The Edges of America

“I don’t see any lions.”

WE ARE ON OUR HONEYMOON CAMPING in the small Toyota pickup with a shell over the back I inherited from my father last year. Yes, you can get away with camping rough on your honeymoon when your bride is an archaeologist. Last night, we slept at the Ute Mountain casino; it was full of elderly Navajo women dressed in traditional attire playing the one-armed bandits (back in 1999, the Navajo Nation did not allow casinos). Today, we will visit Ute Mountain’s Pueblo ruins, which are said to be like those at Mesa Verde National Park, except they have not been excavated, reconstructed, or heavily looted since being abandoned in the late 13^th century. Almost no one visits these ruins for reasons that will soon become apparent. This is our third attempt in three years to visit Lion Canyon. Two years ago, we could not find anyone at the tribal visitor center who could tell us how to visit the ruins. Last year, we found a guide, but our all-day guided tour became a half-day tour due to a funeral on the rez. But the third try is a charm: We will finally get the full-day guided trip, deep into the reservation, reached by taking a 4WD vehicle on a very dodgy road. At the end, all will have to climb up a rickety handmade wooden ladder and 

then walk along a narrow ledge. Before we begin our final ascent, the guide tells us:

"It's called 'Lion Canyon' because of all the mountain lions here."

At this point, a young girl, maybe ten years old, steps in front of our guide, fearlessly scrambles up a rickety wooden ladder ahead of us, and runs along the narrow ledge to the ruins, then she yells down to us, disappointment in her voice,

“I don't see any lions!”

Dances with Bears

WE WERE THE ONLY WHITES AT THE SPRING BEAR DANCE on our honey- moon. I am not very spiritual in any sense. However, the bear has long been my personal totem. I once mentioned to my late father that I would really like to have a bear claw...and the next time I saw him, he handed me...a bear claw, which today hangs in my study inside the beaded, deerskin medicine bag I bought at the annual spring bear dance, next to a small bear fetish made of jet I bought at Zuni Pueblo south of Ute Mountain. I also like to scratch my back on trees, and because my man cave at home is cool and dimly lit, my wife says I am a bear (I am also a bit chunky). Were my prehistoric ancestors members of The Clan of the Cave Bear?

When I met my wife, I lived in Alaska and, of course, I also met, or almost met, a few bears. Early one morning, a friend and I were mountain biking on a trail to an inland glacier. The trail was soft and impressionable, not muddy, due to a light mist, which had stopped right before we hit the trail. When we returned to the trailhead later that day, we saw fresh grizzly bear tracks that seemed to be moving behind our tracks. And then there was the time I had gone berry picking by myself on a local hill. Should I have carried a gun, like the locals? It takes a big gun to take down a bear. As I started up the 

trail, I met two local men coming down carrying rifles:

"Yes, we were hunting bears, " one hunter replied. "No, we didn't see any sign."

So there I am, by myself, on the top of an assuredly bearless hill, picking berries, one of the bucket, two for my mouth. I had been there about an hour...when I decided to 

stop and stretch...and there is a black bear working the end of the berry patch,

moving slowly in my direction. I saw him before he smelled me. So, I stood up and cleared my throat loudly. The bear left, and I decided to call it a day.

Then, after I moved to New Mexico (because I could not see my future wife living in Alaska), we were hiking along a forested mountain trail near the Gila River, not far from Geronimo’s birthplace. Suddenly, I heard a crashing sound below the trail, the sound was moving up the hill in our direction. I stopped my wife, pulled her 

next to me, and then said, just as the bear appeared on the trail 20 feet from us:

"Look, honey; a bear!"

And once we were camping in the forest on an isolated mountain road in the same area. We were making our dinner; it was beginning to get dark. Suddenly, a large boulder came crashing down the mountainside in our general direction; the boulder came to rest not far from us. Suddenly, the largest black bear I have ever seen appeared on the hill above us...right where the boulder had been positioned...before it came crashing down the mountainside. The bear then walked within 50 feet of our vehicle...as we sat inside...and then went on his way, and we resumed our meal.

ER

WE ARE DRIVING SOUTH FROM UTE MOUNTAIN ON US 666. Suddenly, a car

pulls up alongside our car on the otherwise carless highway, the woman frantically 

signals us to pull over. On the side of the road, she cries ou the window of her car:

"I'm in so much pain! I think I'm going to pass out!"

She is a rather large native woman. She could be pregnant. Or maybe kidney stones.

"My wife will drive your car to the ER in Shiprock," I tell her.

We are going that direction anyway. At the hospital, we tell the nurse,

"We have no idea who she is. We found her on the road".

E.R. doctors and nurses are not surprised by anything. As the young woman is being taken away in a wheelchair, she calls out her phone number and says to my wife,

"You have to call my sister."

"Hi, you don't know me", my wife says, "we just drove your sister to the E.R. in Shiprock. She'll be okay. But you need to come get her."

"What?" the voice on the line asks.

The Sacred Mountain.

I WAS IN CHARGE OF A STEM PROGRAM FOR MINORITY STUDENTS at a small rural community college. A student and I has gone to attend a national conference on the Salish-Kootenai Nation in Montana. During the conference, there were field trips available in addition to the presentations and lectures. I decided to go on the hike to the sacred mountain to eat lunch, near the sacred lake, with the president of the college hosting the conference and a group of about 20 visitors. A school bus took us to a trailhead in the middle of an unfamiliar forest. The hike was pleasant, but uneventful. I chatted with the president the whole way. Now, it was time to head back down...and two women are missing, one from Chicago, the other from New York City. They had evidently fallen behind the group and no one had noticed. They had had taken the wrong trail (it was not really clear to me if we were 

ever really on a trail). The president turned to me and said to me:

"I need to go track those two women down. Can you take the others back to the bus at trailhead and wait for us? "

I wanted to say. "I wasn't really paying attention. I have no idea where we are."

"Yeah, sure. See you at the bus", I told him.

Although I am an experienced tracker, I have no idea how I got us back to bus with the group. Not long after we arrived, the president and the two visitors turned up. 

Dances with Bears, Part II

INTERNSHIPS USUALLY COME WITH NO MONEY. As director of my college’s STEM program for minority students, I had some money that I could use to pay my students on summer internships. I had found someone on the rez to take one of my student, he was a member of the same tribe. But I first would have to go before the tribal council and ask their permission to pay one of their tribal members to work for them. Sound crazy? Not really; Native Americans do not trust white people…with good reason: A white Trojan Horse has arrived on their doorstep more than once. A year or two later, I had left that college for a position in another town. But occasionally I read the newspaper from the former stomping grounds, where I still had friends, and imagine my surprise when one day I read the following:

“Joe X was sentenced to federal prison today after his attorney entered a plea of guilty for the crime of arson. The defendant did not speak in court nor did prosecutors offer a theory for the crime. Investigators found a home-made incendiary device, commonly used by arsonists,  at the scene and linked it to X…

Thankfully, the device was so poorly constructed that the forest fire was small and easily extinguished with no injuries. In fact, seasonal forest fire fighters (some white) have been convicted for setting wildfires with the intention of increasing their hours worked with hazard pay. Was that Joe’s plan? Did the tribe later give me a cool name like Dances with Arsonists? Probably not; my reputation went up in smoke. For a more humorous tale of Native Americans interacting with whites, see Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals. 

“I’m from Las Cruces.”

It is 7 am, my wife and I are the only visitors at the Massacre Canyon turn-out inside Canyon de Chelly (Tsegi) National Park. The interpretative sign tells us this is 

“The Place Where Two Fell Off,” during the Spanish occupation, a grandmother and 

her granddaughter were trapped on a cliff and, instead of surrendering, they jumped to their deaths. My wife is not pleased. My wife is from Spain, but her ancestors did not come to the Americas until the late 1800s (one of her great-grandfathers was the governor of Cuba when the U.S. invaded and seized the island in 1898, to create the first U.S.-controlled “banana republic”). And then suddenly, my wife faces sheer terror! A young Navajo women had been sitting at the turn-out, drawing the canyon. We never expected she would want to talk to us, but she comes up to my wife and asks:

“Can you tell me what time it is? I have class at the high school at eight. I am here drawing the canyon as a gift for my grandmother.”

“7:45.”

“Thanks.”

Then perhaps noting my wife’s accented English, she asks:

“Where are you from?”

“Las Cruces.”

Our Native-Americans friends back home laughed at lot when she told them the story.

What's in a name?

WHEN YOU HEAR THE NAME "JUAREZ", what comes into your mind? Do you think of the first Native-American elected president in the Americas, adopted as a child and raised by whites, who became a lawyer and married into a prominent white family, who battled the dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana to restore democracy to Mexico, the man who expelled the French? John Huston won his first Oscar for Best Screenplay for Juarez (1939). Paul Muni, a Jew born in the Austro­ Hungarian Empire about the same time as Hitler, played Juarez, Bette Davis played empress Carlota, Gilbert Roland, from Ciudad Juárez, became a leading secondary actor in Hollywood. Then there is the large border city of several million people. In the late 1870s, it was a dusty little Mexican border town of about 10,000 persons called El Paso del Norte. Then, Porfirio Diaz, a man who had fought the French alongside Juárez, the first Mexican president to be born a Mexican, the first president to openly claim descent from Native Americans, re-named the dusty little Mexican border town Ciudad Juárez...and went on to rule Mexico with an iron hand until he was overthrown in 1910. And, of course, a future Nobel Laureate in literature once sang,

"When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter time too... "