Diné youth met back in the day,”
Skeets says. Not long after, they had
their first child, RaeDawn, named
after the daughter of Canadian Amer-
ican actor and comedian Tommy
Chong. Skeets was the second born,
and three more would follow.
The family set down roots in
Va nder wagen, a n u n i ncor porated
community on the reservation just
twenty miles south of Gallup. As
the family grew, they moved from a
small hand-built house belonging to
his grandmother to a mobile home. “It
was pink,” he recalls. “It was an excit-
ing moment to see the big pink mobile
beast delivered to our plot of land. We
still have the trailer. It’s still pink.”
Childhood on the reservation was
a relatively carefree experience for
Skeets. He recalls his parents work-
ing long hours, leaving the five sib-
lings and many cousins to become
self-sufficient, which usually meant
running around barefoot most of the
summer. At lunch hour members of
the local church would come by of-
fering a free meal, but Skeets didn’t
take to the yeast rolls.
School was also relatively unevent-
ful, with all of the education provided
exclusively in English, except for in-
troductory lessons in Navajo in his
high school lang uage class. But it was
through an English class that Skeets
got a first glimpse of what would be-
come his passion: poetry.
“It was a college prep class,” he re-
calls. “The teacher brought in poems
by Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, and
other Indigenous writers. And that’s
when I thought, ‘Oh, I can do this? I
can be a writer?’”
A ye a r l at er, i n 20 0 9, he en rol led at t he
University of New Mexico (UNM) in
Albuquerque, majoring in English with
an emphasis in creative writing. Skeets
considers his time at UNM his forma-
tive years, during which he continued
t a k i ng Navajo la ng u age cla s se s. “ I cou ld
understand Navajo, but I couldn’t carry
a conversat ion i n it ,” he say s. I ron ic a l ly,
Navajo fulfilled the university’s foreign
language requirement.
He became politically active with
various campus clubs like the Diné of
UNM, the UNM Men of Color Initia-
tive, and the KIVA Club, which hosted
powwows and other cultural activities
on campus. But at the time he was still
living as a straight man and dating
women, a deception that didn’t seem
to fool anyone except him. Looking
back, he says, “Everybody knew.”
Still, his coming out was gradual.
He met another young man and
began spending more and more time
with him until an intimate encounter
was inevitable. “And it felt right,” he
recalls. This didn’t lessen the stress of
having to inform his family, however.
Skeets and his sister, RaeDawn, who
was working as a legal assistant in Al-
buquerque, drove to Vanderwagen to
visit their family, who received them
with a prayer ceremony. Skeets, twenty
years old at the time, couldn’t contain
his emotions. “I began to bawl my eyes
out, and I blurted it all out once: that
I had kissed a boy, that I had sex with
a boy, and that I thought I was gay.”
His family members didn’t bat an eye.
They all knew as well.
“My mom was still scared for me,
though,” Skeets adds. “We all knew
what happens to gay people in the cit-
ies. So she asked me to be careful.”
Back at UNM, he embraced the term
queer and interrogated his sexuality inhis poems. His double major in Native
American studies and creative writ-
ing allowed him to feel complete as a
queer Diné.
It was in a Navajo language class
that he first met Sherwin Bitsui, who
had already published two critically
acclaimed books of poetry, Shapeshift
(University of Arizona Press, 2003)
and Floodsong (Copper Canyon Press,
2009). A visiting writer, Bitsui helped
plant the seed of poetry as a lifelong
practice and encouraged Skeets to start
thinking about a graduate writing pro-
gram. “We met by chance at Sandia
Casino [in Albuquerque] not long after
that,” Skeets recalls, “and he asked me
to send him poems.”
Being seen by a successful Diné poet
was an inspiring moment for Skeets,
who would eventually enroll in Santa
Fe’s Institute for American Indian Arts
(IAIA) low-residency program. There
he was mentored further by Bitsui,
who sees the debut poet as “a visionary
and great human being,” he says. “I’m
excited for everyone to recognize the
gifts he has created for us. His poems
are necessary and urgent; he connects
worlds by revealing the deep song
within all of us.”
In the meantime Skeets had built a
friendship with another poet, Natalie
Scenters-Zapico, a graduate student in
UNM’s MFA program. “She was alsothe practical writer FIRSTSEPT OCT 2019 126Jake Skeetsquanahyazzie