I met David Sangster, the uncle-in-law of a former client of mine, at the Holiday Inn in Holbrook, Arizona, one windy, dusty day. Small dust devils swirled in the distance. David, a Navajo man who lives on the Arizona side of the Navajo Nation, near the New Mexico state line, has done a great job of navigating the two worlds. He has been able to understand and internalize a sufficient amount of the outside culture to be successful in it.
At the same time, he is involved with Navajo religion in a way common to those featured in this story. Our discussion helped me understand how the three traditions interact.
David completed high school at the Indian School in Phoenix, served in the Navy, and retired from a maintenance job at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. He worked as a track laborer for the Santa Fe Railroad in the summer before he entered the ninth grade, traveling with a track gang that was sent to Illinois to work.66 Management saw that he had skills in both English and Navajo and had him do the “paperwork” for the gang.
Along with his ability to be successful in both worlds, David has given much thought to the role of faith and the practical use of religion among the Navajos, and Navajo railroad workers more particularly. I told him of my interest and was honored when he agreed to share his thoughts in great detail. David is a man of faith and sees the three Navajo religious paths as various ways to get to the same place. There is “only one God,” he told me.
66 On a track gang certain discrete skills are often required. Some workers become skilled at operating certain kinds of machines, or in a certain craft like welding. This often allows them to be assigned to do this work, as opposed to simple manual labor.
“I don’t care if there are over a hundred different religions, including the Indian religions. It all goes to the man up there.
If I want to I can go to a church, there is no restriction or law or whatever. I am a Presbyterian. I can go to any church.”
Today David is active in the Native American Church (NAC), serving as a robeman, an important position in NAC meetings.67 He participated in his first ceremony when he was a young man and became a robeman in 1979. A perceptive observer, he is very aware of the history of the church and the many controversies that surround it. Every year NAC members hold a conference between the Arizona communities of Many Farms and Chinle, attended by people from their many chapters; fifteen to twenty tepees are set up for ceremonies.
David’s NAC ceremonies are performed for marriage prob-lems, family probprob-lems, and sickness. David recognizes that some sickness is incurable, like arthritis and cancer. But he believes that NAC ceremonies are very useful for those in need.
“If you are a perfect person, no sickness or nothing, you are a good person or a perfect one, you don’t belong in there,” he told me. “What is the use going there? This is the place where a sick person gets well. That is the place where you eat peyote and sing and pray and all that. You have no business in there. So, it is for sickness.”
Given the Christian influence on the NAC, there is a holi-day meeting for Christmas and New Year’s Day. “There is an Easter meeting where they pray for resurrection of Christ, and on Christmas it is for when Jesus was born.” The NAC also holds educational meetings for students so that they will learn well.
They encourage the young to pray throughout their educational career, even when they are in college. Young people today are really out of hand, David believes. Some can get straightened up, but some don’t. The NAC meetings can cure some wayward kids
67 As in many Christian ceremonies, a number of well-specified positions can be found in each ritual, each with its own important duties.
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through the singing and the ceremony. The same basic ceremony is done for each issue or concern and the same fire pit can be used. However, the prayer changes based on the purpose of the meeting, he tells me.
I ask David about the Christian revivals. “It is all up to the individual,” he tells me. “If you believe in our old ways, you go to the traditional singing medicine man. If you believe in that, you have faith in that [and] you get well with that, why go to another one? . . . Some people for some reason, I don’t know why, maybe they get tired, they can’t seem to get help from that, they go to revival or they go back to Catholic or some other church. Then they come to find out that revival did not agree with, I don’t know, whatever. They come back. Some people jump around to different relations. . . . Some people say they get cured at the revival and they stay with them. . . . It is all up to the individual. You have to have faith in something. It is the only way.”
We talk about traditional religion. David tells me that the Long Walk experience is the genesis of Navajo religious prac-tices. I ask him how he understands the way one becomes a medicine man. “It is all God’s, the creation that creates this, the spiritual way,” David says. “It involves the Holy People, some-how. I guess you sort of get picked. Then they let you have it.
If you just want to become a hand trembler or a crystal gazer, I don’t care who authorizes you; it is never going to come to you.
It is never going to happen.” But just having the desire and being picked is not enough, David says. An aspiring healer or medicine man must work as a kind of apprentice for three years or so, to be sure that the proper introduction into the world of such leaders is fully realized.
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