Of Metaphors and Learning: Navajo Teachings for Today's Youth.

I winced. The young teenage boy gazed into my eyes without even a ripple of a smile. He was serious. I looked over in the corner where an older Navajo man rested, silver hair cropped close, eyes gazing into the fire of the small wood-burning stove. I was glad that he probably did not understand what his grandson had just said, since what was a cartoon to one person was the essence of life for another. As I made my way across miles of sandy desert road and slickrock to the serenity of asphalt, I had time to reflect upon what had been said. The interview with Charlie Blueyes had been informative, but the brief dialogue with his grandson had also been enlightening, though in a far different manner. In that two-room, gray-stuccoed house planted in a sea of red sand and gray-green sagebrush, three people had assumed roles that typify a problem inherent across the Navajo reservation today. Charlie Blueyes, a man in his mid-eighties, spoke only broken English, and although he understood more than he let on, he was so fluent in Navajo that our interview was entirely in his language. The interpreter who worked with him understood the importance of what he said. The grandson, on the other hand, spoke English well, but his Navajo was a struggle at best. School and the dominant society had captured his native tongue and replaced it. And as for me, I was desperately interested in reconstructing elements of the history of the Utah Navajos as seen through the eyes of someone who had lived part of it. Oral history gave a slant to the historical record that could be obtained and preserved in no other way. So there we sat: Charlie in the twilight of his life (he died two years later), a White man with the help of an interpreter learning everything from religious beliefs to historical events, and a young boy who did not see much value in any of it. My impression is that although there are many