Free Trip of the Tongue by Elizabeth Little

how profound a betrayal these boarding schools represent. “My grandchild,” said Manuelito, “the whites have many things which we Navajos need, but we cannot get them. It is as though the whites were in a grassy canyon and there they have wagons, plows, and plenty of food. We Navajos are up on the dry mesa. We can hear them talking but we cannot get to them. My grandchild, education is our ladder. Tell our people to take it.”
    In 1882 Manuelito sent his two sons to Carlisle Indian School. They both fell ill—one at school, the other as soon as he returned home for a visit—and died.
    In the midst of all this misfortune, there were some small signs that education might one day fulfill Manuelito’s vision. One of the first of these came in the form of a school founded in 1902 by Katharine Drexel and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. p Located not far from the center of tribal government at Window Rock, St. Michael Indian School is to this day the only Catholic school in Navajo Nation.
    I visited the town of St. Michaels on a crisp, sunny day in early August. The museum, a former trading post and the first building to be used by the mission, is a small stone structure set apart from the sprawling complex that makes up the convent and school. As I walked up I saw that they were refinishing some of the woodwork on the outside of the building, and I stood frozen in place for several long minutes, trying to decide just how much of an inconvenience I might be causing for the man in charge of the repairs. When he saw me, frozen in place, he gave me a strange look and gestured me inside. I couldn’t say if he was wondering why I was standing so still or why I was there in the first place.
    As soon as I walked in, it was clear to me that St. Michael’s museum is not the most popular attraction in Navajoland. There were two women keeping watch over the exhibits, a smiling middle-aged woman and an extremely quiet older woman I suspected was her mother. While I explored the museum, they sat together and listened to a Navajo-language broadcast on the radio.
    Although the land for St. Michael was purchased by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1895, it was unused until October 1898, when three Franciscan friars arrived to establish a mission. They moved into what is now the museum and, realizing that their work would be hindered and not helped by an ignorance of the local language, quickly applied themselves to the compilation of an English-Navajo dictionary. They began simply, offering food and coffee to visitors in return for help naming nearby objects. When they had exhausted their proximate vocabulary, they pulled out a Montgomery Ward catalog in order to ask after a wider variety of words. Slowly but surely, they were able to create a small dictionary. This handwritten volume is kept in one of the museum’s glass cases, and as I looked at it that afternoon I marveled that something so small and ordinary could once have represented a momentous shift in outside attitudes toward the Navajo language.
    The dictionary was far from the friars’ only contribution to their adopted community. Father Bernard Haile developed the first Navajo orthography, published a number of linguistic materials, and was considered to speak so well that “he might have been more Navajo than Anglo.” Father Marcellus Troester conducted the first census of the Navajo people. The photographs of Father Simeon Schwemberger provide an unparalleled look into the Navajo traditions of the early twentieth century. And Father Anselm Weber tasked himself with extensive surveys of Navajo territory, personally petitioning the U.S. government for the return of the tribe’s traditional lands. His efforts helped lead to the return to the Navajo people of nearly 1.5 million acres of land.
    In this way, the mission was over time able to secure the trust and assistance of its neighbors. Similarly, the St. Michael