Navajo rancher dies after contracting COVID-19
Kayla Pinkard clearly remembers the time when she and her grandmother Helen Nez got their truck stuck in the mud near the border of New Mexico.
Pinkard’s grandmother was a Navajo rancher who lived near Sanders, Arizona, in what Pinkard called “the middle of nowhere.” When Pinkard visited, they often drove out on the cattle range to check on Nez’s cows. A cow had given birth and Nez wanted to show her the mother and calf. But that December day it rained so hard that Pinkard, who was driving, panicked when their truck got stuck in the mud.
But Nez took charge, jumping out of the vehicle to direct Pinkard on what to do.
“After we got out, she was so excited,” Pinkard said. “She kept saying, ‘We went mud bogging.’ She had this positive spin on it. She thought it was fun and I was freaking out.”
Pinkard lives in Phoenix and when the pandemic arrived, she promised herself that as soon as it was safer, she would make the trek out to Sanders more often to visit her grandmother.
It pains Pinkard to know she make good on that promise.
Nez died June 8 at the Gallup Indian Medical Center in New Mexico, three days after learning she tested positive for COVID-19, according to her family. She was 81 years old.
Pinkard said Nez was most likely exposed to the virus around May 31 after meeting up with other ranchers. Nez had an active lifestyle, so it shocked Pinkard how quickly the virus claimed her grandmother’s life.
“Every time we told her she couldn’t do something, she would want to do it anyway,” Pinkard said. “After sheep and cattle, she wanted to get a horse. She wanted to make jewelry and sell it on the side of the road. What I admired about her a lot was how independent and how driven she was.”
How she kept her Navajo culture alive
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Her grandmother, who was from the Deer Spring clan, wanted the family to preserve Navajo traditions, Pinkard said.
She recalled Nez telling her that she had been taken away from the Navajo Nation reservation as a child and sent to California to “assimilate” with a foster mother. When Nez returned to Arizona, she had a desire to hold onto her Navajo culture and pass it down to her family,
Pinkard said.
Pinkard said Nez organized Kinaaldá for her, a coming-of-age ceremony held when a Navajo girl reaches puberty, the time of her first menstruation. The ceremony is based on the story of Changing Woman, one of the Holy People in Navajo belief, whose body transformed so she could bear children. The Holy People marked the occasion with the first Kinaaldá.
For one part of the ceremony, Changing Woman baked a cake made of ground corn and offered the first piece to the Sun.
Pinkard learned how to make alkaan, or Navajo cake, from watching her mother, she said. For Kinaaldá, Pinkard mixed ground corn, brown sugar and boiling water. Then she placed the batter in a fire pit, covered with corn husks. When the cake was ready, she offered a piece to every person in the tribe, but could not eat the cake herself because sugar is forbidden for the girl during her Kinaaldá, Pinkard said.
Everyone has a different variation on the cake and some people add other ingredients, such as raisins, germinated wheat and honey, she added.
The ceremony was just one of the ways Nez kept their culture alive, Pinkard said. Nez also took her to powwows and other ceremonies.
“Before they were taking our culture away from us, the Native people, and it was important for us to come back and relearn it,” Pinkard said. “It’s kind of a dying culture. The language isn’t spoken a lot. I know when I was raised in the city as a kid, they tried to teach you it in school, but after aroundeighth grade, they don’t make you take it anymore. She just really wanted for me to keep it alive.”
‘She loved taking care of those cows’
Nez raised sheep for much of her life, as did her mother before her, and later began raising cattle. She also took care of two dogs, a Chihuahua and a Labrador, and she used to have birds and horses, Pinkard recalled.
When Pinkard visited her grandmother in the hospital, Nez wanted to know how her animals were doing.
“One of the first things she said to me was, ‘How are the dogs? How are the sheep? How are the cattle? Are they going to be fed?’” Pinkard said. “That’s what she cared about most. We had to reassure her multiple times, the animals are OK.”
Growing up, Pinkard remembers her grandmother and great-grandmother shearing the sheep and making rugs from the wool. Pinkard became vegetarian and is now vegan, but prior to that, grew up eating mutton on special occasions, she said.
Her family would grill meats and make blood sausages — almost no part of the sheep’s body would go to waste, Pinkard said.
Nez also raised Angus cows, which she sold to casinos, her daughter Melissa Nez said. She and Pinkard recalled how Nez, when she lived near Sanders, would drive more than an hour to and from her job at Winslow Campus of Care — and then make time to check on the cows after work.
“The only thing that makes me feel better with all of this, was knowing she passed away doing what she loved,” Pinkard said. “She loved taking care of those cows.”
‘She raised us well. She will be missed’
Nez worked as a nurse at Tuba City Regional Health Care for most of her career before moving to the Sanders area. She inspired her daughter Melissa Nez to become a nurse, too. Melissa works at Winslow Campus of Care, where her mother retired.
The coronavirus pandemic has been a hard time for her, Melissa said. She has relatives living throughout the reservation and a few of her family members have died from COVID-19, she said. The Navajo Reservation, which includes parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, is one of the hardest hit areas in the country by the coronavirus pandemic.
Pinkard has started a GoFundMe to cover expenses from Nez’s funeral, as well as pay for a headstone. The fundraiser can be found at gofundme.com/ f/funeral-assistance-covid-19.
“As careful as we try to be, we tried to be so careful, but she still got it,” Melissa said. “We love her, we love her so much. She will be greatly missed by everybody, by everybody that she knows. I hear it from work, I hear it from the ranchers around that area. She raised us well. She will be missed.”