Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty: Navajos, Hozho, and Track Work

209 Pages·2011·3.177 MB·English

by  Jay Youngdahl

Working on the Railroad,
Walking in Beauty
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Navajo Religion, by Douglas Johnson, 2006.
Working on the Railroad,
Walking in Beauty
Navajos, Hózh=, and Track Work
Jay Youngdahl
Utah State University Press
Logan, Utah
2011
Copyright © 2011 Utah State University Press
All Rights Reserved
Utah State University Press
Logan, Utah 84322-3078
www.USUPress.org
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free, recycled paper
ISBN: 978-0-87421-853-4 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-0-87421-854-1 (e-book)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Youngdahl, Jay.
Working on the railroad, walking in beauty : Navajos, Hózh=, and track work /
Jay Youngdahl.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Navajo Indians—Employment. 2. Navajo Indians—Social conditions. 3. Navajo
Indians—Religion. 4. Railroad construction workers—Southwest, New—History.
5. Railroads—Southwest, New—Employees—History. 6. Southwest, New—Race
relations. 7. Southwest, New—Politics and government. I. Title.
E99.N3Y74 2011
979.1004’9726—dc23
2011034427
Contents
Foreword, Michael D. Jackson viii
Preface xi
Introduction 1
An introduction to the Navajo Nation 2
Navajo railroad work 6
The legal background of Navajo railroad work 9
Language, space, and time 13
“Pastoral life” and “modern civilization” 18
The fixed and the fluid 22
The meaning and importance of Navajo strategies 24
One: Life on the Tracks 27
Meeting Jerry Sandoval 27
Wage labor and the Navajo 30
The work of railroad trackmen 33
Jerry Sandoval’s experience 39
Two: Religion on the Rez 44
A Pentecostal family 44
Religious practices on the Navajo Nation 45
Traditional Navajo religion 46
The Native American Church 53
Christianity on the rez 56
A short discussion with Harry Walters 62
The centrality of hózh= 65
vi Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty
David Sangster—A conversation about
the interplay of religious traditions 67
Three: A Visit with a Medicine Man 70
Meeting John Sandoval 70
John’s work as a medicine man 72
The Long Walk 76
John Wayne on the wall 79
Four: Adversaries and Advocates 82
The Bureau of Indian Affairs: Friend or foe to
the Navajo worker? 82
Efforts at “de-culturating” the Navajo worker 88
The Unitarian Service Committee’s project
with Navajo railroad workers 93
Five: How Did Navajo Men Come to Work for
the Railroads? 103
Tom Caydaitto—Using the Blessingway
and the Enemyway 103
A visit to Chicago 105
The impetus from World War II 108
The Railroad Retirement Board develops
a system for Navajo railroad work 111
The RRB implements its manpower system
for the railroads 113
The system matures 118
Six: Railroads, Trading Posts, and a Fatal
Challenge to the RRB’s System 123
Leroy Yazzie—“Go round up some Navajos” 123
The railroads take full advantage 124
The RRB works to please the railroads 126
Contents vii
Sparks fly between the RRB and the railroads 129
Issues at the trading posts 132
An important journalist takes note 135
The legal service lawyers enter 138
The end of the system 141
Seven: In the Workers’ Words 144
Tom Martinez—Following in the footsteps
of the Holy People 144
The Pintos—Husband and wife healers 146
Dickie and Marilyn Sandoval—A family
that followed the tracks 153
Joe Mace—Finding a personal
military connection 156
The Spencers—“My crystal
is like the white man’s computer” 159
Eight: Anchoring and Adaptability, Fixed yet Fluid 163
Afterword 173
Selected Bibliography 174
Index 181
Foreword
I met Jay Youngdahl at Harvard Divinity School in 2004. Jay had
taken a sabbatical from his work as a labor lawyer to consider sev-
eral pressing questions that had arisen in the course of his career.
In our numerous conversations, the Navajo experience held a par-
ticular fascination for Jay. It was not only the heartrending history
of dispossession and violence that Navajos had endured as a nation
or the high rates of life-threatening injuries that Navajo workers
suffered on the tracks of the southwest United States. It was the
cultural invisibility of these people—written out of the conscious-
ness of contemporary Americans, and often written off—that Jay
refused to accept. Legal representation was well and good, but if
these people were to be made more visible, Jay would have to avoid
the pitfalls of construing them as victims and explore lifeways that
demanded deep familiarity and firsthand knowledge. Above all, he
would need to give voice to the views and visions of Navajos them-
selves. Jay chose to pursue this project in a divinity school because
he was convinced that the ritual and religious life of Navajo railroad
workers was basic to understanding how they responded to the haz-
ards of their work; sustained themselves during long periods away
from home; achieved a sense of emotional and intellectual equilib-
rium in the face of danger, degradation, and adversity; and remained
resilient despite injury, impoverishment, and loss.
As Jay observes, there is no word in Navajo that directly
translates our word religion. Even words like cult and spiritual-
ity suggest activities and orientations that transcend the everyday,
referring to extrasocial domains or “higher” powers. For Navajos,
however, life is a constant struggle to countermand largely external
forces that threaten the integrity of both persons and communities.
viii
Foreword ix
One accomplishes this perpetual remaking or reordering of the
world through actions that reintegrate, balance, bind, and replen-
ish. Perhaps the term existential best covers the many situations
in which this struggle for integrated and balanced being is enacted
and experienced. But we have to be sensitive to the culturally spe-
cific ways in which Navajos understand existence—the emphasis
they give to connectedness with ancestors, land, and language;
the creative integration they seek of old and new lifeways; and
the deep sense of responsibility they feel for keeping a world of
centrifugal forces, plural values, multiple personalities, and differ-
ent religious traditions in balance. Yet even in practices that might
appear strange to us—railroad workers applying corn pollen before
starting work, filling their bunk cars with the smoke from aro-
matic herbs, taking peyote, or carrying “medicine pouches”—we
may discern echoes of our own precautionary actions in preparing
for a perilous journey, a new undertaking, or a difficult encounter
(though in embarrassment we might dismiss these as superstitions).
Indeed, some of the most arresting moments in Jay’s conversa-
tions with Navajo friends are when the seemingly exotic proves
to be familiar—the Navajos’ impish sense of humor, the sharing
of a smoke, the trembling or laying on of hands, the recourse to
prayer even when biomedical treatment has been sought, the reci-
tation of an origin myth of creation in which order is imposed on
chaos, the use of song and chant to lift one’s spirits, the invocation
of nature as a way of drawing the beauty of the physical world into
the social spaces of hogan or house. I think here of Buffy Sainte-
Marie’s compelling lines:
You think I have visions
because I am an Indian.
I have visions because
there are visions to be seen.
Some might have difficulty accepting such an assertion or taking
seriously the words of the Navajo healer who told Jay that “crystals
serve the same purpose as the white man’s computers.” But such