Spring Break
Like beads on a string
Four generations of Navajo women inherit tradition
by Shana D. Lebowitz
Features Editor
Features | 11/13/07
Posted online at 1:24 AM EST on 11/13/07
Their traditional turquoise and magenta silk dresses, the proudly displayed hand-woven tapestries, the way each Navajo woman's face communicated a slightly different self confidence, could have told the story by themselves.
Four generations of women from a Navajo tribe in Arizona visited Brandeis last Wednesday to speak about a traumatic history of being forcibly relocated from their homes in the 1970s, and how they managed to find their way back to their cultural heritage.
Grandmother Dorothy Walker-a great-grandmother- represented the oldest generation of the women and spoke only in Navajo-or Diné bizaad-while her daughter Mae Peshlakai translated. Walker recalled painful memories of her family's "forced relocation to a desert area" by the federal government in the 1970s.
"My children were abruptly taken away from me," she said.
Calmly, yet seeming to omit little from the horrors they encountered, Walker's daughters Peshlakai and Angie Maloney revealed to the audience what it was like to be taken from their home when they were just 10 and eight years old, respectively, and forced to attend a boarding school in Arizona.
"They shipped me out, and I didn't see my homeland for 14 years," Peshlakai said.
"Navajo Nation," which covers over 27,000 square miles and comprises parts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, is currently the greatest land area of largely American Indian jurisdiction in the United States. The 1974 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act called for the forced relocation of over 10,000 Navajo and 100 Hopi Indians from their reservations in the Navajo-Hopi Joint Use Area.
Once at the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Tolani Lake, Ariz., the sisters underwent a series of traumatizing experiences, including having their heads shaved before being herded into shower stalls to be deloused.
Holding her hands to her head as if to remember how vulnerable she felt 40 years ago, Maloney said: "I came out, [my sister] saw me with my short hair and my ears sticking out, and we cried. She said, 'What happened to you?'"
Four generations of women from a Navajo tribe in Arizona visited Brandeis last Wednesday to speak about a traumatic history of being forcibly relocated from their homes in the 1970s, and how they managed to find their way back to their cultural heritage.
Grandmother Dorothy Walker-a great-grandmother- represented the oldest generation of the women and spoke only in Navajo-or Diné bizaad-while her daughter Mae Peshlakai translated. Walker recalled painful memories of her family's "forced relocation to a desert area" by the federal government in the 1970s.
"My children were abruptly taken away from me," she said.
Calmly, yet seeming to omit little from the horrors they encountered, Walker's daughters Peshlakai and Angie Maloney revealed to the audience what it was like to be taken from their home when they were just 10 and eight years old, respectively, and forced to attend a boarding school in Arizona.
"They shipped me out, and I didn't see my homeland for 14 years," Peshlakai said.
"Navajo Nation," which covers over 27,000 square miles and comprises parts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, is currently the greatest land area of largely American Indian jurisdiction in the United States. The 1974 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act called for the forced relocation of over 10,000 Navajo and 100 Hopi Indians from their reservations in the Navajo-Hopi Joint Use Area.
Once at the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Tolani Lake, Ariz., the sisters underwent a series of traumatizing experiences, including having their heads shaved before being herded into shower stalls to be deloused.
Holding her hands to her head as if to remember how vulnerable she felt 40 years ago, Maloney said: "I came out, [my sister] saw me with my short hair and my ears sticking out, and we cried. She said, 'What happened to you?'"
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