ONE WAY OF LIFE
A
s a kid, I never rooted for the cowboys.
Stick on a Western and I was hoping
the stagecoaches get robbed, John
Wayne flips sides and Tonto rips off the Lone
Ranger’s ridiculous mask and rides off to
the sunset alone. But as I grew up, I realised
those Hollywood Indians are like cardboard
cutouts. I wanted to get past the good, the bad
and the ugly clichés. I wanted the real thing.
But for that I had to go to the source.
The Navajo Nation is a 27,000sq mile
sovereign state in the high desert of Arizona,
New Mexico and Utah. It’s the largest tribal
reservation in the country, almost half the
size of England, and home to more than
100,000 Navajo — or Dine (‘The People’), as
they call themselves; many of whom still
embrace their traditional way of life.
But being in the reservation was strange.
A few miles away, there were shopping
malls, drive-throughs and supermarkets
stacked with food. But here I found weather-
torn shacks, broken farms and people living
without running water or mains electricity.
It was like falling through the cracks of
the modern world. And that’s the thing. In
the richest, most powerful country on the
planet, finding entire communities living in
Third World conditions is the equivalent of
finding a horse and carriage lining up next
to Lewis Hamilton in the Grand Prix. It just
shouldn’t happen.
But there’s pride here too. I spent a week
living on the reservation and, far away
from the casinos and tourist shows, found
people still living the old ways, tending
flocks of paper-thin sheep and dry farming
the parched grasslands with heirloom
seeds of squash, bean and corn. I hiked
to 1,000-year-old cliff dwellings, touched
ancient petroglyphs and slept under the stars
in the backcountry of Monument Valley, the
red rock mesas glowing like silver totems in
the milky light.
I also found resilience. Over and over
again, the people I met told me the greatest
threat America’s first nations face today is
cultural assimilation. Maintaining a native
identity, and traditional way of life in the
face of a dominant US ideology is a near
insurmountable challenge. But, nevertheless,
I found that struggle everywhere. Sometimes
Despite grinding poverty, resilience and a strong sense of identity is evident
on a Native American tribal reservation in the Arizona desertILLUSTRATION: JACQUI OAKLEYBritish travel writer Aaron Millar ran away from London
in 2013 and has been hiding out in the Rocky
Mountains of Boulder, Colorado, ever since.
@AaronMWriterfaint, but always strong and patient too.
“It’s just endurance,” Ira Vandever, a young
Navajo community leader, told me. “We’ll
outlast them.”
But the thing that changed my life was
meeting the medicine man. His face was
weathered; his sharp blue eyes fixed me with
a hawk-like stare. As I sat before him, he
spread a pile of hot coals on the compacted
red-earth floor of his hogan, the traditional
log-and-mud home of the Navajo, and twisted
a translucent crystal before the flames. By
looking at the coals in this way it’s believed
images will appear to help him divine the
nature of a patient’s affliction. “It’s like an
X-ray machine,” his nephew translated. “He
sees your life reflected in the fire.”
Afterwards, he placed a shiny black
arrowhead in his hand and fanned me with
golden eagle feathers, palming cedar smoke
over my body to bless and purify me. Then the
chanting began, a low rumble that started as a
whisper and got louder and more intense with
every minute. He told me to kneel before the
fire as he sang, to tell the fire why I’m on this
Earth, what my purpose is. I’ve never really
prayed before, never been to church, but there,
among the dust devils and the last feathers of
the setting sun, I found myself asking simple
things: to be a better man, a better father.
Suddenly, I heard my name called and a flood
of emotion washed over me. The medicine
man smiled. “This power is strong,” he said.
“It comes from the Earth.”
That’s why I never root for the cowboys.
Because where I live, in the foothills of the
Rocky Mountains, car parks and fast food
joints stand where once was the hunting
grounds of the Ute, Arapaho and Cheyenne;
herds of buffalo tens of thousands strong
thundered the high plains. Because where
now there are coal mines, once rivers ran
clean. Because the real America is Native
America too, echoing across the fabric of
progress like the memory of an old song.
Because the Indians are still here, fighting,
not just in the movies.48 natgeotraveller.co.uk
VIEW FROM THE USA // AARON MILLAR
SMART TRAVELLER