Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  Sam has been working carefully with brown, green, and gray, trying hard with crayons to evoke the arid semidesert of north-central New Mexico. As he approaches the mesa itself, he stops talking and switches to paint. He does not, interestingly enough, look at the mesa while he paints it. He had glanced at it repeatedly while on his way to it, so to speak, but now he gazes intently at the image that is slowly, stroke by stroke, emerging in front of him. Only when done does he sit back for a moment and look outside. It is good that he does; he realizes that he has by no means completed the job. The paints are again mobilized, this time for the sky, which becomes an extension of the mesa. When he is satisfied with his work, he puts it aside. His sister had wanted the picture, but he says no, it belongs to no one and everyone. He will leave it on the table, and there it will be the family’s. He wishes he could go and visit cousins of his who live to the north in another pueblo. They have a rich choice of mesas; they have mountains too; but his cousins are near the Rio Grande at its full, stormy, swift best. Farther south (where Sam lives) the river becomes weak, tired, dissipated, a ghost of itself.

  As the boy talks about his cousins, he provocatively evokes the meaning to himself of the land about him: “I like to sleep outside, even when it’s cold. I don’t like ever to sleep with the windows closed. My father says that when you cut yourself off, all the way, from the outside world, you are headed for trouble. Most white people live in buildings, and they don’t care if they ever leave them. Even our teachers tell us that the Indians have always liked the land. Well, the white man likes the land, too; he wants to own all he can get. Our land is good; even if we don’t grow much, it is good land. But my relatives have better land to walk on. My father tells his sister: You had better watch out, you’ll lose what you’ve got. Some Anglo will come there, and he will wave dollar bills under your nose, and say take them, and if you say you won’t, he will smile and go to some judge, or call up the people in Washington, D.C., and the next thing you know, you’ll be pushed back into a smaller reservation, and they’ll be telling you that you shouldn’t worry because the United States takes care of the Indians. My aunt laughs; she says that the Pueblos know how to take care of themselves, and the days of the white man are numbered, anyway. That’s the way my cousins talk, too; they say we will be here as long as it is meant for us to be — as long as we are sent here by our ancestors to stay awhile, then return to them. But the white man, he could get into bad trouble, and he’d be gone. The Anglos could destroy themselves with their bombs. That’s a good reason for us to stay away from them — or at least to keep an eye on them. Sometimes I like them, but then I remind myself that I should watch every white man I see very carefully! My cousins have a lot of hiding places up north. We could get there in an hour.”

  Hopi Girl

  In a Hopi settlement in northern Arizona a mother stares at the sky, nods toward a cloud, turns her back on the sun, bends down toward her daughter, who is one year old and learning how to talk. As the mother does so, her older daughter, aged nine, also leans forward. The older daughter reassures the infant as she steps, falters, sits down, crawls, lifts herself up, moves more confidently, but alas, falls down, now a little hurt. The infant cries, softly but persistently. The mother looks down with a kind and not alarmed look, as if to say: this, too, shall pass, and the worst thing I can do is become too preoccupied with the quite natural and inevitable effort on the part of yet another child of mine to stand and move on her own. But she does smile, tilt her head ever so gently toward the baby. The older child, whose name is Miriam, begins to sing words of encouragement to her sister: “You will go / nothing will stop you / soon you will be tired / of walking, walking.”

  The words and music turn out to be Miriam’s. She has heard her mother and grandmother, her aunts and older cousins sing songs — brief, unspectacular, not especially melodic messages, chanted with a rise and fall of the voice that indicate an earnest, lyrical conviction on the part of the speaker: I will speak to you, and you will hear, and we will join hands spiritually, be. Yet Miriam may in truth have no such intent. The girl’s continuing encouragement to her little sister conveys some very concrete suggestions, as well as what anthropologists call “a world view.” When, for example, the baby gets up to walk, Miriam kneels down, blocks the probable point of departure and line of travel, looks into the child’s eyes, holds out two arms parallel to the ground, though without touching the child: they are there, to be called upon, leaned upon, if need be. Miriam begins to sing, then speak: “Do not run / do not run before you walk / do not walk / do not walk before you stand / When you stand / you will be one of us / the Hopis. That is for you, little one. Just look about. Just move with your eyes. You can go far with them. Later you can use your feet; rest them now. They will get strong, and they will hold you and carry you — until you leave us here. See my arm; if you try to walk, and feel like falling, hold on to it. Hold on to both arms. I will help. I will stay with you. Don’t worry. The day will come that you are running with me, and after me, and away from me; and the day will come that you will be standing here, right here, and you will have a baby at your feet, and you will be singing to it and talking to it and you will tell it that you were once here too — crawling and trying to walk. To walk is for us what to fly is for that bird.”

  She stops to point toward the sky. The baby has watched her, listened intently, even if unable to understand the specific words. The baby has remained still for a few minutes. Now the baby lifts her head upward, tries to capture with her eyes the moving bird — but no luck. The eyes, too — the head, for that matter — are not ready. The baby sits down, at the same time lowers its head. The older girl sits down, also begins to look at the ground. She spies a small, flat stone, picks it up, feels it in her hands, holds it tightly between her palms, moves the palms toward the baby’s face, holds them transfixed, almost as if in prayer, in front of the little girl, and suddenly: “Here you are! This is one of many; this is a Hopi stone. Do you see the lines on it? Someone made them. I do not know who it was, but they are here to remind us that before us there were others.”

  Again she pushes the stone toward the baby. Finally, she places it in the baby’s hands and sits quietly to the side while she enjoys what white people would call a toy. But for Miriam the stone is no toy. She wants her sister to learn something about the land that she is trying so hard to walk on. While the mother continues to say nothing, the older daughter gets up and surveys the immediate vicinity for other stones. She finds them, including a rather sizable rock, and gathers them before her sister. She begins to point them out to the little one and talks for a few minutes about the wind, the rain, and time — how large rocks erode or get broken up over the centuries. She does not speak as an authoritative scientist or naturalist but rather as a philosopher: “These stones may have come from a mountain; we do not know. They are here for us, and we will leave them for others. I used to ask our mother if I could take them into the house and save them. I liked them. No, she told me; they are for you, here. They were for others before you, and they will be for others after you. Now it is your turn. I am glad I did not take them away when I was younger.”

  As Miriam makes her pronouncements, utters her prophecies, comes up with observations or interpretations, the baby leans slightly forward, reaches out with her hands, picks up the stones, holds them up high, drops them — one after the other. Then the last, big one — she puts both hands on it, apparently wise enough to know that an obstacle confronts her. No luck, though. She decides to push. What she cannot lift she can indeed cause to tumble over. She is delighted. She smiles at the rock, then looks toward her mother and older sister for approval. They nod their heads but say not a word. The baby seems to take their silence as a cue: if they do not resume their singing and conversational companionship, she had better find some momentum within herself. And she does; she crawls, begins to stand, succeeds in her effort, sets out, moves away from the two older people, and walks, walks.


  Not a sound from the mother and Miriam; they pretend indifference, preoccupation with other interests. When the baby decides to turn around and announce to them, standing up, her triumph, they seem involved in another scene: the sheep grazing a mile or two down the hill. The baby feels free of them. She changes her direction, walks off at an angle to her previous course — in the direction of the sheep. She is walking at an incline and, one would think, is taking an unnecessary risk. But she does exceedingly well. She walks thirteen steps, abruptly stops, then decides to confront her mother and sister once again. Now they are quite willing to respond; they smile, they stand up, they say “good, good,” but they do not move toward her. Miriam breaks the impasse by pointing to a rock that rests on the ground between them, and the baby dutifully and respectfully moves toward it, leans over, falls down, quickly stands up — with the rock in her right hand. She moves her other hand toward it, forms a cup with both hands, cradles the rock, peers at it, then throws it — her body swaying — in the direction of the other rocks. As her mother and sister look at this addition to the small collection, she moves toward them and stops only when she is right beside them. All of a sudden she sits down, right on top of the stones.

  The baby’s mother and older sister are delighted; they clap their hands and virtually exclaim to the world beyond them — as if a thousand people were waiting nearby to hear — the news that a little girl has claimed her heritage. The mother says: “She has made them hers, and they will be hers. She belongs to us, and we belong to her.” Miriam says, far less grandly, but with no lack of serious appreciation: “She is beginning to understand. Soon she’ll be walking all over, and she’ll know the best places to stop and rest.”

  One such place is where they are, on top of a gentle but barren hill, at the edge of a virtual desert. All around them the land, their Hopi land, stretches. After a few minutes the mother decides to intervene directly for the first time. The mother draws close to the baby, fondles her, then gently lifts her up. The baby is glad to be standing again, smiles, looks up at the mother. But she wants the baby to look elsewhere, and she conveys her wishes patiently, quietly; she looks with her own eyes not at the baby, but out toward the rising hills, and she points in that direction with her forefinger. Soon the baby’s eyes leave the mother’s face; soon those eyes scan, a bit unsteadily, to be sure, the Hopi reservation. The mother, as if it were bedtime and a lullaby were in order, recites, with a slight singsong inflection to her voice, a series of reassuring predictions: “You will walk from here to there, to the highest of those hills / You will walk to that tree down the road / You will sit under that tree and say thank you, tree, for the love you give to the Hopi people / You will run so fast that the sun will draw sweat from you / You will find the valley and the water / Then you will not be a baby, but a Hopi.”

  Miriam nods with each assertion, moves her eyes across the land slowly, deliberately, thoughtfully. She looks at the solitary tree longest. She watches the sky, follows a cloud across it. She sees some Hopi men walking in the distance, smiles at them. She seems ready to point them out to her infant sister but apparently has second thoughts. She points them out instead to her mother, who shows no great interest. The mother has only one more sight to urge upon her younger daughter, and it is a rather subtle one, which seems beyond the grasp of a one-year-old child: “The sun is breaking through the cloud; it is light over there, and darker here. Shadows don’t always last. The sun. The sun.” The baby does not look at the sun, but the mother is nevertheless pleased; she has made her point. Miriam reinforces it by cautiously moving her sister’s face in the direction of the sky, and more precisely, the part of the sky the sun occupies at the time. The baby quickly wants to look away and, of course, is allowed to. But a moment later, on her own, she is bending her neck, peering over the heads of Miriam and her mother toward the sky.

  They leave shortly thereafter. Miriam holds her sister for a while, then without saying a word hands her to their mother. The baby is hungry and is given the mother’s breast. Miriam smiles as the baby works away, stopping occasionally for rest or to burp. Back at the house Miriam is delighted to tell her older and younger brother’s that their sister is getting to know the reservation and even laying claim to some of its stones and rocks. They pass the baby around, each of them holding her, cradling her, congratulating her on her new acquaintance with their reservation. Soon the baby yawns, is put down to sleep. The children scatter — the boys to run and vie with other boys (who can throw farther? who can jump higher?) and Miriam to her mother’s side: clothes to wash, food to cook.

  An hour later Miriam has some spare time; she is in the kitchen, and has just taken a Lorna Doone cookie. She sits munching at it very slowly and starts a drawing. She will draw the entire reservation! It is easy! She scratches the paper lightly with the brown crayon, then with the blue one, and makes only slightly more restrained gestures with the green one. She is done! An afterthought, however; she picks up the yellow crayon and draws no sun, but rather scratches the entire picture with that crayon too. The result — a sun-drenched version of the Hopi reservation, as seen from the hill where the baby had just been (Figure 51).

  She attempts another drawing. She loves a nearby valley, tightly held in by red and brown clay hills. She sketches those hills — is now quite concrete with her crayons. She is especially interested in a solitary clump of grass and a small tree in its midst — on the side of one hill. She works at the tree with painstaking care, then moves on: the sun, the sky. When she is done (Figure 52) she has a few remarks to make about the scene: “I am waiting for the day I can take my sister to the valley, and we can sit on a rock there and look up at the tree and be near the grass. My brothers like to stand on the rock and jump; I like to sit on it and listen. Almost always a few stones come tumbling down the side of the hill — our ancestors running about! I don’t hear them speak words, but I know they are there, and they love the tree; it is the place where they can rest. There may be an underground river nearby. My father says no, but my older brother says the teacher told him that for the tree and the grass to grow, there has to be water, and there’s not enough for grass to grow on any other part of the hill, so maybe there’s a well there, if there isn’t the river.

  “My father laughs: what do the teachers know? He’s always saying that. He says the teachers sometimes have come in here from far away; they want to be of help to us, and they don’t know how to understand us when we tell them no, we don’t need their help. My father says that once people came here because they thought there was gold. They looked and looked. They looked very hard near the tree; they were going to cut it down. They were sure that there might be some gold underneath the trunk. Our people came and stood next to them and prayed that they would stop trying to hurt the land. They said they’d kill us if we didn’t stop bothering them. Our people said they would stand there, even if they were killed. They wouldn’t leave. They were ready to join their ancestors. The white people kept looking, but they didn’t find anything. They were going to cut down the tree, just to make our people feel bad; but one white man got scared because the wind started blowing very hard, and the sun hid behind a cloud, and then hail began to fall; it was getting toward winter. So they left fast. My grandmother will tell us the story when the moon is full, and then we go out with her and say her prayer to the tree: ‘Stand there / Bend toward us / Your green reminds us of the brown / Your height makes us know our size / Your shadows whisper to us / We are Hopis / We are Hopis.’”

  She has memorized the words and sings them to no particular tune, only with the slightest of inflections. She has been told at school that she is a bright girl, but her parents are not all that impressed. They wonder what difference the schooling will make in her life — and they express their doubts to her. She speaks of what she has heard with an air of authority: “My mother says that at school we learn a lot, but what we learn doesn’t help us here on the reservation. The teachers want some of us to leave and try to
live someplace else, in a city maybe. My father says this reservation of ours is the whole world, and he never wants to leave it; he never wants to go live in another world. Last week I went with him; he was leading the sheep to a field where there is grass. We came to the big rock; it suddenly is there, when you turn the corner of the path. The rock looks like three fingers pointing up to the sky.

  “My father told me again the story his grandmother used to tell him — about three Hopi men a long time ago. They were very good friends, but they didn’t help others, only themselves. They left their families, and they met some white people, and they joined up with them. They all looked for gold, I think. The three Hopis stopped being Hopis. They became lost; they belonged nowhere. They went to the West, on their way to California. They got into trouble; they were caught stealing. They never got to California. They turned around, and came back to us, the Hopi people, and asked to be taken in. Our ancestors said no, we shouldn’t do it. But the three men begged, and their mothers were still alive, and they came, and they asked the other Hopis to be good, and to take the three men back. There was a vote, and most Hopis said yes. But before the men could come to a ceremony and be welcomed back, they died. Then someone said that the bodies should be taken to the Three Fingers Rock, and the bodies would rest there, and they would be among us, and we would not forget them. And we haven’t. My father says at night you can hear sand falling down from each of the fingers, and it’s the spirits of the three men, moving up there. When some of our Hopis have gone away, they go to the Three Fingers Rock right away when they come back, and the three Hopis up there welcome the travelers back. My uncle went to Phoenix, Arizona, then to New Mexico, and when he came back he went to the Rock, and he said he thought he heard some noise up there, so he asked out loud if the three Hopis were there, and just then the wind rose, and it didn’t stop for a long time.”