might appear strange to us—railroad workers applying corn pollen before starting work, filling their bunk cars with the smoke from aro- matic herbs, taking peyote, or carrying “medicine pouches”—we may discern echoes of our own precautionary actions in preparing for a perilous journey, a new undertaking, or a difficult encounter (though in embarrassment we might dismiss these as superstitions). Indeed, some of the most arresting moments in Jay’s conversations with Navajo friends are when the seemingly exotic proves to be familiar—the Navajos’ impish sense of humor, the sharing of a smoke, the trembling or laying on of hands, the recourse to prayer even when biomedical treatment has been sought, the reci- tation of an origin myth of creation in which order is imposed on chaos, the use of song and chant to lift one’s spirits, the invocation of nature as a way of drawing the beauty of the physical world into the social spaces of hogan or house. I think here of Buffy Sainte- Marie’s compelling lines: You think I have visions because I am an Indian. I have visions because there are visions to be seen. Some might have difficulty accepting such an assertion or taking seriously the words of the Navajo healer who told Jay that “crystals serve the same purpose as the white man’s computers.” But such x Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty views seem mistaken or irrational to us only when we focus on the essence rather than the outcome of the claim. For it is not the essen- tial difference between a crystal and a computer that is at stake, but the capacity of both objects, when in the right hands, to produce positive effects in the consciousness of someone who is ailing or alienated—to restore a sense of confidence and hope, renew one’s faith that life is worth living, and feel that one is in good hands. Faith may have no place in science, but in the face of all that we do not know and can never know, faith in the guise of the absurd is an inevitable dimension of all human existence. As one man told Jay, “Your belief is your pride.” In the same vein, Navajos who attended Native American Church ceremonies felt that attending these meet- ings always “helped them out.” As with other Navajo religious practices, faith in the efficaciousness of the activities seems crucial to their success. Without faith in their own capacity to endure, it is hard to imagine how Navajos could have survived a history of colo- nial violence, vilification, and dispossession, or the social violence that still marginalizes them. With cultural resourcefulness and an eclectic spirit, a determination to retain their autonomy in the face of forces that have stolen, eroded, and denied them any real determination of their own destiny, and a resilience that often defies belief, Navajos—along with other Native American peoples—have kept their integrity and assured their continuity. In documenting some of the hardest times that Navajos have been through, and interlacing archival research with the stories of indi- vidual Navajos themselves, Jay Youngdahl has restored one of the many missing pieces to the jigsaw map of America, making visible the discrimination, misunderstandings, programs, acts, regulations, and laws that, even now, circumscribe or compromise the rights of Native American citizens, while testifying to the struggle for well- being in the shadowlands of America.

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