The night at the Hogan we got to talk to Herb quite a lot. His personal hero is Billy The Kid. His parents are both Navajos but from different clans. He has 6 sisters and 3 brothers. Apparently he doesn’t get on very well with his mother, and when asked where his father was he said “Oh! My father… Well, he went on his horse”, meaning his father left the family. Herb was married when he was 17 but divorced and now settled in Monument Valley, staying at his brother’s in a trailer. He has a 13 year old son, which he sees every couple of years.

We talked extensively about the Long Walk of the Navajo people which isn’t something many americans know of, and the suffering they went through. Not only deported, the Navajos were beat and killed arbitrarily for sport by Cavalry troops. A lot of these events are not very well documented or taught, so a lot of what happened is being transmitted generation after generation. For example, Herb explained that while being deported, the Navajos were fed rancid flour, which would expand in their belly and make them sick.  Many of them died before even making it to Bosque Redondo where they were supposed to be relocated.

One man, Kit Carson, did some of the cruellest attacks on the Navajos, burning their homes, killing their sheep, starving them into submission.  It was kinda sick to see that he is still a celebrated pioneer and that a forest (which we drove through) is named after him.

We also talked about nowadays navajo lifestyle and I was even more suprised to hear that according to Herb, 70% of Navajos do celebrate Thanksgiving. I could not believe it, but they just celebrate it as a family reunion, I guess.

He explained to us the basics of the political system of the Navajo Nation. The Nation is divided in 88 chapters. Each chapter has a delegate which votes at the parliament and elect a president every 4 years. They recently cut down the number of delegates to 24, each running several chapters in order to save money, but ended up paying them 3 or 4 times more, so the cut down was pointless. The government suffers from bad corruption problems which probably explains why recently casinos were finally allowed in the reservation. (No alcohol is allowed in the reservation, and neither was gambling up until recently).

The Navajo people have a very good demography, but are no longer the most populated native americans – it’s now the Cherokee, as they only require people to be 1/8th Cherokee to be part of the tribe, (it takes 1/4th to be a Navajo, i.e. at least one grandparent)

The Navajo made peace with their old time ennemies – The Hopis and allowed the creation of the Hopi reservation within the Navajo Nation, up until some coal was discovered in the Hopi territory and some tensions started again.

On that night Herb also mentioned the traditional Cleansing ceremony that young men go through and a few other things which I’m going to research (such as: why did the Anasazis disappear?)

All that we learnt about the Navajo traditions and history was very inspiring and humbling. We even learnt some navajo words.

Lastly, we got to know about the brave Navajo Code talkers who didn’t get any recognition until 1982, or even later.

Here is their beautiful seal.