A CONVERSATION WITH NASDIJJ
JACK NORTON was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1979. He
has lived a life spent on the road: His parents, Pentecostal
preachers and part-time bluegrass musicians, kept home in Macon,
Georgia; New Orleans; New York; Iowa; and Minnesota.
Jack graduated in 1997 from the Arts High School in Minneapolis.
For the past decade he has been a full-time singer/songwriter
and poet, writing, recording, and performing over two hundred
shows a year in North America and Europe. He leads Jack Norton’s
Wizard Oil Vaudeville Company, a conglomerated touring
theatrical troupe of musicians, actors, puppeteers, .lmmakers,
and carnies. Norton currently lives in Minneapolis. He can be
contacted at [email protected].
Jack Norton: Explain to me how and why the Navajo refer to
themselves as the People Who Walk the Surface of the Earth.
Nasdijj: The Navajo—for good or for bad—essentially see
themselves as apart from the rest of humanity. The mythology
says that the Navajo are here to endure the hardships of living,
and as such they are to offer themselves as examples to other humans.
When living is out of balance, as it usually is—and for someone like me, it always is—we are taught to believe that it is our responsibility to facilitate change. White people do not
understand that part of who we are. For instance, we do not
speak out. Hardly ever. But when we do it is with power. To return
the world to balance. White people see us as stationary. But
that is an illusion. We are, in fact, a nomadic people. But you
have to look at us and our thousands of years of migrating
through the lens of centuries, and not with a corporate eyeball
where the only thing that matters is how much you made today.
JN: Talk to me about poverty on the reservation.
N: I don’t know how to do that. What I do is take one small example
like Awee, and I attempt to show you what he had to live
in. It is a world of desperation, disease, hunger, and utter personal
devastation.
JN: What is this death that comes through uranium mines?
N: All through the Cold War the Navajo reservation was mined
to supply America with nuclear material for weapons. Most
Navajo miners are dead now. It killed many Navajo, much livestock,
and has left the younger generation with enormous health
problems.
JN: You write that change is one child at a time. You write that
change is changing the madness of culture into the spirituality of
the individual one social structure at a time. Do you still believe
this?
N: No. I have lost all hope. For society. For culture. For individuals.
What I now believe is that it is too late. The corporations
win. There is no hope. Not for the Navajo. Not for anyone.
I was wrong. The enormity of what the white culture has imposed
upon the Native American has rendered anything any of us
could do to be totally ephemeral. I have no hope for anything or
anyone. All I know is that we all will die and be done with it.
That is all I believe there is.
JN: Life with Awee had an immediacy to it that was inescapable.
Do you live your own life that way? Was it as intense with Tommy Nothing Fancy?
Does your own health cause you to live this intensely?
N: With Tom, life was soft, and I was not yet thirty. I was a warrior
and still had hope. My own health has been worn down to
the point where my nose is pressed into the grave and it’s cold
and dark. I rage against it. Dylan Thomas was right. Life is absolutely
immediate when what you .ght against is being enveloped
.nally and utterly by what is called the night.
JN: Are there any support systems or health care providers on
the reservation that could deal with AIDS?
N: Public health care on the rez is underfunded and overwhelmed.
Doctors and nurses cope as best they can. But it’s like
war there. You would swear from standing in the hallway of just
about any Indian hospital that a bomb went off somewhere. It’s
like Iraq in that respect. But it’s here. In America. White people
don’t see it because they don’t want to know, and if they did see it
they would be indifferent or they would say, “It’s their own fault”
because that is what they have always said. No. Health care on
the reservation is a nightmare. I have seen people just give up and
die and I understand that.
JN: Was it necessary to become as isolated as you did with
Awee, living alone in a hotel?
N: I did not think it fair for me to impose AIDS on anyone else.
It was my problem to deal with. So we were, indeed, isolated. But
I also knew that through that very isolation we would either bond
or die. We did both. Awee died, but pieces of me did, too. The
hopeful Nasdijj, the nice Nasdijj, the Nasdijj who believed that
we could solve these problems if we just worked together is dead.
I am numb, poor, devastated, ravaged, and ruined. You cannot
know all of it. I keep it to myself. Every moment I am even here
is almost unbelievable, even to me. By rights, I should have died a
long time ago. My doctors are completely baf.ed. But sometimes
my rage at the world and at that night Dylan Thomas talks about
infuses me with life. It is why such people as Crazy Horse and
Tanka Yotanka and Sitting Bull survived as long as they did.
JN: What were Awee’s dreams?
N: Awee dreamed of better places. Better times. Better ways to
love. He was completely innocent, and unlike most adolescents
who want to be let loose, Awee wanted to be held. I held him and
I rocked him and now I miss him.
JN: Was Awee ever allowed to have contact with the kind of
AIDS support group for boys you run now?
N: I do not run anything. The boys run everything themselves.
Yes, we knew some children with AIDS. I did not write about
everything or include everything in the book. That would not be
possible. Did it help Awee? Actually, Awee was helped when he
was allowed to help. Yes. It kept him going. He was a cog in the
support system. Just like the boys I deal with now. To know you
are a part of something or someone gives you hope that the intimacy
you .nd and the responsibility for another person that you
.nd is real.
JN: You have said that AIDS is chaos imposed on time. What
do you mean?
N: I meant that even though life is often this hurtful, chaotic
mess that presents itself to you, AIDS makes it incomprehensible.
In the face of utter incomprehensibility, time becomes an af-
terthought. It is not like time as people who do not live with
AIDS would understand the notion of time. Time in the world of
AIDS is again that intense rage against what is blackness. It is as
if the speed of light does not pour into your eyes, but pours like
milk from them.
JN: You have said that we must make this fantasy we have made
of childhood, and look the thing clearly in the face. And we must
begin to articulate in all our languages what the animal is really
like. Please explain.
N: As a Navajo, I am taught that a child is complete when he
comes into the world. As a human being. He is not a blank slate
that we are compelled to write upon. In America, we tend to see
children through the cutie-pie eyes of Romper Room. This is idiocy.
It is disrespect. Just as we disrespect African Americans, or
Native Americans, or Hispanic-Americans, or Asian-Americans,
we really and truly disrespect children, too. I was a part of the
United Nations Assembly during the International Year of the
Child when we wrote the basic premise of children’s rights. Children
have the right to food. Children have the right to shelter.
Children have the right not to be physically or sexually or emotionally
abused. During that entire .ght to get those basic rights
approved by the UN, country after country, culture after culture
fought it tooth and nail. Including the United States, which was a
little unsure around what we meant by shelter. Does that mean
that homeless children have the right to shelter? America did not
want to go there. Now, we just throw them into a gymnasium
and wash our hands of the issue and of them. Today, children in
America are disposable, and homeless children may as well be
dead. Most of them will go to prison where they will be dead to
anything and everything and certainly to hope.
JN: You have said in print that as a child you were raped and
abused and abandoned. Is that your aim or goal as a writer—to
come to terms with those things?
N: I am homeless now. My entire existence is a coming to terms
with those things. They haunt me every moment of every day.
Like white on rice. Writing is a way to survive. I am never happy
with what I have written. I am never happy about how I get published.
I am never happy. I do not fathom—happiness. Or why it
seems to be a common goal. I want to exist and get through the
day. When I close my eyes I let the writing come to me. It writes
itself. I have no idea or notion of having done it. I have spent my
life writing. But I do not remember the act of writing for one second
of it. I still feel abandoned by white culture. The only warrior
weapons left to me are words.