Wicazo Sa Review 22.1 (2007) 77-82
Hwéeldi Bééhániih: Remembering the Long Walk
Laura Tohe
Omissions
It was like any summer day driving from the rez into Gallup on Friday afternoon to pick up groceries and supplies. The DJ on the Navajo Hour spoke of a gathering of people for a walk. When we arrived in the northern part of Gallup, he gave information about a walk and about a gathering place, something about Hwéeldi Bééhániih. I was still a child, so I asked my mother what a long walk was. Her answer did not satisfy my curiosity and only left me with more questions. It was the 1960s and people were marching in the streets, burning flags and bras, carrying signs protesting war, and advocating love and peace. I suppose some of that spirit of political protest emerged in me. Whatever the gathering was about and this long walk was for, I wanted to be a part of it. I was never told about what my ancestors went through and how they were forced out of our homelands a hundred years ago.
My only experience of walking long distances took place when our car occasionally broke down. Hitchhiking was a way of life for many people on the rez who did not have a car or had theirs break down, as ours did occasionally. One day I got out of school and hitchhiked with my mother into Gallup. As we walked past the cornfield near the FortDefiance junction, I was secretly excited to be on this road adventure. Danger and the possibility that no one would pick us did not enter my childhood mind.
On that summer day in the car, the DJ continued to give out information about Hwéeldi Bééhániih. What is Hwéeldi and why should it be remembered? Why were people gathering for it? Was it an athletic event? And why walk such a long distance? I wished to be part of it, and, if not, I wished someone in my family was. I wanted to know more about Hwéeldi, but no one around me spoke of it.
When I got to college, I came across a book of transcribed narratives of Diné people telling stories about the Long Walk and Hwéeldi, the place the soldiers named FortSumner in south-central New Mexico. All the stories came from the elders who remembered what they had heard from their families. I had never heard or been told any of these Hwéeldi stories by my family or read it in my history textbooks. The history I was taught exalted American imperialism and nationalism. Not one mention was made of the other –ism, colonialism. The Long Walk and the other death marches of indigenous peoples in the United States were omitted in all my history textbooks. The closest I came to learning of Southwest history was from a Louisiana schoolteacher who came out of retirement to teach for one year on the rez at NavajoPineJunior High School. She was the only teacher in all my public school education who taught about Popé and the Pueblo Revolt and how the Pueblo people drove the Spanish out of their homelands. Mrs. Strother pronounced the Pueblo with an emphasis on the u as "pew eblo."
My Grandmother's Stories
In college, I chose the Long Walk as my research topic for my English class. Reading these stories was like clearing the fog from the lens given me by colonialism. On my next visit home I asked my grandmother if she knew any stories of the Long Walk. My grandmother had grown up in the box canyon area at Lupton, Arizona, near the New Mexico and Arizona state line. Our Tsénahabiłnii clan lived and raised their families on private land deeded and signed to them by a former U.S. president. Shimásání said she did not know of any family stories of the Long Walk, but she told of an attempted kidnapping by a Mexican raider who captured one my great-great-grandmothers, who managed to escape and walk home. She knew one story that someone had told her. The storyteller was not from the Lupton area.
She was a young girl and lived with her mother, father, and her brother. One day the soldiers came and the family ran away. They hid wherever they could. The next day the girl went home to see if her parents were still alive. When she got home her home was burned down and the place was still smoking. Then she saw the heads of her mother and father on the fence posts. The girl left after that.
Shimásání did not say what happened to the brother or the girl. That image of the beheaded parents remains embedded in my memory. She also said some of the Diné people buried their pottery and jewelry in caves in Tséyi´, Canyon de Chelly, and in other places, because they kept hopes of returning someday from Hwéeldi, where they were imprisoned from 1864 to 1968 by the U.S. government. Sometimes Diné people would come across those buried valuables after the wind had blown away the top layers of sand.
One time a man showed me one of those potteries. It was really old. What did he do with it? I don't know. He said he found it near his house. He thinks it might have belonged to the people who went to Hwéeldi and never came back.
Finding such items, one had to be careful, because they might belong to the Anaasází, the former inhabitants who had built and lived in the cliff dwellings all over the Southwest. We were warned by our grandparents not to take any of the things they left behind. And even though they no longer lived in the area, the pottery shards and other artifacts still belonged to them. We, who came later, had no right to them.
The Diné, the People, define the idea of belonging and ownership differently from Euro-western definitions. Diné see themselves as belonging to clans and related clans, thus one grows up knowing one is part of an extended family, whether one has actually met them or not. If one needed help or advice, one could depend on one's clan for assistance. In this way one could call on a grandparent or older relative who knows stories and possesses cultural knowledge. Sometimes stories might be withheld until one earned them, paid for them, or could prove oneself worthy of receiving a story. While the people might know stories, they could choose to not tell them because they are too horrendous and could cause harm when remembered. One must carefully use thoughts and words, for they have great potential. I came to learn that this might have caused the People to withhold stories of the Long Walk; the pain and suffering the ancestors endured was so nearly unbearable that they named FortSumner, where they were starved, raped, exploited, and killed, Hwéeldi: the place of extreme hardship where the Diné nearly took their last breath. The response to such death and violence was to not speak of it in any casual way. My father, who had been a Code Talker during World War II, never spoke of war and what he had lived through. "It's nothing to talk about," he would say, and he scolded my brothers for "playing army." In fact, my family did not know he had been a Code Talker until 1983, when he went to Washington, D.C., to receive a medal for his service.
Run and Hide
As I read the stories in the book, I learned of the atrocities and the body count and how the soldiers shot the elderly and young women with children who couldn't keep up as they walked the more than three hundred miles to Hwéeldi. Trails of blood led from the Diné homeland to Hwéeldi. Those who were fortunate enough to escape Kit Carson and his soldiers hid wherever they could and protected themselves however they could.
Shimásání told me another story:
Back then the people were trying to escape the soldiers. They used to hide wherever they could. It was really bad. Sometimes the mothers had to smother their babies to make them stop crying so the soldiers wouldn't hear them and get caught. That's how mean the soldiers were to our people.
These are the kinds of stories that were omitted in the textbooks, but the older people remembered how violent and dangerous that era was. Some hid out on top of Fortress Rock in Tséyi´, hoping to outlast the soldiers camped below. They sneaked down at night to gather food and supplies. In those days, running and hiding was part of life, a way of survival.
My mother used to tell about growing up and how when the men came home intoxicated, the women and children would grab their blankets and run and hide. The next morning they would return to find the men sobered up. Once my younger brother and I ran out the back door and hid in the ditch when we saw headlights coming up the road, because we thought our uncle was coming home drunk. Some ran away from their Mexican captors and from Hwéeldi. Indian children ran away from boarding schools and parochial schools. When the Christians came with their pamphlets to my uncle's house, he ran to the outhouse before they could knock on his door. Years later when I attended DinéCollege in Tsaile, I met a woman who said, when she was growing up, she was threatened with being captured by a man who stole children. I recalled my aunt who made us kids behave by threatening us with "Man," who captured children in his bag and went away with them never to be seen again. What was remarkable was that we had grown up in different parts of the reservation, at least a hundred miles apart, and we knew the same story of the kidnapper who stole children. More than a century had passed and we were still imitating the behavior of our ancestors. Was "Man" the Mexican raider who kidnapped women and children? Was he the white soldiers who marched into the homeland with knives and guns? Was he the policeman who kidnapped children from their parents to take them to boarding school? Given our history, maybe it was not so remarkable after all. The stories of "Man" are part of our collective memory, and our response was to run and hide.
The Next Generation
I never found out if any of my ancestors were on the Long Walk or if they escaped Hwéeldi by hiding from Kit Carson's soldiers. I do know that during the era of Indian Removal, as in wartime, women and children are most vulnerable. I recently received a small women's studies grant to search the archives and military records for the kinds of information that were kept on women and children. Most importantly, I wanted to know what kept their spirits up. The records kept about FortSumner yielded very little, except notes about the numbers of women and children at the fort and the high rate of STDs, which was startling. Little in the records spoke of the incarceration of women and children, so I turned to the oral history.
During my childhood, my grandmother told me stories. As I drove her home, she talked about the people who lived along the way home or what happened at a particular place, long ago or recently. When I was pregnant with my first child, we walked up the dirt road above her house, and she told of how women gave birth before hospitals, and how one of my great grandmothers was a sought-after midwife because she knew how to turn a breech baby into the correct position for birthing. She told how the sash belt was used during pregnancy and childbirth. These stories were necessary for me, because they placed me within the continuum of my family and clan. She told me other things, too, such as how I should avoid anything that could bring harm to me and the new life growing inside me. Shimásání and her stories created in me a sense of belonging to a greater community that values fertility and bringing forth the next generation, with female relatives upholding and supporting new mothers. Were such stories told to the young women at Hwéeldi?
When the people emerged and were birthed into the Glittering World, they came through the umbilical center of the earth mother, Nahasdzáán. She provides for all living things; she sustains life. We are her children, biyázhí daniidlí. The Diné philosophy teaches that we humans depend on Nahasdzáán and that she must be cared for and respected; our survival depends on it. After the umbilical stem falls off the baby, it is buried in the earth near the child's home. This ensures that the child will never become lost, that the child will remain tied to Nahasdzáán. These beliefs remained in the minds and hearts of the people who were forced out of the homeland. Even though they were imprisoned hundreds of miles away, the land within the four sacred mountains was still there for them. It held their birth stems. It is a place chosen for them by the Holy People where Sisnaajiní rises to the east, Tsoodził rises to the south, Dook´osłííd rises to the west, and Dibé Ntsaa rises to the north. The stories of time immemorial are full of references to these mountains, and so are the ceremonial songs and prayers. These are the mountains that would guard the Diné, where prosperity and growth could exist, where hózhó, spiritual balance, could prevail—until the Spanish, the Mexicans, and the American soldiers arrived.
I believe it was the mountains that sustained the hearts and spirits of the Diné and helped to bring them back. The mountains resonate with spirituality and are part of the stories of the mythic migration. Tsoodził, MountTaylor near Grants, New Mexico, was one of the first mountains the people saw upon their return. I have heard how some were so happy and grateful to see it that they died right there. Such is considered a good death. Upon their return, the Diné knew the world had changed and they would have to make changes to survive.
What is Hwéeldi Bééhániih and why should it be remembered? Although the Long Walk happened more than a hundred years ago, it is still with us. We must know what happened and we must remember. It is part of Diné history, as it is part of American history. The Long Walk, the Trail of Tears, the Dakota incarceration, and other death marches like it are part of America's holocaust, and each deserves a place within the larger story of America. To gloss over or to omit the costs of colonialism is an injustice, not only to those whose ancestors were imprisoned but to the future generations who will want to know the past. To speak of these injustices is a way to heal from these wounds. These stories hold connections to current U.S. foreign policies that have already deeply impacted this country.
What is Hwéeldi Bééhániih and why should it be remembered? Hwéeldi Bééhániih speaks of mythic ties and informs the Diné of their past and their connections to tribal sovereignty. We must learn the stories and we must remember them.
Laura Tohe is Diné and lived at Crystal, New Mexico. She was raised by her relatives at Tohatchi and CoyoteCanyon. She has written and coauthored four books. The most recent, Tseyi, Deep in the Rock, is listed as one of the 2005 Southwest Books of the Year by Tucson Pima Library. She writes essays, stories, and children's plays that have appeared in the United States, Canada, and Europe. She is associate professor in the English Department at ArizonaStateUniversity.