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— And I'd like to begin with a prayer.

Creator, Holy Mother Earth,

holy people all around. It's me.

I'm coming before you on this holy day

reaching out to you,

reaching out to my ancestors,

reaching out to the ancestors to come.

May I ask that you be the ones to,

to speak here.

Show us the truth.

Show us what real love is

and may all of the stories

serve to show us the way forward.

Reaching out to the ancestors to come, I just ask you to,

to call out to us and to sing to us

because we're headed your way.

Walking that beauty way pathway.

Let this storytelling be a part of that.

All my relations

— As children, we were told

you don't cry

for any reason.

You fight and you hold back those tears.

Why?

Historical trauma

has really tested us as a people.

A lot of the memories we've become so good at suppressing.

We've become experts at it,

and we've become comfortable with that,

comfortably sick.

— Why did we go through this?

Why is it ignored today?

Why is it not written in history books?

Why is it put under the rug?

Why can't the new generations of Americans

learn the truth so they can better understand their history?

— From the beginning, here in the Navajo land

k'é was the first thing,

K'é is the shortest word and so simple, k'é,

but it is the seedling of who we are.

Relationship and kinship,

love,

belonging.

— The clan system is very important,

and it extends beyond just blood.

You know, this is establishment of relationship, of family,

of kinship

that goes through our matriarchal side,

it goes through the women's lineage.

— Our four clans that make us a whole person,

which is our mother and father

and our grandparents, our paternal grandparents,

maternal grandparents.

They are who we are.

— They wouldn't call me by an English name or a given name.

They would say, "Hey, shiyáázh."

And shiyáázh, just that simple word means my child,

or you belong to me,

you are mine.

"Can I talk with you?"

That's how it is.

You're rooted.

You know, you belong here.

— Just imagine being a child

and being called "my child".

To every child,

"Good morning, my child."

"Good morning, my little one."

We're part of one another.

— A Navajo child, they're not born to just parents,

they're born into a family.

They're born into a community,

and they all have a role in bringing up a child.

— And so every time we speak of k'e

the smallest thing, clanship, relationship, kinship,

all rolled up in one.

When we express that,

we are in contact with all our relatives,

even the ones that go beyond

into the next world.

That's the spirit

of who we are.

Our songs, our prayers,

our expressions,

and how we speak

is who we are.

— Our language evolved from spiritual beings,

like the talking god, what we call Hastseyalti.

And then Hastsehogan,

the spirit of the home.

That's where our language developed.

That's where it caught a spirit.

— You have to hear it from

when you're a child, a little baby.

Your little gugu and gagas

are the most sacred sounds

that were given to us by the holy people.

— My childhood was in a hogan,

a traditional home made out of mud and logs.

That's where I recognize home as.

The round home is what it's translated to.

Being in our traditional home,

we always feel that sense of belonging,

a sense of nurturing feeling,

a sense of family.

— Here's one rare photo

of my grandpa in his ceremony.

I grew up with a grandfather

who was a medicine man,

a part of my childhood involved rhythm.

And the songs were a big part of that.

And they were very sacred.

They were not for everyone.

They were for those who

were in need.

People would come from all parts of the reservation

to see my grandpa who offered those songs.

I, as a curious little girl,

with so many questions,

I wanted to hear,

the songs.

And so I would sneak by the hogan.

My grandma and I had this little pact.

I would tell her,

I promise to cut two bags of potatoes

if you only open the window this much,

because I want to sit under it.

And of course, grandma's going to like,

okay, yeah, two bags of potatoes,

you know, let's... I'll open the window.

— Your story is through these songs.

It was passed on from generation

to generation to generation.

He prays through the earth,

he prays through the air,

he prays through the water,

he prays through the sun,

the moon, the stars, the universe.

— They were songs to restore a broken self.

You hear the songs,

but you also hear of the struggle

and you are aware of the struggle.

— As a child, I remember when

you know, people first started coming into our region.

You kind of start to see this mentality of

you're poor.

You know, you don't have anything,

you have a dirt floor hogan that's not...

By the standards of value in American society like

like, you have nothing.

But for me,

it felt like we had everything

that we were maybe the richest people in the world.

All of our cultural things that we still carry on,

all those just are so beautiful and rich that

I really thought we were millionaires.

— What's really important is how we reframe

our traditional life ways,

because so many people see it in this colonized sense

as being poverty.

When in fact it is not poverty.

There is an incredible richness

that we have in our own Indigenous identities

with our language, our culture, our foods, our ceremony,

our song, our prayer, and our connection to Mother Earth.

— For me, there's a very important significance

with the hair.

When I was a child, I've always had long hair

and mom had to fight my father,

to ensure that I was able to keep my hair long

—part of my identity.

They say this represents the rain, the moisture.

We live in one of the most dry, arid environments.

At a young age

you know, I was bullied and

even held down in a locker room and branded

where they heated up a lighter

and burned me and scarred me

and would call me TROG

which means Total Reject Of God,

prairie n****r,

all kinds of just hurtful, spiteful things

because of having long hair, having pierced ears,

having a darker skin,

and coming from the Navajo reservation,

the Diné nation.

The way that we tie hair is as it connects us

with our universe.

So from Yádiłhił, from the sky, father sky,

the way that our jish, our sacred mountain soil bundles

are wrapped and prepared.

This is way of bringing all those thoughts

in nitsáhákees, our thought processes,

everything into a harmonious place of balance.

You're prepared for

all the challenges in life.

But it's more in the,

the beauty way and the blessing way.

— We always talk about the beautiness of being Diné.

We talk about our culture,

we talk about our language,

we talk about the art

and the land, how beautiful it is.

But I think we never talk about the darks,

the dark paths of

what, what really, who we are.

— Our people experienced oppression

through and through.

They didn't know

what was coming for them.

— At that time,

the US government says

annihilate the Navajos.

— In the mid 1800s, we were told

that any male member of our people

could be captured or killed

if they didn't turn themselves in

to the US military.

— Kit Carson

did the Scorched Earth Campaign where they

didn't wanna waste their bullets.

You know, they would murder women and children

and elders with the backs of their guns.

That was to save bullets

as they forcibly removed our people from their homelands.

— Using the same tactics that they used in the Civil War,

burn down homes,

burn down fields.

— Go back into our history...

The Long Walk.

We were taken to a concentration camp

in the southern part of New Mexico,

which is about a 400 mile walk.

Very, very cruel walk.

You know, there's stories of pregnant women who couldn't walk

were shot and left by the side of the road.

We were taken down to,

they called it Fort Sumner.

And we have our own name for it,

which was Hwéeldi,

which means the place of suffering.

And they say that they didn't give us even

anything to build shelter with.

So we were living in holes that we dug in the ground

with a blanket put over the top.

We were given government rations,

and that was food that was completely foreign to us.

We didn't really know exactly what to do with it right away.

We were trying to eat coffee beans like beans.

And it was a time of, of great suffering

and a lot of our people perished.

Initially, the plan was

out and out, you know, murder

like every single one of us was to be

exterminated, you know

and that's what they say

about the whole continent, right,

that 9 out of 10 of the inhabitants were exterminated.

So, I don't really know at what point,

like this conscience grew,

or I don't know if it was conscience

or what, what was it that happened where,

I mean, I guess what I'd like to think is that

it was our prayers and our ceremonies

that shifted just that, that place

of just outright slaughter of every single Indigenous person

to a place of, of wanting to negotiate.

It was proposed that we sign a treaty

and in that treaty,

it said that we would send our children

to their schools.

So this is when the, we shifted from just,

you know, outright genocide to

Kill the Indian, Save the Man

— that was the name of the campaign.

So, they signed the treaty, you know,

and then we were allowed to walk back

400 miles again, a lot of people didn't make it there either.

And then when we got back home, our territory was greatly, greatly reduced.

— They estimate that our tribe was down to maybe 3,000 people.

There's a historical photo that Edward Curtis had taken

in that time period

and he titled it Vanishing Race

because we were expected to go extinct.

The way the reservation was designed,

we were viewed as wards of the United States government,

as prisoners of war,

because we had been engaged in warfare against

the United States government.

The federal government says that we're sovereign, yet

all the land is held in trust.

So we don't have ownership of the land.

— In the 1930s, they did a...

there's a program called the

Navajo Livestock Reduction Program.

My dad was just a child

when they came through and they

slaughtered every single living animal.

They were saying that we were overgrazing the land

and that it was creating desertification.

And as my dad recalls, you know,

it's like we were self-sufficient,

had everything that you need for our people.

It wasn't necessary for them to work

or to, you know, go off the reservation for anything

and everything that they needed was there on the land.

— It led to our people becoming impoverished

in a sense that we hadn't ever known,

because so much of what sustains our people as Diné

comes from these beautiful creatures.

— It's hard. It's not easy.

There's no economy on the reservation.

So, to survive and sustain,

you know, especially with the prices of gas,

when you have to haul water.

They really make it difficult

for you to, to live and exist on the reservation.

The way that they've designed it is for people to flee, to leave.

And that's in the end, you know, the way

of the United States government kind of finalizing the,

the Indian wars and abolishing the reservations

and terminating us as a people.

— I felt like I was in another land, another country.

I had worked with other cultures

and this felt like a place other than

anything I had ever seen.

I knew that I wanted to go to work with an Indigenous people

that was still living on their land.

The trauma was everywhere.

Here I was, inspired by Indigenous people and cultures,

but in many ways, there was no sign of that.

There were only the signs of

generations of trauma.

I didn't come there because I felt sorry for them.

That wasn't what called me.

What called me was my admiration

for what I had learned about these people,

and yet here, what I was encountering was so much lost,

so much being passed on in the way of pain and hurt.

— Shake my hand.

There you go.

— Our people have really gone through

so many historical afflictions.

You have the influenza, the tuberculosis.

You have the the land dispute that forced

families away from their homelands.

You have the, the boarding school era.

— Any native child you saw,

anybody could pretty much just grab them

and say, "Hey, you gotta go to one of these schools."

That was the law.

— We were sent everywhere,

California, Utah, Washington.

— I went to Leupp boarding school.

I was six years old.

When we walked in,

I was clinging onto, hanging onto my mom's skirt,

and I said, you guys aren't gonna leave me here, you know?

And she says, yeah, we'll come back for you.

But they didn't.

I remember that night,

just little girls crying like, "my mom, my dad."

I think that was the very first time that we were ever away from home.

— They came to my house, they took me away from my parents.

I fought to get away.

As much as I could, I fought,

trying to get out of their grip.

I couldn't do it.

I fought, I fought

until I was locked up in a room for two days,

and then I gave in.

— When I got to five years old, they took me to

Leupp boarding school

and they separated me from my grandmother,

put you in school and cut your hair.

— They were told to take away our,

our culture, our way of life.

— We have the Navajo, as we find him in the desert,

yet, through the agencies of the government,

they are being rapidly brought from their state of comparative

savagery and barbarism to one of civilization.

— When we first went into

the boarding school,

we didn't talk English.

We only talked Navajo.

— My voice was Diné,

my language was Diné,

— Their goal was to make our own culture so repulsive to us

that we would never think about going back.

Any part of the way that they acted,

that could be construed as being Diné

was ridiculed and shamed.

— We were really penalized

when we talked Navajo.

We were, we had to be, they'd tell us to eat soap.

We were spanked,

they would pull our hair.

They really abused us, you know

in different ways.

— They had a board in the office,

and it's called Board of Education.

That thing was that long, that wide, and you got a spanking,

and you could just close your eyes and ears

and hear the screaming of the girls.

I was ashamed of who I was.

I was ashamed about,

you know, being Indian, I guess.

— The sexual abuse, the physical abuse,

such a violent process of trying to separate

and ensure that the parents had no influence on their children.

That none of the language was gonna be passed on,

none of the ceremonies, all of that.

They were trying to break that connection.

— This is someplace where church and state

really came together to cooperate

and collaborate on kidnapping these children.

— Every Wednesday and every Sunday we had church services.

We were mandatory to go to those services.

So we can forget our traditional ceremonies

or traditional culture.

— We weren't allowed to be kids.

I think our childhood was severed.

That's the way I felt.

And to this day, I still feel the,

the pain of boarding school,

what has happened.

— God is in our midst no matter what.

You know, that's one, one thing that

no one can take away from us.

No trouble, no hardship,

no problems of this world can overcast and

override the biblical fact

that God is with us.

— I consider myself raised traditionally.

I would ask questions and I'd say,

"Why are you guys doing this?"

"How come you don't allow the kids over there?"

"The hogan's where the ceremony is happening."

So, a lot of it was not answered.

So somewhere along the way, I just came to my own conclusions:

Okay, that's not for me. That's not for me.

So, by the time I met my husband,

he was the one that turned to Christianity

and I was kind of like caught in the middle.

You know, I have my whole family here that's traditional

Then I have my husband just by himself over here.

So, and then it was kind of creating conflicts between us.

Finally, I just had to think,

I'm gonna go with my husband.

My family was kind of like

"you betrayed us."

You know, like, you're turning against us.

And it's like, no, it's not like that.

It's not like that.

— Of my siblings,

I was the first to attend church with my dad.

It presented in a sense of spiritual inquiry of

where do we come from?

Where am I going?

And then you have the traditional side

where you already knew the answer to that.

It was a beautiful blend

because they shared morals,

they shared values.

My faith really just reinforced

my identity, my cultural identity.

— I was raised in the Dutch Christian Reformed Church myself,

and then when I finally decided to leave it,

when I got sent to East Coast boarding school,

and I realized nobody was watching,

nobody knew if I was at church or not,

you know, it was terrifying.

It was terrifying to not go to church.

I mean, I had deeply instilled in me the fear of hell

and damnation, you know?

So it was, it was a very big move and moment for me.

There's a lot of judgment among Indigenous peoples around,

you know, why would you be Christian?

You know? But I think, you know, as a small child

being torn out of your family,

being torn away from your grandparents, being stripped

of all the beautiful things that they made to adorn you

because they loved you, and having those just be stripped

and thrown in the fire in front of your eyes.

If you decide to hold onto Jesus, that's all right with me.

That's all right with me.

Whatever you need to do, you know, whatever you need to do.

— I feel love

and I feel... hope

when people pray.

If people are praying and,

and looking for their spiritual self

out of a place that is

of goodness

and kindness,

compassion

and love,

then that prayer

can be said in any language.

It could be said from a book,

it could be said from the heart.

It could be said from your ancestral wisdom.

But I don't feel any animosity.

The only time that I felt grief or loss

or pain from

organized religions

is when

we're hated as traditional people.

When we're misconstrued as being something that is evil.

— My grandmother

my understanding was that

she was the one who was home when the missionaries came,

and her siblings were not home.

So she was the only one that was taken

from her family

and her siblings all remained traditional Diné.

Her version of Christianity was to not

denigrate the people around her.

When we used to go visit her traditional sister,

they would just weep when they saw each other

with just joy and such a deep feeling.

That was a totally foreign world to me,

a very traditional woman living in a traditional circumstance.

I didn't know anything about it,

and I didn't know what to do there

and it caused problems,

because in Diné way, there is a way to do absolutely everything.

Like there's a way to do it, you know,

and I had no idea.

I didn't understand the foods that we ate.

And I rejected them and that was a huge problem.

So, eventually, what happened on those visits was I got to sit in the corner

with a thermos of milk and some crackers.

Like, you just sit over here while we,

basically I think the way I interpret is, while we be Diné

because you're not one of us and you're never gonna be one of us.

And that message, that went so deep, so, so deep.

And somewhere along the way, when I was very young, I thought

If I ever have a chance to avoid my people,

I'm gonna avoid my people because it's rough, man. It's mean.

My father ended up, you know,

working on his PhD at Stanford University.

My brother went to Stanford, even carried on

to my daughter going to Stanford, my niece and nephew.

Many of my relatives are very highly educated in

you know, American school systems.

My father's full blood Diné, my mother's full blood Diné,

I'm as native as you can be blood wise, right?

But I was sent into American school systems.

So, I have the mannerisms of

basically rich, white, educated people.

That's when the light bulb finally went on and I went, wait a second.

If I'm not native, you know, then who is?

The events of history led to me being here like this.

So, I accept this place but

there's been a cost, let's just say

for me to sit here like this.

— Intergenerational trauma, to me,

we can understand or interpret it in the English language,

but in the Navajo language,

the one thing that I can possibly

describe

back into English from mine:

sorrow and hurt.

— We were never allowed a time to heal

because year, decade after decade after decade after decade,

our people were

affected by something new

and so, as spiritual people,

what does our lives require? a time of healing.

But that never happened.

And so what happens to our physiological self?

Well, then the cells in our body, because they don't heal,

they carry that burden.

— So you saw a lot of

problems with alcoholism.

My children were learning Navajo

and my daughter asked me one day,

"Mom, what are the earliest words you remember in your childhood?"

And instantly, instantly my mind,

the term Nayila popped up.

It was like instant.

I was like, of all the words in our Navajo vocabulary,

why did the word "passed out" come to mind?

As a child, I remember going to town

in the back of the pickup truck.

As we would drive to town, in the back,

there were liquor bottles

set up along the roadside.

And then you get to town

and you see those same bottles being carried

by our people.

We had family members walking the alleys

and you'd have to

beg them,

"Get in the truck"

"let's go home."

We are in an era of

escalated problems

with substance abuse.

It has gone beyond alcoholism.

It has now gone into the use of

dangerous drugs.

— I went pretty deep into alcohol and drug use.

I was using hard alcohol when I was 11 years old.

I mean, I look at 11-year-olds now, and I think about

trying to picture them drinking 151 Bacardi like I was when I was 11.

And I'm just like, wow.

Poor dear one, like,

wow, you know?

And that, that was a godsend to me at that time.

I'll just never forget the relief of

feeling that feeling coming on and just being like, oh, thank God,

there's some kind of way to make it just stop.

I overdosed twice in two weeks when I was 16,

on Quaalude and Southern Comfort, I think it was.

So later, I came to a crisis point.

I had two, three small children

and I realized I was gonna self-destruct right in front of them,

and I had had other elders around me, self-destruct,

and it's very confusing to watch that happen.

And I thought, I can't.

I can't do that in front of these kids.

So, you know, I called out to something.

I didn't know what I was calling out to.

I was very ashamed for

resorting to that,

but I did it because I love my kids,

and I just said, if there's anything out there,

I'm telling you I could use some help right now

because if I don't get some kind of help,

I don't think I'm gonna make it.

And what came back to me was

getting invited to my first native ceremony,

and it was a Lakota ceremony,

and I got invited into my first

sweat lodge ceremony.

There is no deeper resetting of the nervous system

than being in that ceremony or being in any of our ceremonies.

It pushes the mind all the way to the back of the line

and what comes forward first is the body, because of the heat,

but then the emotions,

then the spirit.

I was screaming and

crying and clawing the earth in there

to try to get rid of whatever it was,

you know, that was, that was in me.

I was reconnected to

this Mother Earth,

and I was reconnected to

spiritual help.

One of my elders says,

"You were born into beauty, as beauty, for joyful life. That's the truth. "

So, to start from that origin

is a place of great strength for me

and a fountain to, to heal from.

— When you look at

the whole process, a community is coming together,

there's medicine, herbs, there's sometimes sand paintings.

There's a whole reset of mental, physical, and spiritual being and

your community is there to support you,

where in Western ways you go into isolation,

you go into a hospital, you're very alone in that process.

The patients, they're processing the trauma or whatever occurred

but then addressing it and thinking of it

in a more positive, hopeful way.

So that they will,

you know, they see themselves recovering,

yhey see themselves getting well or healing,

and they see that support from loved ones.

My father, who's traditional Hatááłii is what we refer to them,

or medicine practitioners,

My dad actually got to work in a hospital

using our traditional medicine.

It took a long time to kind of get to that place of recognition.

It was supposed to be just a very short period just

to test it out, a trial for six months.

And they kept renewing it because it was so successful.

There were so many cases where they'd call him in, they'd be like,

Our patient didn't return, What did you do to them?

And the patient would say,

after 30 years of taking your medications, I never got well

but a cultural practitioner,

he actually fixed me and healed me

and I don't need your medication.

Our ceremonies, our culture,

the teachings that we receive from the holy ones

are just

a way to communicate with the Earth.

The things that the Earth is affected by,

all those things, also affect us, so

in order to heal those things, the Earth

has always had remedies for us.

The Earth, this is our pharmacy.

My dad, he does diagnostics

my sister as well, and there's different methods that we use.

— I started learning traditional medicine

and our traditional sciences.

There was no direct education or school.

It was just, it is.

Understanding that sacred relationship between plant, mineral, animal,

water, sky, and human

is just like breathing.

My daughters are learning traditional medicine.

Being a mom, and understanding traditional medicine,

my role is to support them

so they feel comfortable, confident,

and empowered to continue

to utilize traditional medicine,

to have it be as natural as breathing for them as well.

— You wanna take a sprig of it.

Take a piece of it, but don't take the root,

because the root needs to continue to grow.

In our traditional Diné perspective,

illness is a disharmony.

It's a dis-ease, not a disease.

Dis-ease that exists.

We don't treat the symptoms, we go to the root cause

and then we look for a path forward towards healing.

— Being a traditional practitioner is not an easy road,

but it's a beautiful road

because it means that you get to help people.

You get to see families be whole.

And that's,

that's a gift.

— There's so much knowledge

and wisdom that come from our elders

in those, those teachings.

Every time we lose an elder,

it's like a library is just,

you know, just erased from our people.

— Little Singer was my great-grandfather.

I was an infant when he passed,

so I never knew him.

I knew him through stories.

— Oh man.

— She is saying he used to sit around when he was free,

when he didn't have like any ceremony schedule,

he would be home and he would sit there.

"Come on, you, let me teach you how to sing."

"Let me teach you this, let me teach you that."

But they just were too busy.

They didn't really, nobody really took the time

to actually listen to him.

But he sat there, "Let me teach you this."

"Let me teach you how to sing."

The horse song, the sheep song, all of these songs.

— During that blizzard of, what was it, '69?

When my uncle got lost.

So he went to round up the sheep on horseback and

he lost his sense of direction because there was snow everywhere.

Visibility was zero.

And so instead of heading home, he just started heading the other way.

It was getting dark and my grandmother was getting worried.

And then Little Singer was just sitting there like,

"he'll be back," you know?

was kind of getting impatient,

was getting after my grandpa.

So, then my grandpa says, "Okay, get me a basket."

And so they gave, they got him a big wedding basket, like,

you know this big, and

if you look at the wedding basket, there's an opening.

You're supposed to always put that basket to the east.

And then he said, "Go to his house

and get the clothes that he changed, you know, out of."

And he put it in the basket,

and he started chanting.

When he went so far, he would move the,

the basket like a quarter, then he would, you know,

start chanting again.

And then he would turn it again.

When he got the basket all the way around, facing back

to the east, when he finished his chant, guess what?

He comes walking in.

He had frostbites on his fingers, his toes,

and he was just cold.

And so we asked him, "how did you come home?"

He said, "I saw a light."

"Four times," he said, "There was a light way over there."

"I got to that light."

"And when I got there," he says,

"the light would move this way again."

"And then I'd get to that light again. It would move again."

"The fourth light led me home," he said.

That I will never understand.

I was like, wow, that overwhelms me to this day.

Like how, just by his chance did he lead, you know,

lead him home?

All his grandchildren,

they all were, you know, hauled to the boarding school.

So he found himself

alone with my grandmother.

And so that's where a lot of this, you know,

like bring the children home, you know,

I need to hear the laughter.

I need to communicate with my grandchildren.

I want to be able to tell stories.

I want to be able to share what I have,

the songs, the prayers, I want them here.

— The medicine man and the community,

their first goal was to bring their children home.

And because of that, the community said,

let's start our own school here

so we can hear them again

when they come back from school that same day.

— His school,

it was a school built on the hope that children

would never lose sight of who they are.

At that time, this was just a desert in here.

There's nothing, just... Little Singers' little hogan was the only one sitting here.

— I was working here when the school first opened the door,

and we had 23 students that came on bicycle

that came running,

that came on horseback.

You were overwhelmed with excitement.

Like, wow, this is actually happening, you know,

out here where there's no electricity and no running water.

And here we are.

— So Little Singer was

committed to bringing the culture back to the children

and to have them

planted well in the culture.

Their teaching staff are Navajo,

their bus drivers, their cooks,

their coaches, they're Navajo.

And so when there is that common ground in identity,

these children already know who they are, who they belong to.

— I am the principal here at Little Singer Community School.

Little Singer's wish is to

continue with the language, really make the language strong,

and to keep the kids happy,

with happy voices, happy noises,

happiness is what he wanted for the kids.

And so here it's the same,

the same thing that Little Singer wanted for the kids.

Our Navajo, our Diné education

is very different from the Western world.

We don't call this a class,

this is our home, just a place of learning and gaining knowledge.

The Western education is very linear,

and it feels like they don't wait for you.

You will be left behind.

In our way, nobody leaves anybody behind.

Why? K'é.

We belong to each other.

— The school has really helped in a sense of

preserving our language.

They have such a desire to, to sing these songs,

and they know them by heart.

Had that school not been there,

I think that their sense of self wouldn't be as strong.

— I got to witness the culture returning,

coming back, and being called out of them.

I could see how different the children were when they were in the classes

with their language and with their culture,

how differently their bodies responded to those teachings.

— We always say that we're a unique school,

so we have an alternative discipline.

We don't expel, we do peacemaking.

Peacemaking is in the Navajo courts.

If you decide not to go to court,

you can choose to have peacemaking.

— Peacemaking is entirely different than the majority culture justice system.

I had already learned about restorative justice.

Didn't know how related it was to peacemaking.

It's not often mentioned that

this has been sourced from peacemaking and

pretty much in particular Navajo, Diné peacemaking.

Peacemaking doesn't even have a word for offender.

It only has a word for broken relationship.

When something happened, the relationship is broken.

So there is "k'é" again.

You repair the relationship,

you bring the relationship back together again.

And then you have what they call hózhó,

then you have beauty again, you have balance.

Hózhó means a lot of things, it's not just beauty.

It means balance and connection,

harmony.

And it wouldn't just be a parent,

it would be an aunt,

it would be a grandmother sitting in this circle.

At some point the aunt would say,

I wanna tell you

why I'm responsible for this happening.

I haven't been paying enough attention.

And then the grandmother would say why she's responsible too.

And each person in the circle

would share how this had happened

because they had not been there in the right way.

And it would very soon go into Navajo

because the English language doesn't have the language

for the emotion that was shared in that circle.

And I always felt I could understand it, you know, somehow

my heart could understand the language right from the start.

There's not only generational trauma,

there's generational culture.

Not only trauma affects us,

but healing affects us

and we have generations

that we can call on and remember from.

And you can't miss it.

It's, it's there.

— It is the spirit of what was prayed for, what was sung for,

what was believed, and in the Diné way is moving, still.

— There are so many young people,

not only in my community,

but other communities that are constantly searching.

Some of them don't have the same support system that I did.

Some just continue to wander.

I met a group of young men who

have such a sad story.

— Our mother is all of our mother,

but our father, we have different fathers,

and my dad was the brother to their dad.

My dad ended up passing away and then my mom passed away.

I found a way to mentor them.

Maybe if they know

of a hope

that I carry,

maybe they'll see it,

maybe they'll hold onto it.

— I dream of myself being in other places,

meeting with people, talking with people.

My dream, honestly,

is to leave this place.

— Financially, it's just a struggle

'cause not most of us are working, there's not that much jobs out here.

So, we have to go out and get jobs.

Not much out here to do.

You can't really make a life out here if you really don't got nothing, you know?

We don't have no ride, we don't got nothing, so we can't go to work

and with that, it's just another financial problem

too where we can't buy our food and all that.

And it's just...you know, it gets tiresome doing the same thing over and over,

having the same struggles over and over.

You know, it'd be better...

it'd be better with somewhere different.

— They're young men.

Had them for over a decade

and I call them my sons,

and... they're still with me.

— You know, a prayer I've been making,

asking the ancestors, what was our love like?

What was our love like before

all of this, you know?

And I just think about us and our life

with our ceremonies and our prayers and our...

the beautiful things that we spent our time doing

and the closeness of our relationships, our clans.

And I just think, you know, our love must have just been so extraordinary.

Like incredible.

— When the ships arrive here,

what do they describe that they see?

Everything is flowering and fruiting and flourishing.

Game is plentiful.

Water is sparkling, you know, gorgeous.

And they even describe it as

you know, they've come upon Eden.

So, it implies that human beings had not touched that place.

When the truth of the matter was there were millions of human beings

occupying this continent.

I think the logic is

that if it had been touched by human beings,

it would look like where we came from

and it doesn't look that way.

— This world is fragile

and the things that we do to it

have very real consequences.

That's something that we're suffering with, we're afflicted by it today.

Climate change, even tornadoes coming back into our region,

all these things are signs.

If you think about

all of the water, the fresh potable water in this world,

there are corporations, there are politicians

that are trying to steal

the future rights of our water.

So, this has happened to our people in the past.

The draining of our aquifer from Peabody coal mine,

these giant earth movers destroying our landscape,

removing, eating the earth, you know, to access the liver,

the liver of our earth, the coal.

This world will continue in some other form,

but for us, we've talked about this history,

we know it because these are things our ancestors

or ancient ones, have continued to teach us:

Don't disturb the earth. Don't remove these things.

You know, if you take this out of the earth, this is gonna harm you.

Like uranium or other things that have harmful impacts

for generations upon generations, far outliving us.

— My grandpa

was diagnosed with lung cancer,

just like a lot of the elderly here.

They had the downwinders

where they poured the radiation into the river

and a lot of our families used the river

for farming purposes.

But the pouring of that radiation eventually caught up

years later and it manifested as

cancer.

— As humanity,

we have to protect what we have.

We have to preserve, we have to ensure

that the water, the air, all these things that are sacred,

they give us life, they sustain us,

that's continuance.

Money, fossil fuels, this greed,

that's the end of our civilization as humanity.

— We have always carried ourselves

in a way of balance, of hózhó, of beauty.

Hózhó Hajaa, our beauty way,

is to ensure that there's balance and harmony,

because we don't want to see this world destroyed.

— Sustainability is the highest and most sought after technology on the planet

but we actually have actual human beings who understand

how to do that.

These are the premier scientists of sustainability.

There's plants, there's insects, the hummingbirds are coming.

All these things are happening out there, and what are they doing?

Every single thing out there is doing one thing: it's making more life.

So, how could we develop so many institutions

creating health institutions, governance institutions, economic institutions

and none of them

are constructed placing life at the very center,

when the entire plan here is life.

Human beings are looking for

the kind of omnibeneficence that Indigenous peoples have lived.

We need to understand collectively what Indigenous people hold

for all of us and for the planet.

For me, that's very heartening

and it's also saying we're not just dreaming

of some pie in the sky that's probably impossible,

we have evidence that we've already done it.

The understanding of how to do it, the science of it

is in the cultures, is in the languages.

— Where I learned my weaving,

my grandmother, my mother,

anybody else in the family that knew how to weave,

I just watched.

My favorite place to play was behind

because our homes are circular

so our looms would go across

and then it would have some room back there

and so that's where I would play.

I would see the strings

and the design beginning to build.

and I could see my grandmother's,

my mother's thoughts beginning to build

and the beauty that they were showing.

This is our thoughts.

It's not just an art,

but it's an expression, it's a love.

I lost my mom.

It's been... two years ago.

So, I just didn't feel like weaving

until now, just...

probably within two weeks or so,

I started feeling that I need to come back to it.

Because I feel I'm connected with my mom, my grandma, my great-grandma.

The new world

is very different

from the world that our older generations have experienced,

but you can still have culture

— These people have survived largely

because they have a design of culture

that we no longer see, is rare to be seen.

The inclusiveness,

the generosity,

it's alive and it lives.

— In this colonized society

that exists throughout the world

there is an intense longing to reconnect

with all that exists that makes us.

People look at the Indigenous peoples of the world

and are able to still see that connection.

And that is something that Western colonized societies yearn for,

is that deep connection that Indigenous peoples still have.

The global Indigenous community,

we're finally at a place where we're respected and people are listening.

We're finally in a place as humanity to have compassion

and not just try to

convert, Christianize or

destroy those cultures and erase them.

I think it's a turning point for

not just us as Navajo in our region,

but traveling and going to

different other tribes

and seeing that their ceremonies are coming back,

their songs and their learning.

Their youth aren't afraid to speak their language.

Their youth aren't afraid to sing their songs in public.

It's a beautiful place to be,

but we're, we're still very much like those endangered species,

like the polar bear in the north.

We're struggling to survive.

— I feel like we can make it through.

We will make it through to find ourselves.

We won't be the same as we were,

but we can be that expression of human being

that is omnibeneficent again.

— Many people today say that there are two worlds that exist,

there's the traditional world and there's the modern world,

and that you have to choose one.

No, you are both

and understand, feel grounded

in who you are in your identity

as a person of Mother Earth, as a child of Mother Earth.

The rhythm

of those songs that

I grew up with,

they still echo

around here.

You can hear it, you know, in the wind.

You can hear it with just the sound of the sheep and the sheep corral

and children and their laughter.

So, life is giving us these

savory moments

and so

we have to embrace them.

In our language,

to close things out,

whether in action, whether in life, whether in song,

in gathering, the end

comes down to k'ad,

it is done.

We can't go back.

But it's also an invitation

to what is yet to come.

One day

k'ad will happen,

the end.