Shoveling Snow – Navajo Language Lesson

Shoveling Snow  - Navajo Language Lesson

I help my mother shovel snow.
We make a path to the sheep corral and to my grandmother’s hogan.
I The snow, so soft to feel is hard to shovel.

Shoveling Snow text-2

 

 

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Rainbow Lodge and Navajo Trading Post

The Rainbow Lodge and Navajo Trading Post were built in 1924 by S.I. Richardson and his son Cecil.

Rainbow Lodge and Navajo Trading Post

Photo of Rainbow Lodge and Navajo Trading Post 1950

A second post, a tent operation located near War God Springs, was operated on the other side of the mountain by Ben and Myri Wetherill.

The Richardson brothers came to the Southwest to escape the harsh life imposed on them by their fundamentalist father.

After working with relatives in the trading post business, the brothers took a pack trip from Kaibito to the bridge. It was this trip that inspired them to start a guide and trading post business on the southern slope of Navajo Mountain.

Their plan included construction of a road from Tonalea, Arizona to their new Rainbow Lodge and Trading Post at Willow Springs.

Hubert Richardson sold his interest in the lodge to Barry Goldwater, future Arizona Senator and presidential candidate.

World War II handicapped business at the lodge. Very little recreational travel took place during the war, and remote locations like Rainbow Lodge were hit the hardest. But Goldwater loved the country around Rainbow Bridge.

He had bought into the Richardson operation in the 1930s as a partner and in 1946, after the conclusion of the war, decided he wanted to have a go at running a successful tourist operation.

The lodge did little business during the war, with the Wilsons leaving Navajo Mountain for a brief time to secure employment elsewhere. The lodge was virtually unused for nearly five years.

With wartime fuel restrictions lifted by 1946, people began touring the Southwest again. Goldwater had guessed well regarding post-war tourism. In 1923, annual visitation to the bridge was only 142 people.

After 1945, visitation went up every year, reaching a high of 1,081 in 1955. Goldwater secured the promise of the Park Service to distribute Rainbow Lodge pamphlets to all persons inquiring about services at Rainbow Bridge.

In high hopes of success, Goldwater sent 1,500 pamphlets to the Park Service’s information office. Unfortunately the lodge burned to the ground in August 1951, leaving nothing but high hopes.

There Is No Food – Navajo Story

 

There is no food  - Navajo Story

 There is no flour nor cornmeal to make into bread,
‘There is no coffee that my mother could boil for us to drink.

There is no food.
The corn my father planted in his field is gone.

We ate it.
There was so little.
The corn pile in the storehouse was not high enough to last for long.
It is gone.
Now all of it is gone.
There is no food.
There is food at the Trading Post in sacks and in boxes, in bins and in cans on the shelf.

There is food at the Trading Post, but the Trading Post is far away and snowdrifts and snow clouds are heavy between

There is food at the Trading Post but my father has nothing leftof the hard, round money that he must give to the Trader for the food:
There is no food here in my mother’s hogan.

Then it is time to eat, we talk of other things, . but not of hunger.
This thing called hunger is a pain that sits inside me.
At first it was little, but now it grows bigger and bigger.’
It hurts me to be hungry.

Source : “Little Herder in the Winter” by Ann Clark 1940

Illustrated by:
Hoke Denetsosie

Linguistics by:
John P. Harrington
Robert W. Young

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Elle Ganado wife of Tom Ganado

Tom’s Ganado mother and some of his white friends succeeded in persuading him that eight wives were seven too many. Out of the eight Tom chose Elle, who, strange to say, is the only wife who has borne him no children.

Elle Ganado

Elle Ganado

Tom and  are wealthy, as Navajos count wealth, owning several flocks of sheep and goats (which are cared for by Tom’s army of grandchildren) much turquoise, wampum and an abundance of the typical Navajo hand-wrought silver jewelry.
Tourists who have come to know the old couple wonder if they do not long for the life and people of their home country. They do, occasionally, and visit the reservation, but always return before they had intended. Thoroughly Americanized in their mode of living and sanitary habits, Tom and Elle soon tire of the filth and superstition of their tribe.
To their white friends Tom and Elle exemplify everything Navajo, but to their relatives at home they are sorely contaminated by American cleanliness and are earnestly besought by the medicine men to give up their dangerous habits of bathing and changing clothes occasionally.

Most photographers posed Elle with Navajo children. usually girls. Although usually identified as her children, she had none, and these were likely those of other craft demonstrators or Tom’s grandchildren from an earlier marriage.