Eclipse. Pencil drawing by Two Feathers

The seeds of the tribal college movement were planted in Navajo land by the founding fathers of Navajo Community College. The seeds are older than that, but they were tossed aside by white men when they planted their crops on the banks of our rivers. These seeds were carried by our ancestors in their medicine pouches on forced marches away from our own lands. They are the same seeds that nourished our peoples’ bodies and spirits when the Earth was young. The seeds of the tribal college movement are sacred seeds, for they are the thoughts of the Holy People in the very beginning as they planned our lives on Earth’s surface: “I am thinking about it; I am planning it; it is now living; it is finished in beauty,” they sang.

First Man and Changing Woman

In the Navajo way, the seeds of all new life go back to the very beginning. In earlier times, it was not unusual for Navajo children to hear about the creation story several times throughout their lifetimes. We learned about the story from an uncle, an aunt, a cousin, our parents, and/or our grandparents.

Such was my experience as a young girl. I recall even now the story of the dramatic event at the site of the Emergence Place when First Man observed (once upon a mythic day) an unusual happening: He saw that great clouds with thunder and lightning were gathering over Gobernador Knob. This thunderous activity continued for three days, and each day First Man’s curiosity was excited. Finally, on the fourth day, First Man could contain himself no longer. He told First Woman that he was going to find out what was happening on Gobernador Knob. First Man set out, much against the objections of First Woman who feared for her husband. He was about to traverse dangerous territory and enter a treacherous storm at the risk of his life.

However, once he safely arrived at Gobernador Knob, First Man found the Holy People were preparing for the creation of Changing Woman. The Daylight People came from the dawn in the east, and the Blue Sky people came from the south. From the west came the Yellow Light people, and the Darkness people come from the north. The beings who participated bore appropriate life sources from their places to be included in the creation of Changing Woman, who was destined to be the life giver to the Navajo people. First Man was given the duty of caring for the newly created Changing Woman, and he headed home to First Woman with the infant in his arms. It is told that within four days, Changing Woman reached puberty and that the first Blessingway Puberty Ceremony was conducted for her, that she might bring to fruition all of the good things desired by the Holy People for the Navajo. The Puberty Ceremony is now a rite of passage for all young Navajo women. It acknowledges that a young girl has reached the age of womanhood with life-giving powers.

In this fragment of the greater story, one can see a pattern that is a basic part of the Navajo way: The first step is taken by First Man (at great risk to his life) to seek and find the seed of life for the Navajo Nation, and the second step is the creation of Changing Woman who subsequently creates other lives and who becomes the cornerstone of Navajo life. It is a dual activity of man and woman, male and female, two seeds– one bearer and one receptor. Life cannot be one without the other. It is a conjoining activity inherent in Navajo philosophy: our metaphysics, our aesthetics, and our ethics. Thus, in earlier times, Navajo children were properly educated in the Navajo language, the ceremonies, and the creation stories. These constituted their life’s activities and formed the foundation for their knowledge as well as their lives.

Alien System

Unfortunately, when the government schools began for the education of Navajo youths, the European educational system had no place for the Navajo language or for other cultural knowledge. Instead, the early government schools imposed an alien culture on us. Their schools adopted policies aimed to extinguish the Navajo culture and forced the assimilation of Navajo students into the white man’s culture. No attempts were made to build upon the strengths of the traditional Navajo culture for students in the early years. This often had disastrous results.

Even in the best of these schools, the parent substitutes could not make up for the absence of family members and home. I personally remember with fondness and gratitude the solicitation of the good Catholic nuns who helped influence me toward leading a good life in the boarding school, which they operated for girls. During the school year, I was apart from any semblance of family life and activity. The nuns meant well, but they could not substitute for a father’s or a mother’s or other kin family’s heart-felt guidance. While I was prepared to enter into life as a woman and as a graduate of a good Catholic college, it has taken most of my adult life to reestablish my roots in the Navajo cultural tradition.

Such schooling provided Native students with fragmented learning without the alien culture’s complete context to explain fully why we were taught what we were taught. Too often, this created a fragmented person made up of remnants of his original Native American self and of a lack-luster substitute, which displaced other aspects of his original being. Many Native American youths fell prey to this type of education; I am no exception. I often mention this entrapment to my clan brother who is a Blessingway singer and a mentor to me. I tell him that at one time, I was a bilagáana (“American woman”), removed from my original self. Listen, I was not alone. Many Navajo students joined the bilagáana “club” in order to survive the ridicule and disrespect of the dominant society. Some perished along the way, while others managed to heal themselves to become original again. Others elected to stay in the club. Me? I flew the cuckoo’s nest.

The founding fathers of Navajo Community College (now Diné College) were cognizant that the educational system on the reservation did not meet the needs of the people. Something had to be done. Our leaders saw that the Navajo people needed to regain control of our children’s education in order that schools would once again teach traditional philosophy, traditional values, and traditional means of livelihood.

These ideas were not unprecedented. National movements such as Red Power in the 1960s helped influence the resurgence of interest in Native American lifestyles. Perhaps this is why a few of the higher education institutions near the Navajo Reservation began to offer courses in Native American studies.

However, these studies were not specifically designed to help Native Americans return to their roots. Many non-Native students in anthropology, religious studies, linguistics, and other such fields studied our cultures and languages. The professors who taught these courses were products of institutions such as the University of Chicago, Harvard, or Berkeley. These teachers were heavily armed with book knowledge of Native American life, books that had been written by archaic anthropologists — mostly non-Natives. Books that here-to-fore had been collecting dust on library shelves were exhumed and given life again. This heightened interest in Native Americans provided the climate for both the Navajo and non-Indian people to accept the notion of an institution of higher learning on Native American soil.

A College’s Birth

Quite appropriately, Diné College had its beginning in a process analogous to that which gave life to Changing Woman. The male seeds for this development came in part from unlikely quarters outside the boundaries of the Navajo Nation: President Richard Nixon supported self-determination for Native Americans; the civil rights movements sparked by Martin Luther King gave fertile ground for Red Power as well as Black Power; President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty provided funds for the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity, which, in turn, provided funding opportunities. An elementary school on the reservation at Rough Rock had already seized hold of government funding to launch the first formal educational system founded on Navajo principles of learning: Rough Rock Demonstration School. These movements stirred the seeds that had been dormant but that were already present.

Like First Man, the male founding fathers of the college began the quest to create a new kind of higher educational institution for the Navajo people. This was an unprecedented and a risky endeavor, at best. For one thing, the founding fathers had to convince the great white guardians of Indian affairs who sat behind mahogany desks and who were accustomed to issuing orders on how programs for the indigenous peoples should be run. They would be hard to deal with, for after all these guardians of our fate had the perception that we could not think or plan for ourselves. Also, these guardians did not recognize our indigenous sophistication in nitsáhatkees, nahat’á, iiná, and sihasin–thinking, planning, implementing plans, and bringing tasks to fruition. These processes are near the heart of our traditional philosophy of life, and they have since been enshrined in the Diné Educational Philosophy at Diné College.

The founding fathers met with skepticism and outright ridicule that an indigenous group wanted to start a college, but despite this, our founders diligently thought hard, planned carefully, and worked to create a college on Native soil. With the cooperation of local, state, and other government agencies, the idea came to fruition, and soon afterwards, the ground breaking took place. At the core of this event was a simple ceremony: A gish or traditional planting stick was used to break the ground to receive the seed of life.

Unknown to outsiders, our founding fathers, in the quiet of a night, arranged for a Blessingway ceremony for the new college. Since the female brings all life issues forth, the founding fathers blessed the college as a young woman and gave her a sacred name, as is the custom. Like Changing Woman, she was empowered with the responsibility of creating life and ideas appropriate to an educational institution. She is adorned with the attributes of female life-giving power. In the safeguard of the president of the college is the Navajo basket that was used in the ceremony at her birth as well as the gish (poker) that prepared the soil for the seed. Thus, conceived of as a woman, the college today is a source of life and thinking for the Navajo people.

I should note, especially for the reader who is a non-Native, that this conception of the college as a woman is not a metaphor. The English language includes the use of “it” to identify what are viewed as non-living “objects,” but the Navajo language does not have such a word. The Navajo perceives all that is on earth as living entities. Thus, Diné College is a living being.

Grace McNeley has watched many students make a dramatic turn around over the past 30 years at Diné College. Photo by Ed McCombs

The Progeny

I have related the story of First Man’s quest, the creation of Changing Woman, and the subsequent development of Diné College in order to disclose that our stories (our philosophy) underlie the thinking of the college’s founders. Our central mission is strengthening student knowledge of Navajo history, culture, and language while also teaching students more conventional subjects.

The college is now in her fourth decade of existence. Has it made a difference for students who go to Diné College for their first two years of higher education? After having studied Navajo language, history, and culture, do students feel that these courses have made a difference in their lives? I think so.

For science students who have actively engaged in research on environmental, health, and other issues that concern their own communities, has this made a difference? Yes. The Shiprock campus has a fine team of faculty and students active in their community educating members about diabetes and other health issues.

For student athletes who have participated in the college’s archery, rodeo, and other competitive teams, have their national titles made a difference in their conceptions of self? According to the archery coach at the Tsaile campus, students in the club convey self-assurance, self-discipline, stability, self-esteem, and self-empowerment as a result of the traditional teaching of the concept of t’áá hó ájít’ée go (self-motivation). For those older college students who are too rooted in families, jobs, and communities to leave the reservation for college, what difference has it made that many of them have followed their children across the stage as college graduates in their own right?

Social scientists usually answer such questions with a collection of data to make the answers credible. I am not a social scientist, but I have worked for about 30 years with students in their studies of the humanities and communications. I interact with them socially as fellow members of the Navajo community, and I have personally observed many examples of personal and academic development and success.

Studies in Navajo language, culture, and history at Diné College remain the strength of the college. Navajo students are drawn to these studies. Sometimes when I ask a student to remain for a few minutes after class, he or she responds that the next class is in the Navajo studies area, and the student is dismayed at the prospect of having to be detained from such a class.

On the other hand, some students reluctantly enroll at Diné College for fear that the college might try to return them to the “blanket.” I remember one such young man who enrolled in my classes, a communications course and Introduction to Philosophy. Throughout the semester, his face always had a grimace or a frown, and he tried to be invisible from others when he had to be on campus. He did not seem to relish studying at Diné College, much less taking the Navajo Studies courses required for all students.

However, this student stayed at the college for several semesters, and he began to emerge from out of his cocoon. Sometimes he would arrive early to class and would chat about his weekend ventures: He had begun to visit his grandmother at her sheep camp in an isolated area of the reservation. He volunteered information about his return to using his Native language with the help of his grandmother. He also queried her about Navajo culture and history. Eventually, the young man graduated from Diné College with an Associate of Arts degree, and I lost contact with him. Two years later I received a long letter from him addressed from Northern Arizona University. He expressed his gratitude for his classes in Navajo studies and said that he was minoring in philosophy. To me, this is a beautiful story of a young man who evolved out of his shell into a beautiful human being. Rather than returning to the “blanket,” this student’s Navajo studies enhanced his life by developing a true self-identity.

Another example that comes to mind is a young Navajo Vietnam veteran who, upon his discharge from the service, enrolled immediately and without hesitation in Navajo studies. The young veteran said that in the barracks, men of other ethnic groups wrote letters home in their own languages. He began to see that although he spoke his first language, Navajo, he had to rely on English to communicate home, and this dismayed him. Subsequently this young man developed finely honed orthographic skills, and he received an Associate of Arts degree in Navajo Studies. Another success story. These are only two examples of how our college helps students find their paths in life.

Some Final Reflections

I have been with the college since 1970 although not consistently. Most of my work has been as a professor, and I have repeatedly seen students make such a turnaround. I think that Navajo studies classes provide the foundation for their educational and personal quest for self-knowledge, and where better to begin the quest than at home with one’s own teachers?

I do not want to create the image that the college attracts only individuals who are in dire need of personal foundations. The college also attracts young Navajos who arrive fully knowledgeable about Navajo life. They come with highly developed skills in their Native language and with their lives already enriched by knowledge of a vibrant culture and ennobled by appreciation of the natural world’s beauty. By gaining knowledge of both cultures, they have learned to live in “both worlds” at a higher level; one does not diminish the other.

Since the founding of Diné College, the other tribal colleges around the country have followed the same course of placing the teaching and learning of their peoples’ traditional histories, cultures, and languages at the core of the curricula. This has not happened by chance nor has it happened out of some kind of coordinated or central planning. Rather, each of the tribes has its own seeds of knowledge, passed down through the generations from its own sacred past. The leaders of each tribe have waited for the right time and place to plant their sacred seeds so that what is sown is finished in beauty.

Grace Anna McNeley is on the faculty of Diné College at the Tsaile campus. She is an alumnus of the Graduate Institute, St. John’s College, Santa Fe, NM, and a native of Shiprock, NM.