Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty

Navajos, Hózho, and Track Work By Jay Youngdahl

Utah State University Press

Copyright © 2011 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-853-4

Contents

Foreword, Michael D. Jackson………………………………………………………..viiiPreface…………………………………………………………………………..xiIntroduction………………………………………………………………………1One: Life on the Tracks…………………………………………………………….27Two: Religion on the Rez……………………………………………………………44Three: A Visit with a Medicine Man…………………………………………………..70Four: Adversaries and Advocates……………………………………………………..82Five: How Did Navajo Men Come to Work for the Railroads?……………………………….103Six: Railroads, Trading Posts, and a Fatal Challenge to the RRB’s System…………………123Seven: In the Workers’ Words………………………………………………………..144Eight: Anchoring and Adaptability, Fixed yet Fluid…………………………………….163Afterword…………………………………………………………………………173Selected Bibliography………………………………………………………………174Index…………………………………………………………………………….181

Chapter One

Life on the Tracks

Tóhajiilee, New Mexico

Meeting Jerry Sandoval

On a cold, sunny day in late December, I struggled to guide our truck through the mud on the roads of the Navajo Nation. With my two Navajo friends and translators, Julie and Zina Benally, my wife and I were on our way to visit a retired railroad worker, Jerry Sandoval. Jerry lived with his son at the end of a road on a beautiful small mesa overlooking the main settlement of Tóhajiilee, New Mexico, a portion of the Navajo Nation located southeast of the main body of their land. Spanish records show contact with the descendants of this Cañoncito group of Navajo people as far back as 1583, as they were some of the Navajos living closest to the Spanish settlements. This would suggest that ancestors of the present-day residents have certainly lived on this land since long before the Spanish intrusion.

However, according to legend, the actual community of Tóhajiilee was founded when the Navajos returned from Fort Sumner on the Bosque Redondo Reservation, where they had been forcibly sent in 1868.1 On the walk back, a group of Navajos encountered a large hole that contained a spring. But the hole, it seems, was too deep for anyone to climb down to get the water. So, as the story was related by Charley Sandoval, a resident of the town:

The Diné used to carry with them some sort of tóshjee‘ (water jug). They tied a braided, narrow yucca leaf rope to a jug to bring up water with; but the jug would not sink in the water. It just floated on top. So the Diné tied a stone to the bottom of the jug to make it sink down. That is how they fished out their water. And that’s the reason this place is called Tóhajiilee.

The community is now a part of the “checkerboard” section of the Navajo Nation and is separated from the “big rez” by miles of government and private, non-Navajo-owned land. Today, however, there is no question that Tóhajiilee is a secure section of the Navajo Nation. Ronald Kurtz, who studied the ethnohistory of the area, found a complicated overlapping relationship over time between this group of Navajos, the Spanish, other Native American groups, and Navajos living in other areas. This complexity is partially reflected in the Spanish surnames of many of the men I met.

In meeting, legally representing, and interviewing Navajo railroad workers, I had found that among them, as with all people who constitute a community, there were many similarities as well as differences. Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton were correct when they wrote in The Navajo that “the Navaho way of life may be learned only by knowing individual Navajos; conversely, Navaho personality may be fully understood only insofar as it is seen in relation to this life-way and to other factors in the environment in the widest sense.” Jerry Sandoval’s is a representative story.

On the frigid day of our visit to Jerry, the community of Tóhajiilee had just seen the biggest snowstorm in years. While the sun shone brightly, the melting of the snow made the byways in this area nearly impassable. To our chagrin, we fishtailed to and fro on the sloppy roads as we drove out to Tóhajiilee. We met Jerry and his son at the small windswept compound where their home adjoins those of several close relatives. Jerry’s house was surrounded by extraordinary vistas in all directions, featuring multihued mesas, snowy mountains, and dark volcanic plugs piercing the desert landscape. We drove onto Jerry’s property and sat in the car. Jerry’s three menacing, though thankfully chained, dogs barked frantically. Finally, the dogs calmed down a bit and Julie knocked at Jerry’s door. He motioned us in.

Entering Jerry’s house, we encountered a wall festooned with drawings from his son, evidently made at school, which expressed the son’s affection for Jerry. Sitting in his cozy living room, we made small talk as I took out my tape recorder and pad. When I began to ask questions, Jerry, a pleasant, stocky man in his forties, told us that he had gone to work for the Missouri Pacific Railroad in 1978. The MoPac Railroad, as it was known, is now part of the Union Pacific through merger.

Wage labor and the Navajo

Jerry’s story provides an opportune place for a short review of the history of Navajo wage labor, which, as with that of other native peoples, has generally been overlooked by American society. As Alice Littlefield and Martha C. Knack write in their book Native Americans and Wage Labor, “Studies of North American Indian economic life have largely ignored the participation of indigenous people in wage labor, even though for over a century such participation has often been essential for the survival of Native individuals and communities.”

This lack of interest has been especially harmful, because although Navajos are separate in many important ways from the dominant culture that surrounds them, in considering their economic life it is their commonality with other workers that should be stressed, not their difference. As railroad workers, they operated in basically the same environment as railroad workers in other parts of the country. Littlefield and Knack argue that “these professional biases toward the past, coupled with the habit of studying the Indian community as separate from the non-Indian, have all too often led to constructions that treat Native life as an isolate. Such theories are too narrow to account for the phenomenon of Indian wage labor, which of historical necessity has existed along the contact zone between Indian and non-Indian communities and culture.” Further complicating the area, many sympathetic scholars often romanticize the conditions faced by the Navajo and the ways in which they have reacted.

Any visitor to this beautiful and meaningful area of the Navajo Nation can see the large degree to which Navajo people are part of the economic as well as the natural landscape. Thus, Navajo railroad work was important for both the Navajo Nation and for the economies of the mountain and desert West. A contemporary historian of Native American labor in the West, Colleen O’Neill, argues that Navajo wage earners were “significant actors who shaped the regional dynamics of U.S. economic development.” Today, Navajo people are involved in all aspects of the regional economy. They have made up the bulk of workers in some industries such as mining and power production and were important to the development of farming in the Southwest and West. O’Neill argues that when and how “Native Americans participate in the market economy [of the American West], as producers and as wage workers, largely defined the terms of local economic conditions.” But, as O’Neill has recognized, this subject area is complex, because to understand “indigenous people’s experience with wage work, we need to think about questions not often addressed by labor historians.”

While the major upsurge in Navajo railroad work occurred after World War II, their work on the railroad is over 125 years old, dating from the beginning of the intrusion of railroad tracks into the Southwest. After the tragic events of Bosque Redondo and the Long Walk, for many Navajo the railroad was their next point of large-scale contact with American society: thus railroad work presented new opportunities as well as obstacles through which they had to navigate.

The work of railroad trackmen

Railroad surveyors came through the southern portion of the Navajo Reservation as early as 1876. Employing several hundred Navajo trackmen for the manual labor of laying the tracks, the Santa Fe Railroad ran continuously from New Mexico to the Pacific by the dawn of the twentieth century. Historian James Ducker reports that for a period around 1900, the Santa Fe Railroad brought in Japanese workers, who were paid less than a dollar a day, to displace the “higher paid” Indian workers. This substitution, however, did not last.

As the tracks have continued their advance through the unmarred deserts and mountains of the Southwest, Navajo men have ventured far from their land in greater and greater numbers to work for the railroads. And today, as they have for the past century, Navajo workers make up a large percentage of those who man many western railroad track gangs. Numerous gangs are completely staffed by Navajo workers except for the foremen and higher management. In his meticulous ethnographic study of the Navajo community of Shónto, Arizona, William Adams reported that in 1955 the combination of wages and unemployment compensation from the railroads and the Railroad Retirement Board made up over half of the total income of this Navajo community. For the Navajo Nation as a whole at the time, railroad work was the “single most important source of income for Navajos, accounting for almost one-third of their total income.”

When Lorraine Turner Ruffing, of the American Indian Policy Review Commission, returned to Shónto in 1971 carrying Adams’s original data with her, she found that to survive, “Shónto Navajos were forced either to combine subsistence activities with local temporary wage work or to leave the reservation.” She observed that many individuals worked for the railroad year after year, constituting a “long-established and well-known work gang who were accustomed to working together.”

So today, as they have for many years, these Navajo men leave their homeland after the snow begins to melt in the spring and travel between the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi River in gangs of up to one hundred men, maintaining and replacing aging railroad tracks. On the northern rail route come the trains from the strip-mined hills of Wyoming, with coal to feed midwestern power plants. On the southern double-tracked route near the boundary of the Navajo Nation, trains made up of railroad cars specially produced to carry Japanese and Korean automobiles rumble night and day. They are interspersed with two-mile-long trains speeding along at sixty miles an hour and carrying containers from China and the East, often covered with the tagging of California graffiti artists, heading to Chicago or Kansas City. There the containers will be placed on trucks and sent off to the Costco, Target, or Wal-Mart Super Centers around the country. Empty, the containers will return west on trains headed to the coast, where they will be placed on giant ocean freighers to be shipped off for refilling in Asia.

Often these men work on steel gangs, laying long, dark gray strips of heavy rail which are often well over a hundred feet long. After the rail has been laid, huge quantities of granite are poured on the track to create a solid base. As part of the ballast gang, the men doing this job must walk ghostlike along the sides of slowly moving trains, intermittently pulling levers on the ballast cars to emit loads of rock on the track and enveloping themselves in clouds of silica dust as the rocks fall. Others ride and walk behind, tamping down the ballast and securing the rail and the bed. As part of the process, rail anchors are installed, tools which are “designed to eliminate creepage of track by providing a large bearing surface against the rail base and tie.” The anchors hold the tracks in place and keep the trains on the track as they constantly rumble over the steel rails. When they are complete, the tracks can absorb the hourly pounding of heavy locomotives and the vast array of railroad cars that they pull.

The trackmen’s work, while routinized, has not benefited from the kinds of safety methods and equipment that have come into use in American factories in the last thirty years. Track work is still performed much as it was well over one hundred years ago and remains the most difficult work on the railroad. What a historian for the union of track workers, William Haber, wrote nearly fifty years ago, remains true today:

The work of the maintenance of way man is hazardous. In addition to the ordinary dangers that beset the worker who uses tools and machines, he must often work in high places, on bridges, trestles, and structures. And usually his work is done under the hazards of train traffic, on the main lines where he must keep a sharp lookout for trains or in busy railroad yards where the switching of cars is constantly going on.

Today, the increased use of machinery allows greater productivity but is no guarantee of safety. In just one recent gruesome example, newspapers reported on a disaster involving a maintenance train in northern California on November 9, 2006, in which two men were killed and six badly injured.

For years the relationship between the railroads and their Navajo workers has been a contentious one in which the profit motive of the railroads has received preference over the human needs of the Navajo. Even industry-friendly government officials have long recognized this fact. In 1947 F. H. Stapleton, the regional director of the Railroad Retirement Board (RRB), the government agency responsible for pension, sickness, and unemployment insurance benefits for railroad workers, wrote another RRB official: “There are several hundred Indians on the reservation who are eligible for sickness insurance benefits but no claims have yet been filed. Many of these Indians have been injured on the job and the railroads passed them back to the reservation on the request of the Indian and, as far as I know, in very few instances made any settlement with the Indian for the injury incurred.” The story of the relationship of these workers to the Railroad Retirement Board is detailed in succeeding chapters.

According to a 2006 article in the Navajo Times, the newspaper of record for the Navajo Nation, others have noted that conditions have not changed much for these men. The article says that complaints of maltreatment of Navajo workers by the railroads have now been addressed to the Navajo Nation’s labor relations office but that those in the office have been forced to beg off because “the tribe lacks jurisdiction over labor disputes that occur outside its borders.” The present complaints mirror problems of the past—railroads giving Navajo workers the hardest jobs and being insensitive to their ceremonial needs. One advocate is quoted in the article as saying that “the reason why the companies like to hire Navajos is because they don’t complain and never speak up for themselves because they are afraid of losing their jobs.” Because they do not complain, they are assigned to the hardest jobs. He also claims that the railroads “deny requests from Navajos who want to take time off for ceremonies. As a result, a lot of young Navajos are being forced to make a choice—maintain their culture or lose it to keep their job.”

Navajo men have not been the only Native Americans to perform significant railroad work. In the Northwest today, Native Americans continue to perform track maintenance, especially for the Union Pacific Railroad. Scholars and others have noted significant historic railroad work by other Native Americans. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, members of the Laguna Pueblo began to work in large numbers for the AT&SF Railroad, in exchange for granting the AT&SF the right to build a line through their land. The Lagunas established colonies along the track that runs from Albuquerque to San Francisco, with large camps in Gallup, New Mexico; Winslow, Arizona; and Barstow and Richmond, California. The establishment of the colonies allowed families to accompany the men. Old railroad boxcars were used as housing. The men performed railroad track work and the women tended their homes, with some working in railroad hotels. The Lagunas were able to organize their colony in ways similar to the pueblo itself, arranging the boxcars to set up a central plaza in which feasts and other ceremonies could take place. It is likely that the ability of the Lagunas to incorporate their family life so closely into their work life allowed them to avoid some of the existential pain suffered by the Navajos. Laguna colonies faded out in the first half of the twentieth century, however, and the members of these colonies dispersed, some moving back to the pueblo in New Mexico, but many moving to large towns, such as Albuquerque. In the Southwest, only the Navajos have maintained their constant large-scale connection to the railroad.

(Continues…)

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