THE NAVAJO HEARTLAND

Author: By Marjorie Harvey, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, August 2, 1998

Page: M1

Section: Travel

It is the new name of the Cameron Elementary School she attends on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona. The words, written with accents and slashed letters, mean Grey Mountain, the purple peak looming on the horizon beyond the classroom window.

I bare teeth, tuck tongue, and seek to imitate her sounds exactly.

``No,'' says Amanda, ``thats not right.''

It is my fourth try, and I give up. I can get by in French or Spanish, but will never master Navajo. No wonder that when the United States used Navajo to transmit secret messages during World War II, the Japanese failed to crack the code.

Perhaps it is the mystery still shrouding Native American ways that has drawn friend Peggy and me to the Navajo heartland to assist at the Cameron School on an Elderhostel Service Program.

On our Boston-to-Phoenix flight, the man in the next seat said, ``You coming out to golf?''

While golf was the last thing on my mind, the question reminded me that Arizona is a state with a climate, landscape, and lifestyle for everyone. On our 50th wedding anniversary, my husband and I paddled down the Rio Grande, the Great River, with our grown children, camping on beachheads below awesome canyon walls. On another visit, we went south to Nogales and across the border to build a Habitat for Humanity house on a Mexican hillside.

This time, Peggy and I leave the city that the Navajo named Phoenix, or ``hot place,'' to head for Flagstaff aboard a sliver of a plane that barely skims forest and desert, mesa and mountain. The terrain, so unlike green and enclosed New England, sets my pulse to pounding. We are entering another geography as well as another culture.

On the way to the reservation, we are to visit my painter friend Adele, formerly a neighbor in Stow, Mass., in her wide-windowed house on the edge of Sedona. From Flagstaff's pristine mini-airport, we drive a rented car through snowy forests of pinon pine and plunge down into Oak Creek Canyon. The road snakes beside the creek through a breath-catching gorge of rose and purple cliffs.

By the time we reach Sedona, the scenery has inspired a permanent state of breathlessness. Brilliant red crags jut skyward behind Adele's house. They rise like rock cathedrals from sandy slopes alive with wheat-colored grasses and the grays, greens, and yellows of low shrubs. As fast as I can put on hiking boots, our host leads me and his two cairn terriers scrambling up the slope, until I must stop and take off a boot to pull out a long thorn that has pierced the webbing. After that, I step more carefully among prickly pears, snake weed, spiky salt bush. Tiny flowerets bloom on slim stalks, but in the harsh struggle for water, only the century plants, the white-plumed pampas grasses, and hardy bushes like juniper and manzanita grow taller than my knees.

Back at the house, flocks of fat Gambrel Quail crowd out the towhees at the feeder. White-crowned sparrows dart in while scrub jays and ravens voice raucous discontent. Out the kitchen window, a far range of purple peaks frames flat-topped mesas. As light drains from the valley, red cliffs fade to pink and into shadow.

Free of highway roar, night descends in silent benediction. In a sky undimmed by city lights, stars are a revelation of clarity. A coyote's cry echoes across the stillness. There is magic in the air; and we understand why local folk speak of special sites here, ``places of power.''

Adele, founder of Gardens for Humanity, is newly back from planting bulbs in a garden ``labyrinth'' as a healing space.

In a town of artists, psychics, and holistic healers, it seems only natural that one neighbor has remembered a past life in which she was an Egyptian princess, or that another has discovered that the man who is now her therapist was her priestly lover in an earlier incarnation.

Next morning, as gray clouds lift from the the cliff tops and the sky blossoms into blue, sunlight creeps into Pine Valley, splashing the rocks red once more. We bypass Sedona's artful galleries, craft shops, boutiques in favor of Chinese lunch in Flagstaff with our hostesss Navajo daughter-in-law, a skilled jewelry-maker, and legions of related small Navajos clamoring to sit next to ``Grandma Adele.''

Then it's north to Cameron, climbing over the 8,000-foot pass at 15 miles an hour in a sudden blinding snowstorm that sends cars and pickup trucks skidding into the median. Beyond Flagstaff, back down to 5,000 feet, the storm vanishes and we drive through yellow grasslands, weaving in and out of the pine woods of the Coconino National Forest.

Occasional little ranch houses dot the empty expanse, beside each one a pickup truck for hauling water, wood, oil. A couple of herds of cattle are the only life visible on these arid acres where a single cow needs three miles of grazing land. Eventually, there are sparse clusters of small tan houses, but we do not recognize the Cameron School as we drive by a long, low, sand-colored building that melds into the desert beside a mesa, a site chosen for the water 300 feet down.

There is no missing the big yellow sign, ``Cameron Trading Post,'' its prominence justified since the Post is Cameron. Perched on a bank of the Little Colorado River, the reddish-brown complex includes motel buildings, a restaurant, a gas station, a post office, a small grocery store, a huge gift shop, and an art gallery. Two trailer parks nearby supply local housing.

For 400 years, before Highway 89 sliced through mountain and desert, a coast-to-coast trading route crossed this place. In its present incarnation, the parking lot hosts as many as 40 tourist buses on a summer day. In cold, dry February, the place belongs to a handful of visitors and to us, 14 elderhostelers who fan out to claim our bedrooms.

They are pleasant, standard motel rooms with two double beds, a large TV, modern plumbing that works. To me, they are the Ritz compared with Elderhostel Service Program quarters I have shared on the Mexican border and in eastern Kentucky.

Up the road next morn, we talk with Tim Clashin, youngish bespectacled principal of this well-designed, two-year-old, 200-pupil elementary school. The Board of Directors, principal, and all teachers except two ``Anglos,'' are Navajo. The school's Mission Statement declares: ``We believe the understanding of native language, and cultural foundations enhances identity, pride and success.''

Most of the children's parents speak Navajo to each other, and it is the only language of the grandmothers who, in this matriarchal society, are the purveyors of ancient tradition and sacred lore. Yet many parents, convinced ``English is the language of success,'' balk at their children spending time learning to read and write Navajo. It is one of many issues facing tribes who span two worlds.

There were no high schools on the reservation when principal Clashin was growing up, and the federal government sent children away to boarding school where they did not see their families for nine months. Others were taken to be educated by Mormon families who believe the Navajos are the lost tribe of Israel. Clashin says, ``My mother was a single parent and a sheep lady. I was the first member of my family ever to go to college.''

His school announcements over the loudspeaker each morning are made in English and Navajo, and the children recite the Pledge of Allegiance in both tongues.

He tells us that since the private sector is so limited on the reservation, educated Navajos must rely for jobs primarily on schools, hospitals, or the government. Rates of unemployment, of alcohol and drug abuse, and of suicide are very high. He estimates a quarter of the children's homes have no electricity or running water.

Issues of cultural identity do not concern 23 lively third graders with whom I spend the next five days. Their concern is with the Valentine's Party on Friday, and they are decorating paper bags and cardboard boxes in which to put expected valentines. I do whatever Mrs. Nelson suggests in her bubbling but well-ordered classroom, correcting papers while she gives a math quiz, reading a story aloud as the pupils listen attentively, wondering what to do as they fidget and poke each other when I have them read aloud to one another about an armadillo from Amarillo. I watch them in the computer room, I drill Corey and Sheehan in the library in preparation for the regional spelling bee.

The girls gently elbow past each other to sit next to me at lunch, and I fall in love with these beautiful children with the rich brown skin, straight black hair, and eyes of deepest brown. The broad, high cheekbones of some remind me of Mayan faces I have seen on Indians on the streets of Mexico City and in the highlands of Guatemala.

One of our evening speakers, Eleanor williams, teacher of Navajo at Tuba City High School, says there are not nearly enough trained teachers of Navajo. Since the culture is embedded in the language, she says, ``When Navajo college students get out into other universities, they find they don't know who they are because they dont know their own legends, religion, history. When they do, they respect themselves and get respect.''

I remember the words of a friend back home who had lived on the reservation at Canyon de Chelly and taught at Tsai Community College:

``The two cultures are incompatible. The kids are raised differently, they're not competitive, they believe inequalities should be evened out. They're raised to be in harmony with the environment, and to take responsibility for the clan. Unlike Western teenagers wanting to separate from their families, Indian teens try to reconcile Western culture with traditional culture.''

We have an intimate glimpse of that older culture as we sit on cots around a stove made from an old oil drum in an eight-sided hogan at sheep camp. We are guests of Mabel Franklin, a woman bridging two worlds, and of her mother, 80, who speaks no English and is manager of the sheep herd. The women are dressed in their best ceremonial attire and adorned with massive silver and turquoise jewelry. Their hair is long; tradition holds that cutting hair will shorten life and impair mental faculties. The door of the hogan faces east so they may greet the morning sun and toss out in blessing the corn that sustains them. Grandmother kneels to beat sheep's wool between wooden paddles, then twirls it into yarn. We walk to their cavelike sweat lodge where they undergo ceremonies of purification with heat, herbs, and chanting.

Carol Dean is another bridge woman, discoursing learnedly to visitors in the trading post's fine art gallery on Indian rugs, bowls, baskets, jewelry, and how they relate to history and customs. She is able to recognize from which of a dozen mines a given piece of turquoise came, and warns us to buy stones from a reputable dealer, not at a roadside stand. She warns, too, that stones we pick up to take home as souvenirs will bring us bad luck until they are returned to the land where they belong (inducing instant guilt in Peggy and me, although we keep our stones).

``Let me tell you about the bride price,'' says Carol Dean. ``I was bought for 20 cows. But I was worth it, because I am the granddaughter of a medicine man, and because I came with herding and land rights.''

Our final treat is a drive 50 miles west to the stone Watchtower at Desert View, guarding the entrance to the Grand Canyon. Austere and solitary, it broods above many-hued, unbelievable canyon walls.

Ascending inside the round, kiva-like tower, we are surrounded by ceremonial drawings, sand paintings, all manner of Indian art: mute but vibrant testimony to a way of life that may be passing.

It seems fitting that our week should close here. We do not know in what form, if any, the culture and traditions of the Navajo will endure. We do know they are a people tied to the land, and thus it is reassuring to be in the presence of this eroding yet seemingly eternal cleft in the earth.

On an Elderhostel: If you're 55 or older and looking for an inexpensive educational experience with simple living in lively company, you'll find hundreds of programs in Elderhostel catalogs at sites across the nation and around the world. Write for a catalog from Elderhostel, 75 Federal St., Boston MA 02110-1941, or find one in your library.

Elderhostel Service Programs, in which you can teach English in Poland or China, conserve natural resources in Alaska or New Hampshire, or raise heifers for export in Arkansas, are listed in a much smaller and less formidable catalog. Write to Elderhostel, Box 1251, Wakefield, MA 01880