Hashtlish-Mud…

Hashtlish-Mud…

Haschtlish is a Navajo word, which means mud…it is also one of the groups of the original Navajo people we call clans who settled Dinetah-Navajoland, it tells us who are our relations Navajo groups through kinship that are related by birth through the eons of time as our people disbursed and settled over a large area in the Southwest. This clan relationship ties Navajos together so they know their relatives and distant relations, as we are all connected. We use to describe where we come from by birth, our origin as it were and identifies us as a people from a certain place and time.
We tell our children this so they will know their relationships to other of our people when they first meet, it is a form of introduction and so they know instantly distant relatives at their first meeting.

Now days when people talk of the Mud people it is seen as derogatory, a name for people with a shade of brown in their skin coloring, and yet for Navajos it is a part of us, as we use the names of striped rocks, colors and colorings of animals to describe where we come from in ancient times, so it is not a bad thing at all.

My grand daughter goes to school in a predominantly non indian community which is a mixture of checkerboard lands, indian and non indian scattered in 40 acre parcels across the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in northeastern Utah. She attends a school within the boundaries of the reservation which is adjacent to the reservation headquarters, actually a stone throw away from the tribal offices there. The Utes are a minority in Utah with just 5000 souls if you count every single one of them and the rest of the area is predominantly non Indian in nature…in Navajo we refer to them as Beligaanas, in Ute they call them Americuchu and there are 40,000 of them there so they outnumber the natives by quite a bit.

By chance or by design take your pick, the native kids attend one school in the area that sits on the hill above the reservation community, so at this school the native kids outnumber the non indian kids by quite a bit. All the kids get along pretty good, but with this last election, Trump carried Utah by a wide margin, the natives for the most part did not vote for Trump so when he won it sent a shock wave through both communities and this was felt by everyone even the kids that go to school there.

My grand daughter got to school early to get breakfast as most kids eat before classes start, so when you come in the building you pass by the principals office and go onto the lunch room, this one morning there was a chair sitting out by the school office door and on it sat a red baseball hat…a Trump hat with the slogan Make America Great Again, no one was sitting around it or by it..it was in plain sight and everyone gave it a wide berth as they passed it to go eat. As the school day started the hat stayed where it was and no one removed it…some kids talked about throwing it in the trash but others primarily the non indian kids said it is hat of the newly elected president so it should stay where it was…in any case no one, no adult, no teacher, no school official or the principal removed the hat. The school staff is primarily non Indian and since no one removed the hat some kids thought maybe it was because the school staff had voted for Trump.

As the school day started it was as if something had come over the school and kids in each classroom it seems had to choose a side, those that were for removing the hat and those that wanted it to stay, this division was evident as it was along racial lines. Indian sided with Indians and White kids with White kids, and the seating in each class ended up with Indian kids sitting with Indian students and White kids with or by other White kids, a division occurred and it stayed this way all day as the Trump hat sat on the chair all day.

When lunch came the kids went to eat in the cafeteria and again Indian kids chose to sit with Indian kids and White kids with their own kind, since the native kids outnumbered the non Indian kids, the non natives sat around two tables and they ate that way with each group watching eat other. Normally the kids sit anywhere they want to but on this day they sat divided. When it came time to go to recess for lunch they went out side to the playing fields and again the groups were divided by race, with each group looking at each other murmuring.

One side of the other got to talking and they said things to each other like we should stick with our own kind, and that one side was better than the other, some of the people in each group were saying things like only Indians can come over here, and the other side said only Cowboys can play on this side. That is how it was when it started to rain, a slow drizzle and the kids sat in the rain and watched each other and pools of water formed and it got muddy. The white kids stood by the slide out of the mud and native kids were in it, someone called the natives mud people, and some kids said we are mud people because we are close to the land it is our land t and so it went some harsh words were exchanged and each side had its own area.

Some of the older kids could see what was happening and went to the teachers and some of the teachers said there was no problem and so some kids with cell phones called home and told their parents there was going to be trouble with the school because of the Trump hat. Some parents of the native kids decided to come to the school to see what was going on and left for the school. As this was going on, there was this one kid by the name of Homer.

Homer came in late, he came to school after lunch while everyone was at recess and he went to the playing field to go play; by chance Homer is not a native but a kid with reddish blonde hair whose parents work at the local gas station part time and they lived in a little trailer house surrounded by the indian community, so Homer had been raised there with the native kids. He grew up with them and was poor like them. When he got to the field the kids were divided, the non Indian kids were by the playground equipment and the native kids were playing on the open field near the mud.

Homer stood there and was wondering where he should go and one older native girl who knew Homer well since she had been invited to his birthday party not so long before all this happened called him over to the native kids and so he looked at both groups and went over to the native kids who were standing there and they said to him Homer you are now a member of the tribe.

Among those kids were actually several tribal groups, some Ute, some Navajo, some Pueblo, some Shoshone, some Arapaho and some Paiute, actually all kinds of Indians or parts of different native peoples. The girl who called him over was part Navajo and Ute and she said we have to adopt this child as a member of our tribe.

A tribe the kids formed among themselves on that playground in the rain, and so the native kids gathered around and said yes we have to make him an official part of us, and so they went to a mud puddle nearby and the girl reached down and took a handful of mud and told Homer to kneel down, he looked at the kids around him and knelt down, when he did that the girl raised her hand to the sky and said we who have made our own tribe of Indians here on this field do hereby adopt and name Homer a member of our tribe and so they rubbed mud on his forehead, and each native kid did the same and then they said we have to name him an Indian name so that he is known by that name from here on out.

One kid called out, let us name him White Belly and the kids laughed and said no that is not a good name and so someone else said let us call him Little Corn and the group said yes that is a good name for him and so they told him you are now known as Little Corn and he was named. Just then the school bell rang and recess was over and the kids ran inside to class.

That is how Homer became Little Corn on that playing field on checkerboard Indian lands by a group of native students.

There is a little more to the story as some parents showed up at the school some for Trump and some against and when school let out the kids went out to the parking lot where they were met by BIA police officers who were there just in case there was trouble by some of the parents but there was none, the hat was gone by then…it had disappeared….so it happened it happened that way when a red had appeared on school grounds that said Make America Great Again….this is the way it happened in so many words on day when a new tribe was formed to adopt an outsider into the indian community but in reality he had grown up with these kids and knew all of the from the first day of head start years ago…rustywire