It meant listening until the stories were done. It meant not only showing up, but being present. So being a good guest meant not only coming, but staying. On land where each millimeter is sacred, bringing in an outsider is a profound act of hospitality. During my time on the reservation (and likewise on the Laguna and Acoma pueblos), I discovered how sacred the invitation to meet someone somewhere at some time was. My third strategy also gets back to that car accident. “A Jewish guy from New York gets stranded on the side of a desert road” made tantalizing fodder. One joke at a time, my sources and I found a shared humanity. And, it seemed to me, a particular kind of humor - what the Brits call “taking the piss”, or what Staten Islanders call “busting chops.” Fortunately, as a Jew from New York, I felt exquisitely well trained in the sister arts of chumming and self-deprecation. Fairly quickly, I learned that humor commands an important kind of social currency in the communities I was engaging with. My second strategy was a bit more lighthearted. Within minutes of starting each conversation with a potential source, I acknowledged how I look. My first strategy for confronting this legacy was simple, if blunt: I knew I’d have to call it out. Two, that I looked like many of the perpetrators who’d lied, cheated, stolen, and committed violence upon this country’s First Peoples. One, that I’d need people to trust me so much that they’d walk me through the hills in which they grew up, talk me through the stories their families passed down through the generations, and revisit the injustice, oppression, and trauma that many had tried to forget in order to simply go on living. So, as I undertook this investigation, I knew two things. There’s a long history of extraction from Indigenous peoples. Some 80 miles later on the highway, my back tire blew so bad that I drove back to town on a hubcap.īut the laughs and subsequent rapport that later came out of the white man’s - the bilagaana’s - misadventures on Navajo land probably did more for my reporting than anything else. Within seconds on the dirt road, my cute little Nissan rental bleeped out a low tire pressure warning. Hey, I thought to myself, what’s the worst that can happen?įamous last words. It was either that or turn back 60 miles to take a circuitous route that would add enough time to the journey that I’d miss the meeting anyway. There was, however, the cloud of dust emanating from the caravan trekking through a distant dirt road that appeared to loop around the site of the accident. There was also, let the record show, no cell service. The collision had taken place on a stretch of road where construction consumed the other lane. In this case, the line of cars was backed up before a head-on collision. On the other, it could symbolize something much more sinister: a medical emergency, or a car accident. On the one hand, it could signal a long-awaited event: a community gathering at a local chapter house, say, or a hardwood clash between two rival high school basketball teams. On the Navajo reservation’s horizonless and breathtaking one-lane highway, traffic carries meaning. Hours off schedule and hundreds of miles away from my next meeting, I hit traffic.
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