Ghéé'ye hooghéń `iłdóͅ gólíͅná'a. nDéí doobáńgólaadaná'a.

I think it was 1987 when we made that big road trip.  The idea was to focus on the stops and not try to go too far in any one day, because that’s how you miss things that you should be looking at.  Maya, Jon and I were in Lincoln County, New Mexico, looking at all the Billy the Kid stuff.  In the late afternoon we went to Lincoln National Forest to find a tent site for the night.  It was not promising.  The sites were desolate and every steel garbage can had been violently smashed. It looked to me as though some veryaggressive bears were around, and – indeed -- we found out a few days later that because of a long drought, bears were coming out of the mountains and into the city of Albuquerque.  In any case, we drove back down into Ruidoso and set up our tent at an RV park where people were staying while they went to the horse races at Ruidoso Downs.

It was fine for a night, but not more.  Next day we went to the Mescalero Apache reservation to look into their campground. (Which is a story for another day!)  Registration was at the tribal cultural center, so we took time to visit the museum and then to chat with the lady at the desk.  She told us that two girls were having a sunrise ceremony that night.

I had been wanting to see an Apache na'ii'ees for years. I had always heard that they were done in association with the Fourth of July fair, and I knew that we were never going to make it to New Mexico or Arizona by July 4^th. The school year in New York City doesn’t even end until June 28^th, so I had long ago given up on ever seeing this.  But now this lady was telling us about a ceremony that very night.  I still wasn’t hopeful, though. It was early August and that told me this had to be a private affair, conducted by the girls’ families, not the tribe.

I asked if that was the case.  The lady smiled and said, yes, not at the tribal fairgrounds but in a corner of the reservation away from everything else. We could get there directly from the campground, she said, but it was ten miles, and over an unmarked mountain track.  She suggested we go the long way around, about 30 miles, still unpaved, but on marked roads.

I was still stuck on the idea that this was a private affair.  I asked whether we would be welcome, showing up uninvited.  Now she looked at me as if I was stupid.  “I am inviting you,” she said.

It was kind of a magical night.  People had backed their pickups into a wide circle around a bonfire.  Grandmas sat in rocking chairs in the beds of the trucks.   School had just started back (Arizona is apparently on a very different academic calendar) and the teenaged boys near us were talking a lot of shit about who they were going to fight and which girls they liked.  The masked crown dancers were illuminated by the firelight and that felt timeless, but the interactions between the crowd and the clown stopped it being so solemn.  And then when the two girls came out it felt exactly like a Bat Mitzvah to me: a specific connection between individual young people with their own lives and a long train of tradition that bound the grandmas in their rockers with their own grandmas… and their grandmas, too. There was no band playing Hava Nagila and the people didn’t start dancing horas, but the evening was familiar to me, nevertheless.

Do I need to say that this haunted me? I have never stopped thinking about it. It is the source of the scene in my story “The Giant Believed Her.” And I kept thinking about the lady who invited us. So I should not have been surprised to discover forty years later that she was not just some random tribal employee, that she was an elder with the authority to ask strangers to a private party, that she was essential to the persistence of Mescalero -- and Chiricahua -- culture.

Researching my new book I found myself looking into a work titled Women of the Apache Nation. And there she was.  Elbys Hugar, granddaughter of Naiche, great granddaughter of Cochise, was that host at the Mescalero Apache Cultural Center. She was the one who invited us to that family na'ii'ees. She was the guardian of language and story for several generations of Chiricahuas living at Mescalero, where they had finally been allowed to relocate after decades of imprisonment with Geronimo.

Elbys Naiche Hugar

I have the habit of keeping notes of my travels. That summer they were very terse and cryptic, in part because we did so much, in part because I forgot to bring a journal and was writing in tiny letters on a paper bag. But there it is: “Day 12) Mescalero museum. Discussed coming out w/ Elbys.”

It makes sense now that a hugely-important figure in the history of the Chiricahua Apache invited us to attend that ceremony. It also makes sense to me that her importance entirely eluded me, and that when we went, I stayed pretty much on the outside, watching, but not speaking to anybody there. I can be overly reticent sometimes, afraid of intruding.

Art by Naiche

When Mrs. Hugar’s grandfather, Naiche, was given art supplies and the opportunity to draw he returned again and again to the subject of the na'ii'ees ceremony. He clearly believed that the arrival of Isdzánádleeshé, or White Painted Woman, was essential to the survival of the Chiricahua people and that this arrival recurred in the passage of every young woman as she transitioned from girl to adult.

When I was in my twenties, we believed that survival and resistance are two separate, sometimes parallel, tracks for people suffering monopoly-capitalist oppression. One of the points of my writing is that survival can itself be a form of resistance. In my collection of short stories I used the metaphor of Goliath, trying to destroy David’s people. He picked up five smooth stones from the creek to use in his sling, because that is what he had to hand and that is why my title was Stones from the Creek. It should be clear who the Giant is.

I think one reason why I continue to be haunted by that ceremony and that night is because keeping it alive in the face of a Giant that would destroy the people – and especially its young women! -- represents both survival and resistance. In the Nde song, the Giant, Ghéé'ye,is trying to devour White Painted Woman’s child. She is the one who prevails.