Bearstone

Cloyd is an Indigenous American: His mother was a Ute, and his father is Navajo. The Utes, for which the state of Utah is named, trace their lineage back 10,000 years. In recent centuries, they lived mainly in eastern Utah and southern Colorado, trading with the Navajos and, later, the Spaniards, from whom they acquired horses. Those animals gave the Utes and neighboring groups—Comanche, Apache, and others—vastly increased hunting range. While other native groups migrated to the Great Plains, the Utes stayed in the mountains and valleys of their ancestral lands, sometimes traveling beyond it to hunt, trade, and raid.

The Navajo migrated to what is now Arizona and New Mexico in the early 1600s. They speak a language akin to those spoken in Alaska. The Navajo—who also call themselves “Diné” or “The People”—adopted sheep and goat farming from the Spanish and began weaving woolen blankets and rugs that were, and still are, in high demand. The Navajo sometimes raided other groups for resources but mostly traded, especially with the Spanish and the Ute.

Cloyd refers to the Ancient Ones who lived in cliff houses; these are the ancestors of the Pueblo Natives who traded extensively with the Navajo and Ute peoples. Cloyd, who seeks a direct connection with his people’s past, would like to find the ruins of these houses, which thus would become literal touchstones on his quest.

White settlers pushed aside the Utes and Navajos and committed atrocities against those peoples. The Utes managed to obtain fairly large tracts of land as reservations in northeast Utah and southern Colorado. These territories contain a wealth of gas, oil, and minerals that help support the Utes financially. Still, only about 7,000 Utes remain on the reservations. Though conditions have improved over the decades, today, alcoholism is a major problem for the Utes. On the southern Colorado reservations, their life expectancy is 40 years.

The Navajo also suffered abuse and death at the hands of white settlers and the US Army, but the nation negotiated a series of treaties that today give them control of a reservation of nearly 28,000 square miles, an area larger than ten of the US states. It covers regions of high desert and mesa land, mostly in Arizona, plus parts of southeast Utah and northwest New Mexico. With nearly 400,000 members, the Navajo nation is the largest indigenous group in the US. In the mid-1900s, large uranium mines were developed on Navajo land; these were supposed to benefit their people but caused significant radiation sickness among local workers. The Navajo also suffer from diabetes and alcoholism.

A mainstay of Navajo cuisine is frybread, a wheat dough fried in oil. Cloyd eats frybread when he’s at his grandmother’s house. Navajo, Ute, and many other Native groups, pulled from their ancestral lands and sequestered onto desert reservations, found they could no longer grow or hunt their traditional foods, and frybread became a fallback staple. Some Natives reject frybread as a symbol of colonial oppression; others consider it a revered part of the Native American history of suffering, survival, and ingenuity.

Cloyd, who runs away often and does poorly in his studies, is sent for a time to Durango in southern Colorado to attend school. There, he lives in a “group home” for Native youths called Eaglewing. Cloyd’s people suffered under the federal Indian school system during the late 1800s and early-to-mid 1900s, where suppressing Native languages and culture, not to mention child abuse, were common. Things are better today, but Cloyd’s yearning for the freedom to roam echoes the desires of his people to live life as they wish without feeling hemmed in by the much larger white culture that allows little room for Native hopes and dreams.