THE MAN WHO SITS ON THE TREASURE

If desire could overpower DNA, Bruce Burnham would be a Navajo. A fourth-generation Indian trader, he’s been the man behind the counter at R.B. Burnham & Company Trading Post to several generations. He worked his way up from the white teenager fascinated with Navajo culture, allowed into Navajo men’s card games to lose money and, eventually, into a position of esteem and influence.

“You can’t become Navajo,” he admits, “but I’m an in-law to the whole tribe.”

His wife is Navajo, and because the culture is matriarchal, so are his children. He speaks Navajo to the old women wearing velvet skirts, headscarves and running shoes who come to the trading post to do business. When he talks about Kit Carson, the Long Walk of the Navajos to a relocation camp, and their joy at seeing their homeland again, it’s clear he views history from the tribe’s point of view. Spry and genial, with a magnificent moustache and an affable frontier-style manner, he leads visitors through the store, which evokes trading posts of a century ago. It’s not filled with tourist-driven curios. Instead, skeins of wool, bags of flour and oil lamps line the shelves. There’s a pile of dark woolly pelts, which he identifies as buffalo hides.

“Navajo tradition is that if you have a buffalo hide in your home, you’ll never be hungry,” Burnham says. Leading the way to the wood stove in the back room, he asks jokingly if anyone wants to sit on a buffalo hide “and pretend to be wealthy.” Maybe he’s only half-joking. He’s aware that tourists take strange notions about Indians. On the wall is a photo of his wife and two daughters in beaded Northern Plains Indian dresses, from a time when they were traveling and selling, and fulfilling the Bilag ‘aana (white people) expectation of what “real Indians” would wear.

Burnham might be Anglo, but his soul is not. Balanced between the white and Navajo cultures, he can interpret one to the other. He speaks of roots going deep into your homeland.

“That’s Navajo, to feel connected to the land. Dii’eh shishi k’eyah means ‘sense of place.’ There’s a sense of belonging; a Navajo buries the child’s umbilical cord in the corner of the sheep corral.”
 

Not everyone who drives through Sanders, Arizona, would see what resonates so strongly with Burnham about this place. At the junction of Interstate 40 and U.S. Route 191, it’s quintessential Navajoland — slightly variegated tones of brown stretch in all directions, with what looks like a watercolor smudge of sage indicating where a spring or seep keeps a little vegetation alive. Mobile homes or small compounds of cinder block houses host pickup trucks parked at angles against a vast sky with a few fledgling clouds. Quiet and space are abundant; commerce and company are not.

Burnham came here in 1971 in a pickup carrying all his goods and his wife. She was 15-year-old Virginia Kascoli Begay, fresh from being educated in Anglo schools when he first laid eyes on her. (This is surprising, considering that with six daughters and one son, Virginia’s mother almost never let them go anywhere, probably aware of the challenge of keeping her eye on that many at once.)

After five years, Bruce and Virginia married. Burnham speaks almost reverently of the medicine man blessing the corn pollen used in the traditional ceremony after arrangements had been made. He adds with relish that the traditional bride price was negotiated by his boss. “I paid a cow, a concho belt and a new car for her.”

Virginia describes her bewilderment at being put on a bus as a small child to go to an unfamiliar school. Children were dragged by the hair, or had their mouths washed out with soap for speaking the only language they knew.

“No one from home was with me. We didn’t even know what Christmas was. The dorm attendants were Navajo, and the African-American teachers treated us better than our own people did [at the school]. One teacher would hold us on her lap — she understood homesick children.”

However difficult those years might have been, they didn’t damage Virginia’s ability to love and nurture. Burnham describes his wife’s nature with a story:

“When most of us see a baby, the first thing we do is start talking and cooing. But the first thing a traditional Navajo does is ask, ‘Has your baby laughed yet?’ Because whoever makes the baby laugh first has to give the party. You put rock salt in the baby’s hand to bless it, and then some goes on each plate. This means the baby will always be generous. Virginia doesn’t ask if a baby has laughed. She always throws the party.”

Burnham adds that the worst thing about Navajo children being sent away to government boarding schools in the mid-1900s is that now, every generation speaks English.

“We’re one generation away from losing the language. They say as the language goes, so goes the culture,” he says. “It used to be we spoke English, but since our grandparents spoke only Navajo, we still spoke it at home. Now the grandmothers speak English.”

He says that Native Americans are disappearing into what he calls “a powwow culture.”

“As a tribe, you want to hold on to your Indian-ness. Tribes come together at powwows, and the only common denominator they have is English. If you listen to a chant, which is universal, half the time the words being sung are in English, like, ‘Watch the fat man jump the fence.’ We are right on the edge of losing our culture.”

Burnham’s daughter, Sheri, is raising her children in a hybrid culture. She buried their umbilical cords to connect them to home, but they also play soccer in Gallup. Her husband, much admired among the Navajos because he’s a railroad engineer, embraces his wife’s heritage. Sheri has an accounting business and a degree in communication, and she’s also the Burnham offspring stepping into the family business.

Bruce and Virginia’s cultures are merged in their daughter. The three of them have established a useful dynamic — Sheri and Bruce both speak up rapidly and easily, with Virginia occasionally amending or interpreting something for an outsider. The couple’s parental pride in Sheri is palpable, although, like most offspring, she seems unaware of it. The young woman who once stood on a soda crate to ring up orders as a little girl now has a crib for her own son in the back room.

“This has been our life,” Sheri says. A combination of her mother’s petite dark-haired looks and her father’s outgoing manner, Sheri has a direct gaze and a definite way of speaking. She recalls selling piñon nuts that Navajos would bring in to trade for goods.

“We’d clean them, roast them, salt them and sell them at school,” she says. “I remember being dropped off with a 25-pound bag of nuts for teachers. Then I’d come home and stock shelves. When my parents were making jewelry, it was our job to put hot wax on the backs of the stones and put sticks on them. My sister stuck turquoise up her nose instead of beans. We played with pawn the way other children played house.”

Sheri’s siblings are credits to their parents: Dionne works in advertising in Houston; Patrick and his wife run a studio specializing in Native American dance in Gallup; Austin now lives and works in Albuquerque. Burnham says he always expected more of Sheri than his other children in terms of the business, because they worked so well together. Virginia smiles.

“My husband sent her on a selling trip when she was 17, pulling a trailer with a quarter-million dollars’ worth of Indian art in it,” she says. “He handed her a schedule.”
 

Sheri winces at the memory of her first trip. “That was a baptism by fire,” she says. “I’d fractured my ankle playing softball the night before I left, but I told my folks it wasn’t broken, and I went to Portland, Oakland, San Francisco, Pasadena and some other places in Texas. I could barely walk when I got home.”

Burnham’s great-grandfather was an intrepid Mormon who used his trade routes between the towns his wives lived in to support the various families. He was killed when one of his wagons rolled. Burnham’s grandfather was 13 when he became the man of the house. Sheri grew up on these stories, and the message was clear: In this family, you don’t whine and you don’t make excuses. You step up and get it done. And you take care of your community.

This also means selling some products most tourist-centered trading posts do not. “Like cotton rope,” Sheri says, getting into the spirit. “A certain brand of cigarettes only one customer buys. A kind of birdseed for another. Lamp wicks. We have evaporative cooler pumps, lamb nipples, sheep paint.” (Clearly, the last falls into the category of, “If you have to ask, you don’t need it.”)

The Burnham trading post takes pawn to give cash or credit to customers, and if it’s not claimed in time, the goods can be sold again as dead pawn. But while some traders profit from these deals, Burnham’s longtime customers know he can be counted on to keep their possessions safe for them.

“One woman always brings in the same basket, mainly to keep her children from selling it,” he says. “I always ask to buy it, but she’s had it since her kinaalda — her coming-of-age ceremony. She’ll never sell. I think she leaves it with me so her children don’t walk away with it.”

Burnham is proud of his latest way to put money in the hands of his people — auctions. He and Sheri went to auctioneer school and now sell rugs made by Navajo weavers at the Smoki Museum in Prescott, at Hubbell Trading Post and other nonprofit venues. He gets animated talking about how much weavers can make from the frequent auctions, and how it helps the nonprofits he works with. This is the new direction Burnham is taking. There’s a mixture of joke and truth in his statement that it’s a good thing Sheri is coming in, because in his fifth decade as a trader, he’s getting to a point where he’s bad for the family business.

“Your first 10 years, you do the stocking and sweeping up,” he says. “No one talks to you; no one trusts you. Your second decade, you’re learning how to deal with people — like when to tell a man you don’t have any jeans his size because you know he can’t afford them. He knows you know, and you’re looking out for him. By your third decade, you’re selling to the children of the children you sold to when you started. They trust you. The women come, and take both your hands in theirs to ask you something, and you can’t turn them down.

“Yesterday, Virginia gave me $120 before I left the house, and by the time I got to work, it was gone,” he says.

The Navajo term for Indian trader is Naalye’he’ ya’ sida’hi, which translates to “the man who sits on the treasure.” The trader is the man who sits on the treasure — not as a tight-fisted old bugger, but keeping it safe, protecting it. So when people need their share, they know he has it for them.

It’s clear Burnham values being of service more than he values turning a profit. This is evidenced by the fact that the trading post maintains the tradition of donating a Pendleton blanket or shawl each time there’s a death among his customers.

“I give out 40 or 50 Pendletons for burial blankets every year,” he says. “In Navajo, that’s the most unselfish act, to give to a person who doesn’t have the option of giving back. You love their loved ones. Whatever they need.

“A girl whose mother worked for me, she calls me ‘father.’ It’s a special privilege for me. I get sentimental. I can see my position here.” He pauses, shakes his head. “Why didn’t I get smarter sooner?” Burnham clearly sees that the treasure he sits on has little to do with pawn jewelry and much to do with the trust of other people.

Trading posts like Burnham’s have dwindled from more than a hundred to a handful. Traditions are vanishing. But by creating the auction business, Burnham keeps his family in the business of helping the community prosper. This is his gift to the Diné, “The People.”

And his gift to his daughter might require a change in wording so that in the future, the Indian Trader will be “the person who sits on the treasure.” In Sanders, for at least one more generation, that person will be a Burnham.