Three Sisters

Tall and wiry Naadą́ heeds Moab traffic on Highway 191 as she crosses the four-lane bridge over the Colorado on route tohip surgery  Poison Spider Trail. She rides a unworldly buggy, a Polaris RZR Pro XP 4 Sport with a Specialized Stumpjumper bike racked on the back. Indeed, she slows further so the goosenecker 'shicheii' in the adjacent lane cannot snap her pic on his phone. Naadą́ stays solemn but thinks that 'grandpa' sees her only as a Mad Max Furiosa heading out on an epic journey through a forsaken canyon world. For Naadą́ its just Monday.

Back in Moab, her sister, Pumpkin, is serving up a delicious pork green chili poutine at the Trailhead Public House and Eatery. Pumpkin gets around with a slight limp. Should you ask, Pumpkin would happily supply that she is a breech baby. Hip dysplasia. Sometimes she might chip in that her Navajo culture had her tightly swaddled as a new born. Lovingly acquired dysplasia.

More likely, as she hails from Shiprock, the uranium industry wore her down. Until serendipity happened, her parents worked in the Shiprock electronics assembly plant. Also, they did not know construction materials with uranium milling waste was used in their home. Top it off, the Trinity Test site was downwind. Still hip dysplasia one way or another. Right? So, where's the harm? Millions of tons of uranium ore were extracted from the Navajo Nation, leaving gray streaks across the desert landscape.

The third sister, Naaʼołí, is at Singha Thai in Moab hopeful that Barry will pick up the check for the entire party of eight, again. All suffer an overwhelming cheerfulness from addictive endorphins from their nonstop outdoor activity. In his teens, Barry's Portland father started him on long distance enduro mountain biking. Not that anyone listens, except to say 'wow,' at every get together of the eight, as Barry always recounts his love of enduros, "They are held in timed stages. That means you compete against yourself. Not others." All eight love this notion. Each loves themselves as each shares, unconditionally. It's the saying that matters.

Sam, the owner of Singha Thai, wanders over. That gives Naaʼołí the opportunity to offer up that her Pad Thai today was just a good as when she was in Thailand for three weeks a few years back. Sam asks where. Naaʼołí utters syllables that Sam cannot understand. Naaʼołí finally spits out, "South." Sam cheerfully retorts, "Koh Samui, Hat Yai, Phuket?" Memory returns to Naaʼołí, "Krabi, it's small. It was so nice to be in Krabi away from it all." Sam is unsure of Krabi.

Barry, meanwhile, is so happy with himself that he offers to pick up the check. Someone in the group asks Barry what he does for a living. "I'm in music." They all nod 'wow!' "I'm the one dressed up as an animal at all the shows. I'm the bear. 'Jamm'n Bear.' I do play. Will play. But this is my in!" All at the table feel wonderful for Barry.

Sam is unsure. He is silently grateful for all the trust fund kids in Moab. Sam knows there are also retired Army and Marines here, still young as twenty years in that career puts you at forty and able to afford high-end toys in the desert. If you ever met Barry's sixty year old father, in Portland, you would notice a slight hobble. He no longer has cartilage in his right knee. All those enduros. So, where's the harm? Right?

The three sisters come from the Navajo Trust Land. The Navajo were hunters and gatherers but adopted farming from the Pueblo, growing the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash.

Corn 'naadą́ą́' is planted first to grow tall and provide support for the beans to climb and shade for squash. 

Beans 'naaʼołí' absorb nitrogen in and convert it to fertilizer to benefit corn and squash. 

Squash provides ground cover to suppress weeds and inhibit soil evaporation. Squash's wide leaves shade corn's roots. 

Serendipity. When the three sisters were yet in their first decade, the Tribal community voted their mother onto a district board of NAPI, the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry. Over time NAPI adapted from subsistence farming to large scale agriculture operations. Instead of just raw materials for feed, NAPI increased bean and potato acreages and sumac and chiles as well. NAPI now produces Navajo Pride brand flour and bread and operates an 110,000-acre farm stretching 30 miles east to west just south of Farmington producing 658,000 bushels of winter wheat. NAPI hopes to get winter wheat to one million bushels for its flour mill. It tends 15,000 acres of alfalfa for southwest dairy farmers. NAPI plans to grow 57 varieties of organic potatoes.

This serendipity inspired the three sisters, approaching their third decade, to venture out, together, to Moab to learn and adapt to the world.

Home Rule - Part 1

I have lived chiefly in Indiana. But my first-year college dorm in Colorado held a majestic view of Pikes Peak. Opera singer Kate Smith saw that summit and belted out, “From the mountains to the prairies To the oceans white with foam.” Head west young man. Now, back home again, a gravel quarry is across the street from me. Rocks. Infrequently there, at dawn, blasting caps ignite to split up alluvial. In the near distant past, our Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra set up chairs in the quarry bottom so tuxedoed men and ball-gowned women could sit and listen to Beethoven’s Fifth. The four opening notes of that composition are known as ‘fate knocking at the door.’ Da-da-da-dum.

In the distant past, before me or the gravel pit, Indians lived in Indiana.

“It was a beautiful, level country unbroken by mountains but traversed by rivers which occasionally found a channel through slightly rolling country to the plains beyond. Much of it was covered with thick forests of walnut, poplar, maple, linden, cherry, and sycamore. There were broad meadows with only stubble undergrowth of bushes. The natural plains had been fertilized through the centuries by decomposed vegetation. The topsoil of the woods lay deep with rotted leaves. On these plains, as in the dark, damp recesses of the woodlands, nature from the beginning had been enriching the earth. Its transformation into productive fields needed only the axe and the plow.” ‘Sons of the Wilderness: John and William Conner’ by Charles N. Thomson, Indianapolis, Indiana Historical Society, 1937.

In that era of the Sons of the Wilderness, near where I now sit typing this missive on the west side of the White River, lived a French half-breed doctor named Brouett, whose wife was captured and brought up by Indians. He practiced medicine after the Indian fashion and had considerable patronage. He likely used plums growing wild in thickets along the banks of the White River as medicine. The Plains Indians and Cheyenne ate wild plums. The Navajo used the plum roots to make a red dye for wool garments. But I get ahead of myself.

Just before the Sons of the Wilderness era, along the Atlantic seaboard, a confederacy of tribes including Delaware, Shawnee, and other woodland Indian forces lost the Battle of Fallen Timbers, surrendered to the United States, signed the Treaty of Greenville, and were forced to pledge never again to take up arms against ‘Americans.’ The Delaware tribe resettled along the White River.

And before that era, the Six Nations refused English subjection and the empty promise of limited white settlements beyond the Alleghenies. In turn, French traders and settlers chafed under the loss of the fur trade resulting in Pontiac's War in which Fort Detroit was besieged for three months by ‘savage hordes.’ The Six Nations lost.

Delicious plums. Memories are scent, like perfume, a desire of something perfect. Always making promises it can’t keep. A lifelong friend understands time as a loop. He asserts history is a constant. It repeats. We have not spoken in eight years. So far, no loop. I conject times get better. It must, right? I'm not sure on what evidence I rely.

Indigenous Americans were localized hunter-gatherers. Teepee rule. Clan chiefs were ceremonial leaders. Post Columbian and Christian contact brought on centralized leadership - the confederacy - the Six Nations. Along the White River the traditional Big House Ceremony was revitalized. It featured the ascendancy of a principal chief among the clan chiefs as the Delaware elevated Chief Anderson’s position from a first among equals to the position of head chief. This renewed sense of Delaware identity was in opposition to Christianity. In 1805, along the White River, a Monsi Delaware woman appeared as a prophet preaching a ‘new religion’ to the Delaware. In the aftermath, the Delaware executed several of her followers on the charge of witchcraft. Turns out the executed had colluded with missionaries and U.S. government officials. Fate knocked at the door.

Again and again, Native Americans were herded west. In about a week, I am going back to the stone age in New Mexico and Southeast Utah. Oh, it’s here, but in Indiana nature from the beginning has been enriching the earth. Evidence is covered by the topsoil of the woods. Here, archaeologists find a ring of stones cracked open by heat and deduce it as a tribal campfire. Out West Indigenous Americans built enduring cliff dwellings and later pueblos. Petroglyphs remain. I hope to gain permission to visit a Navajo reservation. I most certainly will drive Indian Routes to reach Canyon De Chelly, the Chaco Cultural Center, and the Tsé Bitʼaʼí monadnock.

We think of Indigenous Americans as living in nature according to natural rights reveling in experiences that circumvented conscious thought. This romantic notion sees a meditative spirit one may always find in Nature. Something in Nature responsive to one’s mood. Reverie. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that individuals surrender natural rights to the state to protect their rights. Rousseau recommended a government guided by the general will, which would be the true good of every person in society. This government would pass laws to reduce income inequality, promote civic education, and cultivate civic virtue. Coming from natural rights, the goodness of government would flow from our innate tendencies toward the virtues of benevolence, righteousness, wisdom, and propriety. In essence, government today depends on a notion that Indigenous Americans were noble.

Evolution, as seen by Charles Darwin and others, on the other hand, is founded in evidence that ancestors of modern humans were not like humans today. Evolution is also much easier to see in New Mexico and Southeast Utah due to the exposed stratigraphy: Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic rock. I look forward to that journey.

Another friend bought the Indianapolis house I grew up in made of enduring red brick high up on a hill. Years back I painted a mural in the garage. An immature petroglyph. It depicted evolution from ape to man. She kept it. When my mom died several years back, I drove back to that ancestral house. It evolved, considerably, with an addition, painted brick, and a pool in the back yard. I do not have a need to go back. My memory does not linger there. It does in my three sisters. We joke that I grew up in a different family then they did. My outlook is different. I evolved differently. But in our group chat they remember my memories of silly idiosyncrasies of growing up together. And I remember their memories. Our clan. Our teepee.
Our rock.