Effort aims to save Navajo oral history
GALLUP — About five decades have passed since Etsitty Bedonie talked about the “Beginning of the Enemies.” His account about the enemies of the Navajo, as he heard it from his grandfather, was recorded with a reel-toreel magnetic tape recorder, most likely, at Bedonie’s home in the Crownpoint area around 1969.
The interviewer was Tom Ration, a member of the Navajo Cultural Center — a group of Navajos who in the 1960s and ’70s traveled to all five regions of the Navajo Nation and interviewed about 450 Navajos and preserved their oral history on audio tape.
Based on a translation of Bedonie’s account of the “Beginning of the Enemies,” which was transcribed by Darlene Peterson, Chief Mountain, known as Nata-Dzil in the Navajo language, rode on his horse from Huerfano Mountain to a squaw dance at Coyote Canyon to warn the people about the consequences of stealing horses and sheep from the Mexicans.
The people ignored his warnings and continued to dance and sing, and Chief Mountain rode in anger into the ash pile. He told the people that because of their thievery, “even the bushes and stones around here will all turn into enemies now.”
According to Bedonie’s account, Chief Mountain’s predictions “came true,” and “the reason that various peoples became enemies of the Navajo is because of “Navajo thievery.” The enemies included Apache, Ute, Mexican, Spanish and Puebloans.
This story must have preceded the Long Walk (1863-64) because in the next page of the transcript, Bedonie talks about the long journey to Fort Sumner. He described the journey and encounters with armed men and said the people were very hungry and did not know how to cook, “so they mixed flour and coffee together and put water into it.” The Mexicans had to teach them how to make tortillas and bake them on a frying pan, and how to make coffee.
Bedonie must have learned the story from his grandfather, who was a medicine man from Huerfano Mountain. He said his grandfather took part on the Long Walk to captivity, and during the journey, traded beads for a cow “and this saved the people from starvation.”
Bedonie told other stories about Navajo history and culture, and they were all recorded.
Bedonie’s oral teachings, and those of other 450 elders, are preserved in more than 1,700 tapes stored in a special collection room inside the library at the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Ariz.
“This whole effort was a way to preserve the culture, the language and the belief system of the Navajo by putting it into reel-to-reel tapes,” said Deswood Tome, whose biological mother, Ruth Morgan Green, was part of the group of interviewers. She eventually became program director. “They went out and recorded more than 1,500 reelto-reel tapes and spoke to several hundred men and women, they called them informants, but they were medicine people. They recorded chants, ceremonies, the stories and a lot of that is in Navajo language that is archaic. A modern day Navajo speaker would probably have difficulty with it.”
Irving Nelson, program supervisor with the Office of Navajo Nation Library, said he knew about the tapes since he started working for the department in late 1970s.
He learned about their importance when years later, in the 1990s, the late Navajo Code Talker Carl Gorman and a group of volunteers starting fundraising to build the Navajo Nation Museum, which was achieved and completed around 1993, and it’s where the library is now.
“[Gorman] had been the director of the Navajo Cultural Center, the group that gathered the oral history in the 1960s,” Nelson said. “He was talking about how important this was, that’s when I found out the complete NineNight Ceremony for the Yei Bi Chei was also recorded by the group.”
In 2015, Nelson and his staff approached the Navajo Nation Board of Education to start looking at ways to secure funding to preserve the tapes for future generations. A couple of years later and several resolutions through the different committees of the Navajo Nation Council, Nelson finally got the approval.
The Navajo Nation Council approved $190,649 for the preservation of the tapes during the 2018 spring session.
“We got a lot of support for the preservation of the oral history collection,” he said, adding he is very grateful the Navajo Nation Council and President Russell Begaye, who signed the resolution into law, understood the significance of this project.