Metwe' Metwe'

Metwe' Metwe'

What does that mean, these words come to mind, they speak of family, of
togetherness, of joining one people with another, taking in a person
from another family, another people to be included in the family.


I met them when they were a young couple, they had a child. Their house
was new and nice and they lived far from their homeland. They made a
place on a high mountain valley, a place to call home where they could
raise their children and bring them up in the way they the two thought
they should live.


The young mother had long flowing black hair and in order to make money
she made frybread and she was good at it, putting in hamburger and
beans with a little cheese. She had some with chili, just hot enough to
let you know you were alive. She came from a place called Coal Mine
Mesa, way out there not too far from Tuba City. Her family was large
and her father made her feel she was the special one. He prized her and
gave his most valuable possession which was his home.


The young woman's husband came from a place not too far from her home,
on a high windy mesa with ancient homes built on top of the other. His
home was at Second Mesa, where he was born into a clan with a place in
the community, an old place where centuries of life had fashioned a way
of life that still persisted in this out of the way corner in Arizona.


She was a Navajo and he was a Hopi and they didn't know that about each
other when they first met far away at school. Their people came from
different places, spoke different languages and traditions they came to
know one another and decided to make a life together.


She left her family and he left his and they set up a life together.
Her father gave her his place, a home far away in a different land.


As time went on she wanted to please her man and learn the ways of his
people so she went with him, driving South to the borders of Dinetah,
passed her old place at Coalmine Mesa and down the windy road to the
high place, where his family lived. Second Mesa it was called where the
traditions of time, space, family and relations required the following
of the flow of seasons. She stepped into his world and his family
looked at her, and she became Metwe'. It is how they call those that
come to join their family, their people and they take them in.


During the ceremonies and dances in the village there was much work to
be done, and she learned to do it all, grinding corn between stones,
collecting wood and fashioning ground corn into a mush to lay it out on
a hot tin and roll it to make the bread they call Piki.


She butchered sheep, made stew and watched the children of the family
as the dancers were readied for the plaza. Her husband was one of these
and she learned how they take the time to follow certain practices. to
dress in an appropriate way and where she was to sit. She learned about
the gathering of plants, the preparation of harvests and offerings and
thw ways of the katchina.


Metwe' Metwe' they called to her, please do this for us and she would
go and get something missed or forgotten. When the doings were done she
cleaned and put away the things a woman does, the pots, the pans, the
cloth, and worked to help her relations with the household duties.
She found that at each dance they went home and she worked learning the
ways of his people and remembering her own.


Her father came a place called Coalmine Mesa. A small place where
there was no water, it had to be hauled in from many miles away. There
were few trees, and the place is a hard place to make a life, but that
is where he came from. He told her, we Navajo exist with the land, we
don't change it but continue on with it, to survive to go on and on.
She listened and then one day her family moved off that land forever.
Her father went to Kinlani and worked there in town knowing he would
never be able to sleep in the land of his birth, he and his children
had to make a new life. It was hard. The folks in Washing'don gave told
him they would build him a new home anywhere for the loss of his place.
He thought about it and said he would let them know.


As time went on, the young couple needed a home to make their life. it
was her father who said, my daughter this is my gift to you. Take this
home that is to be built for me and let it be yours. She looked at her
father and could see his eyes, and the way they looked at her. In his
face were the wrinkles of age, and his hands wore the mark of a hard
life on that barren land which once was his home. In the look of his
eyes she could see the early morning dawns of a lifetime, of herding
sheep and hauling water on horseback from miles away at Moenkopi wash
to the west. That in there she saw the movement of yucca plant moved
faintly by the wind and in it's roots the cleanliness of it for washing
and medicine. That the sand blown in the wind covered the trackes of
all her fathers and mothers who had run to meet the dawn in their
youths, and the sounds of young girls reaching womanhood dressed in
sash belts, silver jewelry with coral and turquoise. These things she
saw in her father's eyes as he gave away his birthright to her to make
a new life in a far off place.


Metwe' Metwe' (Metway is how it is said in the Hop way of speaking) She
heard the sound and came back to the place, to Second Mesa and was
grinding corn and could see the feet of his feet, her man who stood not
too far ready to go to the plaza to dance for another season of rain,
for good corn and long days. He stood there with deerskin moccassins,
with ancient bells, with a loin cloth and sash belt, his body covered
in paint and a large red gourd rattle was by his side. Up ahead was the
place they entered to put on the masks, the dieties, a Katchina he
would be, with long hair. His mother came to her and helped her with
the corn.


This was a time for renewal, it was his people's time and their place.
She picked up her ground corn and followed her new mother into the
pueblo, and looking from this high spot to the west, there on the
horizon was Coal Mine Mesa, once her father's home, now Hopi land under
the laws of the United States. This was now her people, their way of
life was now her own.


When they returned to the high mountain valley she stepped into her
father's house, a house given to him by the United States Government
for what was loss at Coalmine Mesa, the walls were new, the sidewalk
outside led through a yard of green grass. She could see the mountains
to the North and the snow on them and the place was peaceful. Her
husband drove into the driveway and parked and picked up their sons and
they went inside to their new home.


What are these places we call home and how do we get them, how are they
named? What is it about it that makes them that way, is it sacrifice,
love or fate? The Navajo-Hopi land case is settled by the courts, but
the people who lived there where did they go? Dreams and Broken
Rainbows, when rainbows break do they make a sound. Life goes on but at
Coalmine Mesa you can touch the yucca plants, their spiny ends and hear
the sound of a broken rainbow.


Metwe' and her man are no longer together, he left her for another and
she struggles now with the kids. The home, the house the gift of her
father who passed away was sold and it is now gone.


This is one story about the devastation of the forced relocation of
thousands of Navajo People. There are Navajo families at Big Mountain
who refuse to leave, they stand against the United States, the Courts
and the Hopi and Navajo governments. Tonight they sleep and wait the
dawn of another day, and a broken rainbow will not greet them on the
horizon.

rustywire