Tradition of Fruit

Apricot rituals
Photo by Venaya Yazzie
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2016

I can recall moments of my maternal grandmother and aunts canning fruit. These are images ingrained in my brain and have lead me to follow the images.

Last week my mother visited and she brought buckets of apricots with her. So with such an abundance of sweet fruit, I expressed that we should make some jam and can some of the fruit, thus the process of canning was re-ignited.

My aunt explained to me how to she and grandmother would begin the process. We first gathered the dusty glass Kerr jars and hunted the lids. The whole day was amazing, I loved the scent of cooking apricots on the stove. And as a visual artist I fell in love with the brilliant, beautiful orange hue of the apricots.

Fruits such as apricots, peaches, apples and pears are treasure items in the Navajo culture. Our oral history stories speak of such sweet fruits and in our many experiences we have the story of how such fruits were destroyed by the government at one time as means of tactical combat. In the era of the Navajo Long Walk, called Hweeldi (the time of sorrow), General Kit Carson ordered his soldiers to burn and destroy the peach and apple fields of the Navajos in Canyon De Chelly in Arizona. This was an act of evil and I despise his actions. He did such nonsense as a way of getting the Navajos to leave the canyon as he would force them to walk to Fort Sumner, NM where and internment camp awaited my ancestors.

This story is hard for me to share, but it must be told for it is also ingrained in my brain. It is a pure miracle that We as Dine', as Navajo have survived genocide and I believe this was made so by our collective prayers we uttered then and now. My Navajo people have a rich story embedded with deep cuts and rivers of sorrow, but we are resilient and in 2016 we are prosperous! WE have our 'beautyful' land and rivers, and our immense canyons and desert plains. We have our Navajo language and our stories of origin and survival and for that we are rich.

One would not ever think to relate fruits with the desert Navajo people, but we have such connections to them, some sour, but mostly a sweet heritage we treasure.

Desert rain

Monsoon rains
Photo by Venaya Yazzie
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2016

Desert rain. The utterance of that phrase is like the sweetest candy. Finally it seems the high-desert has been blessed by the nomadic clouds via monsoon rains in our arid lands in northwestern New Mexico.

I captured this moment in time as the rains arrived to the San Juan Valley. I am always inspired by the rain, and this has been so. I can remember the days of my childhood and how it rained so much more in the dry desert at Huerfano, NM. I can recall how all of us cousins would stand and run in the downpours of monsoon rain. We never ran from the rain or try to 'shelter' ourselves from it. Instead we'd open our mouths to the heavens, hold our hands out and welcome the rain. Those were beautiful moments of the early 1980s, when we as Navajo desert children actually played and explored the outdoors in nature. We had no use  of technology because we dialogued with each other and told stories of our imaginations, thus we 'loved' the land and had reverence for her.

Today I watch my little cousins and other relatives with cell phones and electronic devices in their hands, their brown eyes glued to tiny screens. I am sad for them, as they will never know the pure joy of the Land. They will never come to really see the beauty of the nature world around them.  I may sound a pessimist in this expression, but I really believe that era in which I was able to experience is forever in the past, technology has come to us as an 'evil doer' in my mind - for it has taken Our Navajo children and youth hostage...

As an adult I still truly love the land. I enjoy every moment I can spend outdoors and it is here that I find inspiration and solace. And, it is in the nature that I express and experience prayer. In Navajo we express the act of prayer as sodizin.

This way of being was instilled in my by my Dine' matriarchs. They taught us Werito-Yazzie children that prayer is everything. That prayer holds every that is good and it will bring life a 'balance.' So for me, prayer is my rain. I know when pray pours out of me and for my by others, my life will be richly blessed.  That is how it is.

Hozho Iina.