Chester Kahn

When somebody is sick, when somebody needs help, there are different ceremonies for different purposes for different illnesses, and the medicine men are trained in these very ceremonies to conduct these ceremonies to keep people healthy and strong and happy. It brings the families and the communities together for 1 day, 2 days, 5 days. The longest ceremonies we have is, two of them left today, they're 9 day ceremonies. And in these times there's a lot of interaction, a lot of social activities, dancing and then of course the counseling to try to help the younger generation. The Elders counsel the youth and everybody, how to live and how to act and how to behave on the individual basis as well as collectively. So all these things are brought together, different portions, different aspects of life so that one lives and the family lives, the community lives in harmony and in balance and in peace. This is what I was born into at that time.

We had never heard about different things like what we have today. Like jail or police or courts, we didn't need them. Everybody lived together so beautifully and they left their homes open, anybody could come and go and there was no problems of any kind. And then when I was eleven years old, I was told to go to the boarding schools. To go to get what they called education. And during that time, a lot of the older people, our Grandparents didn't see why we had to go away to learn somebody else's ways, the language and the way of life. The reason why we were sent away to schools, mostly to these great big boarding schools was because the United States had made a treaty with the Navajo Nation way back in 1863 that one of the parts of the treaties says that the Navajo's will have to send their children to school to learn English way. So a lot of my father's generation, not too many but some of them had gone to school at that time, but at that time they did not see the value of it because we had the system and everything in place and our own way of education, our own way of life. So in my time I was sent away to a boarding school. I was sent about a thousand miles from my home. We went and boarded the bus, they brought all the children together age 6 on up and we were transported far, far away. And that first year was very, very hard for me and for all of us because we were in a strange place, we were in these dormitories. Looking back now it was really scary for all of us. And these regimentation's where everything you had to do like going to eat or school, you had to line up and you were given a number. Your number is going to be this and when they call your number you respond to that, so that's the way we were sort of branded and go through that process, especially that first year was really hard. They did not allow us to speak our language, we were punished if we spoke our language, if we were caught speaking the language. Of course us kids who were Navajos would go off on our own and speak to each other away from the dormitories and when we'd play or something. And our parents and our families could not even visit us because they did'nt have the means of transportation. They didn't speak the language, the English language. So was the process that my generation went through, and why didn't they build schools near our home on the reservation? They built many of these big boarding schools, when I say "they," I mean the government, the BIA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the agency that takes care of the Indians, or was responsible for educating and taking care of Indians. One of their missions was to take us away from our homes, from our reservation into what they called mainstream of American way of life.

Not knowing who you are, not knowing your culture where you come from and I remember after finishing the school over there and they'd let us go, "you go on your own, but stay out here." And I didn't know how to live in a home for example, because we were raised in the dormitories in an institutionalized way. I didn't know how to behave myself in a family setting, in a home. It was really hard, plus not really knowing who I am. I was lost, in other words I was confused about my life and my way of life, but I finally made it back to the reservation several years later and began to learn our culture, our way of life again. And get back in touch with the spirits and with everything that we were brought up with when I was a little child. And slowly I learned the history. We were not taught anything of our own history or the history of Native Americans in the schools, so slowly on my own I learned the histories of this nation and other nations and slowly began to understand, bringing things together, like building a puzzle, putting it together and finally I saw the whole picture why this happened and so forth. So today this is where I am, it's a learning process. Every individual, each one of us, we were born with zero knowledge so from the day we come to this Mother Earth we start learning, little by little, little by little.

From all directions the technology and all kinds of information that we don't really understand, like through the television. Our children watch television everyday now, most of them, and what goes on in there, the violence. And they learn this violence, the killing, the shooting one another. They think it's O.K. to live that way, that this is the way of life. All the different advertisements that go with it, "this is good for you, you eat this you'll be a good man, you do this you'll have a lot of money." All kinds of stuff like that. Now why is this? And then I think about it, where did this come from, whose ideas are these, why are we being fed, what I call, this junk? Where a lot of these come from are what is know as corporations. And these corporations don't really care, they're not human beings, they're something up here (gesturing hands above head) that some people put it together and call it corporations.