HIGHWAY TO HUMOR

Navajo Grandmother Shares Her Plant Wisdom for Everyday Living

KATHERINE PESHLAKAI SAYS she learned about plants the same way many Navajo Indians do-as part of daily living on the land. From certain plants, she makes dyes that reflect subdued earth tones. There are plants to make a tea or add to a stew; plants the sheep will eat; plants to cure a stomachache or put on a snakebite; and, the most guarded ones, plants for sacred ceremonies. Originally from the Sand Springs area of the Navajo Indian Reservation, Katherine was “born to” Red House (her mother’s clan) and “born for” Tobacco (her father’s clan). She proudly notes that her grandfather, Chez Nez, was a well-known Navajo headman, a leader and highly respected member of the community. Katherine grew up in Wupatki National Monument, out in the wide valley of the Little Colorado River, and was married to Clyde Peshlakai, who held a great store of native plant information. Some years later, Katherine moved east across the Little Colorado, where she still lives with her daughter, Eleanor Peshlakai, on the family homestead.

On the walls of her modest home hang pictures of her family-one of Katherine as a young woman with four of her children clinging to her skirts. She eventually had nine children. The photograph, in color, appeared in Arizona Highways years ago. Katherine's face now shows the impressions of seven decades of wind and sun, and her gaze seems set on the long distances of her home country. A weaving loom made of metal pipe occupies the center of her living room. The kitchen has a large woodstove; assorted metal bowls and buckets are stacked neatly on shelves.

They have no refrigerator or electricity. Katherine and Eleanor haul water and heat with juniper wood. Groceries and laundry require a trip to Flagstaff, maybe once a week unless the river rises. Katherine shakes her head as she tells stories of getting stuck in quicksand during these trips.

She kindly agrees to let this garrulous, inquisitive Anglo address her as Shima. It means “my mom,” say her other daughter, Polly, and friend Phyllis Hogan. Phyllis, owner of an herbal shop in Flagstaff and founder of the Arizona Ethnobotanical Research Association, began learning sprigs of knowledge from “Grandma” Peshlakai about traditional Navajo plant uses. A trip to the Peshlakai home in late April It means waiting until the spring runoff in the Little Colorado has slackened enough to allow vehicles to splash through the chocolate-muddy water at Black Falls. A maze of dirt roads leads through the striped hills of the Painted Desert, past an old “male” hogan.

Following Navajo custom, one of the first things to do with visitors is to share a meal. Besides, Katherine and Eleanor have been up for hours herding cattle and tending sheep, and they're hungry. After a feast of frybread, chiles, chicken and watermelon, Katherine announces that the wild onions, tl'ohchin, are ready to harvest.

The sparse green sprouts emerge from cracked ground in the gathering place out in a stark, wind-cleansed part of the desert. In fulltiered skirt and velvet blouse, Katherine bends at the waist, stabs a curved hay-baling hook cleanly into the dirt around the plant's base, carefully grasps the entire plant, then pulls it out and places it in a basket.

She walks slowly, surveying the ground for more. It's best to get them before they flower, she advises, and important to know the difference between the two kinds of onions: the one you can eat, “the other one is poisonous.” She can tell the edible onion by the smell, the round leaves and the arrangement of the bulb. When the sheep eat them “you can smell it on their breath when they come home.” Katherine and Eleanor also glean a small saltbush, the one whose leaves have “ears.” Eleanor even gathers fresh young tumbleweeds. “They taste a little greasy,” she says, but eaten like spinach they're good.

Later, back around the kitchen table, Katherine recounts the plants she uses to dye wool. She ties stems of rabbitbrush together with yucca, pounds them, then cooks them in a big pot of water. Stir in some salt, drain off the liquid and the wool turns a deep yellow or gray color. Walnuts yield a brown; Katherine says she gets them from trees up on a mesa or from a relative at Canyon Diablo. Other plants are put to different uses: The wood of Apache plume makes weaving tools, and juniper ashes get mixed into cornmeal mush.Daughter Polly echoes her mother's statement: Plants “were an everyday living thing” that she learned about, just as she did weaving and making frybread. It is knowledge passed down from her Shima by word and by deed-wisdom worth nurturing and saving.