The Plight of the Modern Native American, and The Bank That Was Closed
We woke up a bit earlier this time because I didn't pull the blackout curtains shut. They had a decent breakfast downstairs, so I went down and got some coffee (really good coffee - it was the last I had all trip) and some cereal for Elise, some little muffins and little bagels... we ate and she watched "Krypto the Superdog" while I packed up.
I had a money order I wanted to cash, to have some extra money for sightseeing, so Jeff found me a Wells Fargo branch nearby and we climbed in the truck to find it.
This was an experience... The sections of town that are just off the freeway are very tourist-oriented, of course, but you don't really get the reality of things until you leave the beaten path for the areas that are NOT touristy.
Here's what we saw: Gallup has a considerable Native American population - Zuni, Hopi, Acoma, Laguna and Navajo, to name only a few - and the part of town where the Wells Fargo was located was the Native American part of town. It wasn't precisely run-down, but it didn't have the sparkly surfaces, so to speak, that the tourists saw. Everything was clean, everything was in decent repair, there was no garbage on the streets, there was one broken window that I saw, and there was a lot of scaffolding up, to paint a mural, to fix the facade of a building... and yet half the town was pawnshops/trading posts, and the buildings were all small, older 70's architecture. There were several buildings that were devoted to aid agencies, and cultural centers, and native government, but no thriving businesses, and no shoppers at all.
Here are some free associations I made that night.
It was a small downtown area, actually reminded me a lot of Niles, or some of the small towns I've visited. No dirt, no garbage, but nothing was new, nothing was busy... Lots of pawn shops (shades of a short story by Native American Writer/Genius Alexie Sherman - "What You Pawn I Will Redeem"), lots of "Indian Trading Posts"...
Disconcerting: groups of people just standing around. Not talking, not smiling, not doing anything at all, just standing around, staring... teenage boys, but also what looked like whole family groups. Young men, women, old men, kids, dads... just standing propping up the buildings, silent as ghosts. Elise and I would walk past, and they'd all find other places to look. It's not that they stopped talking when we got near - it's that they never WERE talking.
We weren't welcome, I could tell, but this wasn't a standard, "Get the hell out of our spot" look - no one even really looked at us at all. It was the looking away, the looking down, the not smiling, the "I can't/won't meet your eyes." It was a shock, and I couldn't tell if this was a cultural Navajo thing, or if it really was us. There were a few whites walking along - we weren't the only ones, and you all know me - I'm "jeans and t-shirt and Berkies", so it wasn't that we were over-dressed, or even dressed like tourists, except that there were some differences. When I wear t-shirts, I pick colorful ones with v-necks, something that at least looks a bit feminine. My impression here was that people were wearing jeans and the kinds of t-shirts with logos like "Harley-Davidson" or, oddly, "West Coast Chopper", but I can't recall a single girl who had dressed like a girl. Hair was always pulled back, men and women, there was no makeup I could recall, no jewelry... I would have to spend more time there to really understand any of what I was seeing, but I was sure that I was seeing a culture that I didn't, in any respect, understand, or even have any familiarity with. I hate to use the word "alien", but it's perhaps the best word there is. I was looking at people from another complete planet, and I didn't understand anything about them.
The last thing I noticed, as we were standing at a corner waiting for the light to turn, was a white Ford F250 regular cab. That's why I looked at it, at first, was to compare it to my new crew cab (the four-door version). I saw a young Indian man and his wife, neither one smiling or talking, just sitting staring straight ahead, with a baby carrier between them.
What was arresting about them was that, as they pulled up level with me, I looked in the window, and there, next to the mom, sitting on the floor between her feet, was a little girl of about 8 or so. All I could see was the top half of her head. She met my eyes for a second, same blank, non-smiling look. It bored clear through me to the brick wall...
At that moment, I gripped Elise's hand tighter and thought about the opportunities I'd had from my life, opportunities that the couple in the truck had never seen themselves, and had no hope of seeing for their children. I don't just mean education, though of course that's an issue in places like Gallup - God alone knows how far away the nearest community college is, or whether or not there's even a university that one can hope to attend if one is not an A+++ student with a lot of money. I mean simple things like I live in the Silicon Valley and I can choose any one of a million jobs. I may not be qualified for them, but if I want, I can go get qualified and apply, and I have the hope that I can advance, to use an odd example, from being a simple mechanic to being a Mercedes mechanic who makes six figures.
There in Gallup, the only jobs are the ones serving tourists at the trucks stops, food or gas or cleaning things... That was the thing about the truck stops all along hwy 40. When we stopped for gas or food, the people at the counters were all minorities, either Hispanic or Native American, and I DIDN'T NOTICE, not until I visited the 'native' part of town and recognized the faces.
Well. Perhaps the most sobering moment of our trip. I'm going to be thinking about Gallup, NM for a very long time.
The bank we wanted was closed - there had been some kind of parade or something going on, but at 11am, it was over and everything was cleaned up and gone, which was just so weird. I couldn't even tell that anything had happened except that there were a few people closing up stuff or taking down stuff, somebody driving off with their sno-cone maker, a horse trailer with a single pinto horse that was gone when we came back, a sign on the bank door that say, "participating in Relay - closed today". We started our walk back to the truck, which was several blocks since it had been hard to find parking.
Elise kept saying she was exhausted, and she was having a hard time walking. At first I just thought she was kidding...
Also, http://www.gallupnm.org/ for Gallup, NM
Zuni Pueblo: http://www.ashiwi.org/
Hopi Tribe: http://www.nau.edu/~hcpo-p/
All I could find on the Acoma: http://www.geocities.com/laceone2k2/acomahist.html
Good Laguna Tribe site: http://www.lagunapueblo.org/
Official Navajo Nation Website: http://www.navajo.org/
A good general site on the different pueblos: http://www.kstrom.net/isk/maps/nm/nmmap.html
Tomorrow, Elise gets sick!
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