Edison Eskeets - Send a Runner: A Navajo Honors the Long Walk

Rug woven by Mary Henderson Begay for Edison Eskeets, the runner.
Photo by Edison Eskeets.

Heya, he weya, he yaha,
Ena heyana heya ha.
If you go to Navajoland,
If you go to Navajo, yes.

If you go to Navajoland,
Take your shroud,
Because death over there
Is firm and without doubt.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SPANISH FOLK SONG
FROM TAOS, NORTHERN NEW MEXICO

DAY ONE

He is in the place where it started and continues. He is in the prayers.

The sun is coming. Blue shadows weave between dark branches of pion and juniper.

Stars glitter in the cold morning sky. Edison Eskeets walks to the edge of the sandstone cascade called Canyon de Chelly. He offers his hand to the East.

His untied black hair streaks with gray. It falls around his thin, defined body. His high cheekbones and articulate nose give him a certain handsome nobility. He stands five feet, nine inches and weighs no more than 135 pounds.

He wears only a woven kilt and a pair of moccasins.

He looks through a half-mile of space to Ts yaaah (Spider Rock), the sacred spire where Na ashj ii Asdz (Spider Woman) is said to have lived after teaching the art of weaving to the Dinthe Navajo people. Edison has painted his bare arm and chest white and offers the white corn from the jish (medicine pouch). His left arm is painted turquoise. His right leg is yellow and red. His left leg is black. The story is quiet. It is in the paint. It speaks of mountains, of a journey through the worlds, through forms and bodies, to this world with the help of the gods.

He looks to the remaining stars of the Milky Way and sees a specific curving shape. It is a feather, clear to any eye. It is what he needs. It is enough.

Edison was a quiet teenager at Gallup High School who spent more time herding sheep than talking to girls. He got recruited and became a first-team All-American runner for Haskell University. He ran professionally for years. He organized running camps all over the Reservation. Now he is the trader at Hubbell Trading Post, the oldest operating trading post in Din Bikyah (Navajo country). Today he will begin a run to honor the survivors of the Long Walkthe forced removal of most of the Din people to a military-controlled reservation on the Pecos River in south-central New Mexico. He will run from here, Spider Rock, to Santa Fwhere the scheme for the Long Walk was drawn out and executedto deliver a message. He will run 330 miles in fifteen days. He will run a marathon a day. He is fifty-nine years old.

Edisons prayers fall into the air like white cornmeal and become part of something that might be so old only Spider Woman remembers it.

The medicine needs to be gathered. People need healing. They send a runner. This morning, Edison is running.

Francisco de Coronado leaves Compostela in Mexico in 1540, envisioning the metals that will add to the Spanish treasury and to his own legacy. He takes over three hundred foot soldiers. He hires over a thousand Indian soldiers with promises of plunder in the north that will make their fortunes. He equips five hundred war horses, each with a coat of mail, and an armored cavalry soldier. The soldiers bring their wives and children. This is customary.

The party is easy to track. Hundreds of cattle and sheep bring up the rear as food.

The Spanish explorers grasp and steal up the Ro San Pedro. They reach the Pecos River and follow it to what is now called the New Mexico border with Texas. There, they meet a people they call Querechosplains Apachesand Coronado says they are one of the best bodies of any people I have seen in the Indies. One of Coronados lieutenants writes that they do not eat human flesh, that they are gentle people, that they are faithful friends.

Edison makes it happen in the old way. He sets down a rug woven by Mary Henderson Begay in the pattern that explains why he is here. Against the gray background, you will see the blue and red lines of the rainbow, constellations of stars, the line of sky and atmosphere that protects Mother Earth, where meteorites are burned and destroyed, the plants that are medicine and food and dye for the rug. The plant is a rug and the rug is the plant. The white eagle feather. The X of the treaty. The dates of the Long Walk, 18641868, in brown wool. The sacred mountains. The four directions. It is all there. As a comfort. To protect us. It is the whole Navajo story. The story of the struggle for happiness.

Edison lays the rug on the ground as the yasikaad (ground cover). Edison gives her a carefully wrapped buckskin pouch of corn pollen. Two hundred years ago, these pouches would be made of hides of deer unpunctured by arrows or spears. They had to be killed by runners, who would chase the deer to exhaustion, where it could no longer run. They would pin the deer, take the sacred