Tiana Bighorse - Bighorse the Warrior

In this simple story, with its vivid and sometimes heart-wrenching images of destruction, a man named Gus Bighorse speaks out of time through his daughter Tiana. What we learn of his life (1846?1939)a life that begins eighteen years before the descent of a Navajo nightmare called the Long Walk and ends during the Navajo stock reduction programs of the 1930s, another nightmarearrives before us, to put it another way, in the living memory of Tiana Bighorse. It is her memory, as much as her fathers recitation of evil and tribulation, that ultimately serves us.

At the heart of all literature, oral and written, we find the effort of human memory, a recapitulation of event or of feeling that binds us again to our history. The obvious surfacing of memory in narrative, the precise recall of historical event, promises at least two things: that the words in the story will flesh out the intentions and indistinct yearnings of the human heartwe will learn, again, who we areand that the enemy, which is to forget, will be defeated.

The dramatic events of the warrior Bighorses life, set out as they are here with no ironic reflection, without rage or self-pity, seem tragic. But his meaning, the history laid before us, is transcendent. The perpetuation of genocide he describesa grotesque episode in North American history, routinely obscuredmakes a paradox of civilization clear: the imposition of a foreign order and hierarchy on a culture does not create opportunity. It destroys coherence. It distorts personality. The loneliness of Hastiin Bighorses early years brings into sharp focus the profound importance Navajos place on family relationships, as distinct from vaguer obligations to a national order. The fidelity of his daughters report is an unpretentious celebration of those relationships, and a demonstration of the intrinsic value of story.

The particular life that unfolds on these pages resonates with qualities we might expect to findanger, longing, tenderness, courage; but also, unexpectedly apparent, is wonder or awe in the face of evil. So this report by an unheard of man, through the incisive voice of his child, goes to the heart of a modern predicamentthe extent to which the reasonable and inevitable destruction of traditional human relationships can be accommodated, in the name of progress or material gain, before the corrosive process undermines completely the spiritual life of a nation.

The evil we confront in modern society, which must inspire awe as well as dread and condemnation, is the way expediency triumphs so brutally over courtesy. Instead of proposing a way of life and waiting for a response, we (federal troops and administrators in this instance) impose our will and quickly silence any rejection. It is the story of colonial expansion from the Caribbean islands of the Arawak to the twentieth-century redoubts of the Montagnard.

This is a story of harm, but also of how memory in service to humanity might redeem us.

BARRY LOPEZ
McKenzie River, Oregon
February 1990