Canyon de Chelly. April 2003. Part One.
On Maggie’s and my first Painting the Rez trip to the Navajo Reservation, I was an overnight guest on the Yazzie family’s farm in Canyon de Chelly. The visit was arranged by Howard Smith, the owner/manager of Spider Rock Campground which overlooks a stretch of the canyon toward its upper Canyon. He is an uncle of Ben Yazzie who helps his parents in the Canyon when he isn’t busy with his work as an electrical contractor. When Howard introduced me to the Yazzie family, he said, “Robert is on a quest.” Meaning, my intent to paint houses and do repair work for folks in tha Chinle-Canyon de Chelly area of the Navajo Reservation. I like that. (Canyon de Chelly is the spiritual center of the vast Navajo Indian Reservation).
Howard is also a licensed Navajo Guide and a well-known and respected medicine man. I had asked him about taking part in a sweat ceremony. A sweat lodge ceremony is a serious matter with him, not to be entered into as a tourist thing. He asks people to put in writing, their reason for wanting to participate in a sweat ceremony, and they have to read and sign a Policy and Dress Code for Sweat Lodge. In a letter to Howard, I explained the reason Maggie and I would be on the Reservation, and that a (private) sweat ceremony would be important to the success of that undertaking. (Maggie didn’t feel the need to participate in a sweat).
“I know that I (and my wife) will come up against things that will cause me to falter in my purpose. Sometimes things are not going to go the way I would hope. There will be times when I will be discouraged and will doubt the purpose of what I’m doing.* A Sweat Lodge ceremony would give me the spiritual strength I need to complete the work.” (*Little did I know).
(April 2003). Soon after the sweat, I found myself standing at the open entry of the lodge, experiencing a feeling of deep respect for this man laying on a woven mat just inside the dark interior. He now slept the undisturbed sleep of someone who had just completed an exhausting undertaking. Two and a half hours in four phases. Temperature in the lodge had cooled from extremely hot to 95? Later, he and I replenished our bodies with smoked salmon from Katy’s Cookhouse here in Trinidad. And lots of sage tea.
