January 12, 2010

Yesterday was rather uneventful, and today was shaping up to be the same until a few minutes ago, when my neighbor came to invite me to walk to the Sand Dunes with her. We'll be accompanied by her dog Maggie, and a puppy that she is 'babysitting' for a park employee. My other canine friend Blaze has been confined behind a higher fence, and we haven't seen him since Sunday afternoon, when we had a conversation with his human, Mick. While we were talking, Blaze came around the corner with a 'stick'--a fallen tree branch at least 7 feet long. Mick said he wasn't great at fetch, but he was big on keep-away. Blaze did drop his stick and run over to greet us, before picking it up again and teasing Mick by jumping around with it.

This morning I began my internet search for information on the history and culture of the Navajo people. Budd remembered accurately that hogans are always built with the door facing east. One account says it's to catch the morning sun, and that seems to jibe with one of the creation legends I found where the morning sun played a role in begetting First Man. Hogans used to be dwellings as well as being important in ceremonies. Nowadays you can see small ones near many of the dwellings, which tend to be mobile homes. One account mentioned that in the old days, Navajos would destroy a hogan that someone died in, believing that the dead were evil or bad luck. For this reason, there was some resistance to building more permanent dwellings until Christian religion overcame the old ways regarding the dead.

Unfortunately, much of what I've found on the internet so far is either confusing, borrowed from sources that may or may not be accurate, or incomplete. One interesting story in modern Navajo history is fairly well-documented though. During World War II, the Marine Corps recruited several dozen Navajo to be radiomen due to the obscure nature of the language at the time. The Code Talkers, as they became known, played a great role in the Pacific Theater, where the code based on their language was never broken. There have been several movies made about them, including Windtalker from 2002. I remember enjoying that when we saw it.

All this has also stirred up my interest in my own Native American heritage again. When I spoke to my mother on Sunday evening, I asked which of my paternal grandparents was Cherokee and which Choctaw. Neither was full-blood, or even enough to be included on tribal membership roles, but both could have been mistaken for full-blood from their features, as could my father.

It turned out that my grandmother, MaMa, claimed Cherokee heritage. I learned for the first time, though, that MaMa's family didn't come west on the Trail of Tears forced migration of most of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia to Oklahoma. It seems they were already in Alabama and thoroughly mixed with Scottish or Scotch-Irish families when they migrated to Texas. Mother hasn't been able to do much with the geneaology, as she hasn't been able to find MaMa's grandparents in the census records as yet.

Just now, checking my accuracy in remembering that the Cherokee Nation was removed from Georgia, I also learned that the term 'Trail of Tears' originated 7 years earlier, when the Choctaw Nation were removed from their ancestral lands in Mississippi to Oklahoma. There is some question whether that removal was forcible or voluntary. A Choctaw at the time sent a letter to the people of the United States saying they preferred to emigrite and be free rather than stay and be subject to laws they had no representative voice in forming. Sound familiar?

This new (or I should probably say renewed) interest may turn out to be a bigger project than I realized. As far as PaPa's geneaology goes, the Choctaw heritage came through a marriage of a son of the Nelson family to a Choctaw woman, but Mother didn't remember exactly when or where. Her research has taken the family back to Massachusetts, but how they met up with any Choctaw hasn't been explained to me yet. Maybe my questions will get her started on her geneaology hobby again, and maybe I'll even join her someday. I've been resisting as I have more than enough hobbies already, but I have to admit that the research is fascinating and I really do want to know.

For now, though, it's time to get my daily tasks done so I'll be free to join Debbie for our walk.