When I first landed in the southwest it was for an internship at Canyon de Chelly National Monument. I was twenty-one year-old East Coast white girl stepping for the first time on the dusty red soil of the Navajo Reservation. I lived alone in the park campground in a doublewide trailer, in a yard crowded with tumbleweed skeletons. I had a pair of cowboy boots, a bicycle, and $50 in my pocket.
“Shawna Tso” befriended me and became the closest thing I had to family at that time in my life. Shawna was a butch lesbian Navajo guide at Canyon de Chelly. She wore a Redskins baseball hat with an eagle feather affixed to the top that flickered and twirled in the wind. She was a husky woman, with an ample chest, and when she laughed, her entire body shook with the tremors of it.
My first week at the visitor center, I confided in her that I was nervous about giving an interpretive talk about the hogan because I had never actually been inside a traditional Navajo home. I felt like a complete fraud. Later that day Shawna took me to her hogan, built by her grandmother, and shared with me all she knew about the traditions. Over the course of our friendship she told me many stories behind the rock spires, alcoves and mesas, bringing the landscape to life. She taught me how to express exasperation in Navajo in one catchy phrase ”Ya-de-la!”. She shared the secrets of throwing a rope, dancing the two-step, and navigating two feet of reservation mud in a two-wheel drive pickup.
Shawna was my Navajo superhero, and perhaps elevating her to that level left her nowhere to go but crashing down. Shawna’s problems were very real. She was a high school drop out who had been in and out of jail. She was a victim of abuse who self-medicated with alcohol, the very elixer that fueled her brawls with loved ones. Despite the darkness, her light shone bright enough for me to recognize her as my mentor, a sage and—at times—a prophet. Shawna balanced precariously on the edge of her culture never appearing to care whether she fit in. I admired her sense of freedom.
Sixteen years later I am looking at a photograph of Shawna taken a month before she died. Her face appears twisted and swollen with a lifetime of pain. I notice the red scars on her neck where her mother tried to strangle her as a baby. I wish in vain to smooth the rough spots, to make her laugh.
She died from a stroke on the first day of this year. I was never able to say goodbye. Now I am left to unravel the tangled story of a friendship that ended 10 years ago late one night when she busted into a downtown Flagstaff house that I shared with roommates. She was on a bender, rolling through town. At that moment she seemed indistinguishable from the drunks that roamed the streets of our neighborhood, only she was calling my name.
In the end I wasn’t able to watch her drink her pain away and hurt the ones she loved so fiercely. I cannot understand why it was difficult to reconcile Chinle and Flagstaff; two worlds that each shaped large parts of who I am today. The shame of turning away from Shawna has infused me with a streak of darkness that is mine alone to carry.
When I returned to Chinle after her death I saw the way time has played out on people’s faces, including my own. I was overwhelmed by the connection I felt to the landscape and those who remembered me despite all the years that have passed. I witnessed the loved ones she hurt the most, her girlfriend and her daughter, struggling to reconcile their loss swinging on a pendulum between courage and quiet despair.
Tumbleweeds spin cartwheels across the desert plain and come to rest along the fence margins. We leave Shawna’s grave, a fresh mound of burnt orange soil covered in plastic flowers, surrounded by so much emptiness. The spring parsley flowers push up through the cracks in an unforgiving landscape. I imagine that these tender flowers are tiny offerings of hope, beacons of beauty pushing though the impossible, inpenetrable grief. I wish for them to survive.
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