No Dudes, Few Women by Elizabeth Lester Ward

Author:Elizabeth Lester Ward [Ward, Elizabeth Lester]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Google: 1rIXAO9KXoIC
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 1951-01-15T04:23:27+00:00

CHAPTER X—RELIEF AND ELECTIONS

The Navahos are a sharing people. With no expectation of reward, and with no demand upon organized charity, they will cheerfully care for their own blind, their occasionally mentally deficient; when necessary they will care, without question, for the children of any one connected with them. It is a common denominator of the tribe, and one that gave the range rider much trouble in taking livestock or census records. A family with three children one summer would turn up, surprisingly with eight youngsters the next season; they would be naively astonished at any question of their obligation to care for them. With kindly patience, and little fanfare, they did what their limited resources would permit. If a woman left her children to go to the white settlements for a job; or if a mother died, or if—as in the case of a squaw near Sheep Springs—she just got tired of it all and walked off, the children were cared for.

“Tsosih’s Wife is gone,” Fanny told me, stopping by to pick up two discarded sweaters I had given her daughter. “He don’t know where she is.”

I remembered Tsosih’s Wife. She had been at the sheep dip, where her five children stayed in the makeshift shade of a ragged blanket tied to a pine limb while their mother assisted with the sheep dipping. I knew they lived in a small hogan on the dreary, grey, windswept flats between Nava and Sheep Springs. I knew that their flock of sheep was small and of poor quality, so that their income was inconsiderable. I didn’t know Hosteen Tsosih, personally—he had no distinguishing features, and no especially outstanding characteristics. He was simply the average man, the median of the lower-class Navaho, with no special ability and no chance to use what ability he had.

“I’ve got to put them on relief,” Dan said, when I relayed Fanny’s report about the family. “They’ve got six kids, now.”

I knew they needed assistance, and rode the eight miles with Dan when he went out to investigate the situation. The wind was whipping sharply from the north, and Bill and Prince stepped out briskly. Within an hour we were approaching Tsosih’s place, and the boy and girl driving the sheep into the corral quickly disappeared into the hogan. So did Hosteen Tsosih, who was talking with a visitor on a ragged pinto pony. It did not surprise us to see the hogan door close as we neared the place, and we knew it was no unfriendly gesture. It was a custom with which we had become familiar, and by now we also knew we should not knock on the hogan door. It was taboo; guests could not be admitted immediately, because hogan ghosts would enter with them. After a reasonable wait, the chindees would vanish.

Before we dismounted, I saw a piece of barbed wire strung across two decrepit posts, with sheepskins hanging across it. There was an ancient corral for the sheep, part natural rock formation, and

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