Chindee -- and thoughts about a not distant enough relative

Like most people, I don't like to be incarcerated in hospitals.  My first experience with that was when I was 19.  There've been a few other instances, mostly via injuries and most recently, of course, the Lupus War.

But I have an anti-hospital strain, or at least a great wariness, that most people in this country don't have -- unless they're Navajo.  I grew up in and around the Dine' country, and its powerful taboo -- Chindee -- resides in my psyche.  Basically, that involves avoidance, if at all possible, of the dead and their places.  On the other hand, from our Wabanaki strains [very closely related Abenaki nations], our family does have a great affinity for friendly spirits.  I mean that literally.  But we do carry Chindee on hospitals.

When I was in my mid-teens, I was with my parents on one of many trips into the Navajo country.  On this one, we stopped at the Navajo capital of Window Rock and then at Fort Defiance.  That was the end of any paved roads -- roads generally were scarce on the vast reservation in those days -- and still are pretty much.  We left Defiance for Chinle [Chin-lee], then at least three hours hence on a very poor road,  stopping briefly at Ganado.  There, the Presbyterian church had sponsored a new hospital, run by a Dr Clarence Salisbury.  There were few Navajo people in and around the place.  Dr Salisbury was at least vaguely aware of the traditional Navajo avoidance of hospitals and western medicine generally and, with difficulty, had recently persuaded a group of medicine men to visit his facility.  Things were somewhat OK for a time until one of the medicine men wandered into a room where human body parts were visibly pickled in alcohol.  The medicine men immediately left.  

[The road functionally ended at Chinle.  Many years later, my family and I came to Tsaile [Say-lee] Lake, not far north of Chinle in yellow pine and pinon country.  There was a paved road by then.  We were situated at Navajo Community College [now Dine' College] for several very pleasant and always challenging years.]

In time, the Ganado hospital -- and others, mainly government -- did draw Navajo clients.  But many still stay away. And Chindee, though fading somewhat -- somewhat -- still remains a powerful taboo with many Dine' people.

At the Portneuf Medical Center yesterday, as in other times, I thought about Chindee but also the name of Portneuf.  Joseph Portneuf, whose name graces not only the hospital, but a close by river and a couple of other small settings, could be termed a distant relative.  He was a St Francis Abenaki who married, early in the 19th century, a lady from the influential Abenaki family of Annance -- one of our major Native strains.  Like other St Francis Indians and many more Mohawks, Portneuf joined the Hudson's Bay Company and came into the Columbia and Snake river country.  He, much a company man, wound up on the edges of the large and very cohesive  Native fur hunting band -- mostly Mohawk but some Abenakis -- headed by our fierce and militant direct ancestor, John Gray [Ignace Hatchiorauquasha.]  Also in that intrepid band was another direct ancestor of ours, Joseph Annance, one of three well known brothers. The families of the fur hunters traveled with them on the trails -- and children born thereon were often listed in family records, and on the census many years later indeed, as "born in the Rocky Mountains."

At Bear Lake in 1825, not far south of Pocatello and in the Idaho/Utah border area, John Gray led a walkout/walkaway from the Hudson's Bay operation in that region which was headed by Peter Skene Ogden.  The issues involved HBC's various forms of discrimination where Natives were involved -- e.g., poor pay for beaver pelts, highly priced trade goods -- and what amounted to perennial debt to the Company and, functionally speaking, indentured servant status.  Virtually all of the Indians joined what could likely be called the first labor strike in the history of the American West.  And that certainly included our other direct ancestor, Joseph Annance.

But it didn't include Joseph Portneuf who stuck with Ogden.  And so, as Sam Friedman and I discussed it when, in 2005, he came to visit, Portneuf was a sc__b.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Well, he has the hospital and the river named for him, and a couple of other little places.  John Gray has Gray's Lake [a major wildlife preserve], Gray's River, Gray's Hole [deep valley], and some other things.  He, and his associates, also have a very secure and honorable place in the turbulent history of this vast region.  Among many other positive things, the job action of the Natives at Ogden's camp altered and reformed the whole pricing system in the Intermountain Western fur trade.
For more: http://hunterbear.org/GRAY%20LANDS%20AND%20GRAY%20GHOSTS.htm

Hunter Bear

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ 
and Ohkwari' 
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

See the Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm

For the new, just out (11/2011) and expanded/updated
edition of my "Organizer's Book," JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- 
with a new and substantial Introduction by me:
http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm

Personal Background Narrative (with many links):
http://hunterbear.org/narrative.htm