The small community of Chi Chil’tah is “Where Oaks Grow.” Diné storyteller Sunny Dooley says that the name comes from the Gambel oak trees indigenous to this part of northwestern New Mexico. This land is bounded by the Six Sacred Mountains of the Diné (or “Navajo,” as named by the early Spanish occupiers) forming the Four Corners region of the Navajo Nation in the southwestern United States.
“Every place here has a name,” Dooley says.
Dooley is the Elder-in-Residence for the Fall semester. She visited and resided on campus for a week earlier this month through a program hosted by the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIIS). While here, she hosted guest lectures and engaged in campus community events. For more than 30 years, she has traveled across the country, sharing oral traditions of the Diné Hozhojii Hané, or Navajo Blessingway stories. Though she prefers to call herself a “storyteller.”
The land on which Dooley lives still carries the community’s traditional name. But between 1887 and 1934, much of the Navajo reservations in this part of New Mexico were parceled into small plots of land and then allotted to individual Native households by the federal government. Whatever was left was sold to non-Natives.
Today, it’s an area where the property lines form a chaotic mix of Tribal Trust land, Indian allotment land, Bureau of Land Management land, State of New Mexico land, forest land, and privately-held purchased land.
“We call this the checkerboard region of the Navajo Nation,” Dooley says. “I’ve lived there all of my life. My mom and dad have lived there all of their lives.”
Dooley’s father’s elders, in fact, had been among those exiled in the Long Walk in the 1860s by the U.S. Army. Thousands of Navajo people were marched on foot, at gunpoint, more than 300 miles from their homelands to Fort Sumner, New Mexico — where they were then imprisoned at the Bosque Redondo reservation until 1868.
Dooley’s mother’s family, on the other hand, did not leave — not because the U.S. Army allowed them to remain, but because they were slaves under the Spanish occupation in the southwestern United States and Mexico.
For Dooley, these histories of violent occupation are inseparable from the stories of the people who have always lived here; they bled the stories into the land.
“As Native people, we always indicate the history that invaded our way of existing,” Dooley says. “That’s how we define where we live.”
The closest town to Dooley’s home in Chi Chil’tah is Gallup, New Mexico, a stop 23 miles north passing through the historic Route 66. In between that stretch is a state highway, then country roads, then a cattle guard that enters into Navajo Tribal Trust Land. At that point, the world looks visibly different.
“Beyond that cattle guard, you are off GPS,” Dooley says. “You fall from the map.”
All of the land that stretches from the highway to the cattle guard is privately owned. But on Dooley’s side of the world, it’s government land. Even obtaining electrical power, let alone political power, is a product of sheer persistence.
“I only got electricity in 2019,” Dooley says. “And I still don’t have running water.”
Families are left to navigate through a tangle of bureaucracies. All of Dooley’s land is owned by the U.S. government, “in trust” to the Bureau of Indian Affairs but actually managed by the Department of the Interior.
Behind these complex webs of management lurks a more subtle form of violence.
When the federal government finally agreed to end the Navajo’s imprisonment at Bosque Redondo in the Navajo Treaty of 1868, they reversed even the structures of land ownership. Dooley explains that while Navajo women held the land culturally and traditionally, now it was turned over to young Navajo men, who would be forced to farm plots of land according to white laws.
“Before, we had spiral gardens that grew either dry or irrigated corn, beans, and squash. We had medicinal gardens. We had artistic gardens where you grew dyes, materials for basketry,” Dooley says. “They were never located in one place. We knew the land, we knew the topography, the geography. We knew where the plants would sustain themselves.”
The treaty changed the shape of the land, too. The land that once anchored you to the earth was now a legal stake, a designation of ownership. And it was shaped like a rectangular box.
“I don’t know if what the United States government did can really be understood,” Dooley says. “And then — once understood — can it be undone?”
Dooley has captured from other angles the bafflement of remembering these histories of violence, the shock and its permanent imprint on both the land and the people’s memories of it. Before the pandemic, she debuted "Ways of Knowing," a virtual reality film recounting her father’s memory of witnessing the world’s first nuclear explosion in Trinity, New Mexico, in 1945. The nuclear blast not only scarred the land but also its old histories, which are being eroded, to this day, by decades of continued uranium mining.
Most of us remember Trinity only as a blast site, not as part of a people’s land.
“My father witnessed the explosion,” Dooley says. “And I’m dealing with the aftermath of that, learning to live with the resulting toxicity.”
For Dooley, stories carry weight, especially for communities. When Dooley first began telling stories of her clan to public audiences, she had to obtain permission from her clan brothers, who were traditional Diné medicine men.
“These stories have never been in public,” she recalls one clan brother saying. “You know what they’re going to do. They’re going to steal them, write books about them — and you won’t ever get a dime from it.”
Yet the stories had to be told.
At the time, Dooley had been a substitute teacher in a public school with nine Navajo students, without a classroom, only the room of a portable building. There wasn’t a blackboard and there were no chairs. Every day, they would be medicated to sleep.
“That was really shocking to me. It was the last month of the school year, and they had never heard a Navajo story,” Dooley recalls. “This is the reason why I want to tell Navajo those stories. If we lose who we are, we’re gone forever.”
Dooley’s clan brothers eventually agreed to let her publicize their lives. The stories, for Dooley, would not only be remembered but also help heal. To deal with the fallout — the toxicity, as Dooley says — of the overwhelming past.
“My storytelling is always based in healing,” she says. “That’s what storytellers do in my culture — heal.”
More stories, thankfully, are emerging. Or flooding, rather.
The pandemic, for example, represented for Dooley a torrent of new stories, a “doorway” opening. It renewed awareness of our mutual connection because everyone was affected. But in the ensuing political and racial violence in 2020, there was an even greater urgency for stories that uncovered the truth — the structures of violence that were always present but forgotten or even ignored.
To tell stories is one thing, but to weave them is another. That, for Dooley, involves the work of personal judgment and discerning truth on the human level.
“Storytellers in my culture sense what needs to be spoken,” Dooley says. “And as they’re telling the stories, they get woven into you. Whoever is listening to the story will actually move things internally so that the body will begin to heal.”
Dooley tells the story of her mother’s first encounter with the Internet at a public library in the 1990s. It was still called the “World Wide Web” then. As the librarian clicked around on the box-shaped computer, her mother stepped back.
“How are they going to weave her web?” Dooley recalls her mother saying to her. She knew exactly who her mother meant: Diné believe that Grandmother Spider bestowed on people the gift of weaving and creativity.
But even in the arresting strangeness of the encounter, there was something assuring about the impact of stories. The internet will hold our weavings, sure. But more importantly, communities, societies — as long as people exist — these will hold our weavings.
“The real question is,” Dooley says, “Will you weave a good web?”