Chapter Eight

McGee, Caitlin O’Brien, and Ivory White fly the corporate jet from New York to Cedar City, Utah, in response to the call from Naalnish Begay. They touch down and walk to Sphere One Aviation. Naalnish completes another interview with one of Sialea-lea Biakeddy’s daughters—one of the three siblings who were expressing their disagreement or disapproval of their brother when he usurped the role of family spokesman during the initial interview. He gets a text from McGee that the private detectives are in the city. The airport’s passenger terminal is only two miles from downtown Cedar City off Highway 56 on Aviation Way, and Naalnish and the three McGee associates are waiting in the other new terminal—Sphere One Aviation, the airport’s FBO [Fixed Base Operation]—with amenities for private pilots.

“Hey, wild Indian, you don’t look that bad for all the wear and tear of working out here on the edge of the earth,” McGee says, and gives Naalnish a quick man-hug.

“Getting away from the Federal Bureau of Ineptitude and becoming one of the ‘Full Blooded Indian’ cops keeps me from going nuts most of the time and having to put up with all the B-S you and I worked with for those years when we both thought we would get to be the DFBI.”

“But, I gather from your call that you ‘Full Blooded Indian’ types have multiple layers of bureaucracy. We’re here and ready to help.”

“And, you can’t imagine how much I appreciate you coming. You know this is an off-the-books operation; and, on my pay, I can’t afford you.”

“We’re friends. And besides, it’s great to be out here where the air is clear, the landscape is empty, and apparently so are the heads.”

“Remember to try and see these people through their own prismatic vision. You will understand them better. You’ll have to go slow, be Indian-type tactful, even if they aren’t. What matters—beyond all the federal government, tribal, and political nonsense and interference—is that we get the killer or killers of three good people at the end of the day.”

Ivory and Caitlin clear the conference table in the FBO building, and the four of them set to work on the planning. Naalnish brings the McGee detectives up-to-date on the findings directly related to the crime thus far, and includes a short tutorial on the ongoing struggle among different factions of Indians within the reservation area, between the Indians and the assistant attorney general and the FBI liaison, and federal law enforcement versus the Navajo Nation Police. He gives them a list of members of the 1491 group and draws a rough map of how to get to them.

“You’ll need to look like Westerners at least. Get some Levis and snap button shirts and some scruffy looking boots. They’ll laugh at you if you come all duded up in shiny pants and snakeskin boots. I’ll finish up here by late afternoon today, and we can meet in Blue Mesa day after tomorrow. By then, my assistant Dodge Maryboy and I will have touched base with each other; and we can see what we’ve learned. You don’t have to buy horses or all-terrain vehicles; I can get both, and you are going to need them. Think of it as an adventure.”

They laugh and part ways.

Most of the rest of the Biakeddy family interviews go quickly. They are largely uninformative by their nature as Navajos, or because they are protective of family privacy, or because they specifically do not want to discuss the relationship of Leland with his mother and other members of the Save the Minds of the Navajo Children NGO. At three-thirty, he lets all the others go but quietly asks the three daughters to hang back; so, he can talk to them away from the rest of the family.

Agnes Biakeddy Tsinajinnie, Delphine Biakeddy Bahane’, and the youngest daughter, and still unmarried, Raven Biakeddy, are tired and want this long process of interrogation to be over; but they are angry about the death of their mother; and they want answers. If Leland or his cronies have anything to do with her death, well, so be it.

“Let’s not waste any more of your time. I have been a detective for a long time, and a Navajo for a lot longer. I have learned a lot about reading people in that time. You three are not in agreement with the others. There is something you know—or maybe suspect—about your mother’s death that you haven’t wanted to talk about while the rest of your family was hanging around. Please help me to put your mom’s spirit to rest. We can’t just let this go.”

Agnes looks at her sisters, and they give her a slight nod.

“Lt. Begay, we have been worried for a long time about what Mom was doing. There are res people who are determined to keep our kids Navajos and away from mainstream American life. Mom told us that she was scared because some of the really fundamentalist men and women have become more than pushy and argumentative; they were threatening. It would never be anything that could be used in a court—all hints, innuendo, and Indian superstition. She got notes from a few of them with little references to old taboos, like ‘you’re getting yourself onto a high place.’ It is taboo to stand on high rocks. The traditional Navajos believe that the rocks will grow into the sky with them. Another message said that ‘while she is up on that high place, she might roll a rock from a mountain. The holy people put them there, and it will be bad luck. Every high spot on the reservation and every unusual formation is considered as a religious symbol to the traditional people.’ The implication was strong that something bad would happen to her if she didn’t stop this bad Save the Minds of the Navajo Children NGO business.

“The most recent message; and the one that worried Mom the most, warned her that ‘she should be careful not to stare at the moon because real Navajos know that if they do stare at the moon, it will follow you.’ It was less than a day after that—during the full moon—when Mom told us that she saw an old Navajo warrior sitting bareback on a white or light grey horse holding a tall lance with some eagle feathers attached to the shaft near the point. She told us that that was the moon sending a killer in the form of a man on a pale horse. Raven is the only one of the family that turned Christian—she joined the Mormons—and she showed us a passage from their Bible. It was Revelations, Chapter 6, verse 8. I’ll never forget the chill that we all felt when we read it. ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.’ When we tried to talk to Leland about what we all perceived as a threat, he told us that we had over-active imaginations; and we needed to shut up about that kind of thing while the election process was under way. It might hurt his chances. He didn’t give a fig about our mother’s life.”

Naalnish asked for a list of the people who worked directly with Leland in his campaign and also a list of everybody that had been threatening or angry with their mother. They already had a list of names, and Leland Biakeddy’s name led them all.

Dodge Maryboy’s mother and Lashena Tall Woman are cousins. Lashena is a Spotted Eagle of the Tall Woman clan before she married a young soldier, Emery Weatherseer, who was drafted to fight in the War in Viet Nam. He told her about being discriminated against; he was neither black nor white. Neither race of soldiers accepted him. His only desire when he was sent back to Viet Nam for his second tour was to get out of the army and away from the bigots he saw all around him. He and Lashena talked for hours, for days, when he came home on furlough and when at last he was given an honorable discharge. He and Lashena came to an understanding; they would leave America and live a true Navajo life away from those people who looked down on everything Indian. They took an opposite course from those Americans. They eschewed everything that was not Indian, not Navajo.

Emery was discharged in 1969. He and Lashena took the bare necessities and rode horses out into the desert beyond the roads, beyond the reach of the white man’s radio, telephone, television, and internet. They built a hogán with their own two hands, hunted and fished, grew corn and squash, and had four children. It was the children who caused the authorities to find them. It was not as if they were at fault. Occasionally one of their children would encounter a distant neighbor child riding far away from home. Those chance encounters resulted in the authorities finding out where the Weatherseer family lived and that their children were not attending the white man’s school. The Navajo Nation Police came and forced them to let the children attend the schools in Blue Mesa.

Emery and Lashena grew progressively dismayed when the children reported that they only spoke Navajo an hour or two a day, and only a few of their classes were taught in the sacred language. They were learning about places like Rome and issues like civil rights for black people. They learned almost nothing about Indians except that they were warriors who attacked and did bad things to white people; so, the white pony soldiers came to drive them onto reservations and to destroy their way of life.

Emery started to drink. Lashena knew that Indians cannot use alcohol; for them it is a poison that takes away the Indian spirit. One late snowy night, he fell off his horse, struck his head, and died out there in the cold. Lashena blamed the whites; she blamed their school and their police, including the Indian officers. She tried to reclaim her children, but they were under the spell of the white demons in the school. Lashena changed her name back to Tall Woman. The children graduated from school and fled the reservation.

Lashena vowed to make change in the school system—to make it more nurturing of the Indian way and spirit—her lifetime goal. She found like-minded people from the tribe and even from the despised Hopis and Zunis. A group of forty real Indians became a driving force for change. They had a lawyer who helped them form the Navajos of 1491. During this year, this election year, they became political. No one else that they knew was interested in getting a real Indian elected; so, they began to fight for their champion, a man named Leland Biakeddy from Utah. It seemed to be a doomed mission, and they had no illusions. He was from Utah, up around Navajo Lake; he was a Democrat; and he was opposed to the modernization of education on the reservation at the expense of the Navajo heritage and culture. All of those made him an unlikely candidate, but the 1491ers were a very determined minority vowing to effect change.

When her sister Esmé’ Spotted Eagle’s boy—rides up to the front door of her hogán, it takes her a moment to remember that he would be named Maryboy like his father. It has been that long since she and Esmé communicated. The years fly by too fast.

Dodge dismounts and walks to the rough-hewn door of Lashena’s hogán. As a good Navajo should, he patiently stands in front of the rectangular door of the eight-sided earthen hut and waits to be invited in.

Lashena opens the door and quickly frowns and takes a small step back when she sees his Navajo Nation Police uniform.

“You’re Esmé’s boy, right?” she asks, making no move to invite him in—a discourtesy even towards a stranger.

“Yes, I’m Dodge.”

“And you’re one of their police.”

“That’s right.”

“You here on police business?”

“Yes, I am, Lashena. Can I come in and talk?”

“How many frogskins they give you to betray your people, Dodge, hmmh?”

He ignores the insulting attack.

“No. I have to let them take away my kids to school, have to have the Americans run our government, make our roads, control our lives outside our homes, but I don’t have to let them into my home without a warrant. That’s American law. Sometimes Navajo law is even more definite about who can come in. We’ll talk out here.”

An unknown traveler—weary and far from home—may stop at a hogán along his way and be assured that he will be welcomed. Although he is a stranger in the sense that he has never been seen before, he will be taken in and cared for. That is the Navajo way. Apparently the ‘Navajo Way’ is not in force for Dodge Maryboy today.

“All right, Lashena, but you’re making a mistake. I have to have answers. You know why I’m here. If you won’t talk to me, then there’ll be others who don’t care about family like I do who will come out here.”

“Let them come.”

“There have been three murders on res, including one in Utah. Every one of them was a person involved in our schools and in the education of our children. More than that, they were all members of a group I know you’ve heard about, the Save the Minds of the Navajo Children. I know you are a member of the Navajos of 1491 who oppose everything Bertha Yazzie, Sialea-lea Biakeddy, Hyrum Kieyoomia, and the rest want to accomplish for our children.”

“And turn them into pretty little blond white Navajo robots like their own kids—can’t ride, can’t speak the language, don’t know about our real history of struggles against the white intruders, thieves, and murderers.”

“That about sums up the attitudes. We know the murdered people received threats, and there is no doubt who sent those threats, Lashena. I need to get information I can use, or I am going to have to bring you in for obstruction of justice.”

“You and what army, Dodge Maryboy?”

She made an elaborate theatrical effort to look out of her hogán door to see the ‘army.’

“Answer me a few questions, and I’ll ride back the way I came.”

“Like what?”

“Who killed those three innocent Navajos? Was it you? Did you help in the killings? Who is behind them? Who stands to benefit?”

“You have some nerve asking me if I killed them. They are part of the people who committed the massacres at Sand Creek and Bended Knee.”

“That was a century ago, and not relevant to the three murders I am investigating.”

“There is every relevance. Us Navajos—us real Navajos—have to be the ‘homeland security’ for the nation. We have always had to fight. Maybe those three dead people were just combatants that fell in this new set of battles to save our way of life. We’ve been at it since 1492, what’s different now?”

“You did not answer my questions. Tell me where you were during the past several days, please.”

“Now, I need an alibi? What have things come to? I was here … alone. Nobody saw me here or any place else for that matter. And, since you ask, I did not kill anybody. I am an activist, but I am not a murderer.”

Lashena is angry and working herself up to a smoldering rage.

“Then, who did kill them? Give me something to work on, or I will have to take you in for obstructing a legal police investigation at the least.”

Lashena has no stomach for going into Blue Mesa for a grilling. She has some secrets that the police would probably be able to ferret out, and it is best if those secrets do not come out.

“Okay. I give you some names and you leave me alone.”

“Depends.”

Lashena reluctantly relents, “You might want to talk to Patrick Joe, Fred Chee, Jay Wauneka, Herb Tavare, Zonnie Whitehorse, and Tsosie Halne’é, the medicine men who have anything to do with the Painted Desert. None of them make any bones about their opposition to the new ways in the schools or for their dislike of the troublemakers either, for that matter. If you are so sure that one of the 1491 people did it, there’s a place to start. Good luck with that.”

“I’ll go with that for now, Lashena, but don’t be too surprised if I come back. My partner and I are going to get the murderer or murderers and anyone who helps them and obstructs the law. Count on it.”

Lashena puts her head out in another theatrical looking gesture and says, “It’s raining out. Don’t yell when it is raining. Maybe you will be struck by lightning, Mr. Navajo Nation policeman, Mr. White Man’s boy.”

She walks back inside the hogán and closes the door.

“Thanks for the nice cool drink of water,” Dodge says sarcastically, talking to the wind.

Naalnish finds the going easier with Hyrum Kieyoomia’s family. They produce a list of every member of the 1491 antiprogress group—including the supporters of Leland Biakeddy’s election campaign. Because of their good educations and relative sophistication, they also produce a chronological list of every attack and insult by every member of the 1491s they can remember. The list is more than a hundred incidents long and well documented. Naalnish is very tired and feeling down at the lack of specifics thus far in his investigation, but he now has a considerable amount of information. It bothers him that everything is pointing at the 1491ers. Maybe he has blinders on and is not looking at other options. He cannot think of any other options at the moment, and that bothers him. The stakes are too high for him and his career to lose objectivity and to make a major mistake. At least he has something to go on when he meets Dodge and McGee back in Blue Mesa in the afternoon. It is a long drive from Navajo Lake.