Anna Redsand

First published on this site in December, 2015. Memories of Christmas at Teec Nos Pos, deep in Dinétah, the Navajo Nation, are probably from several Christmases, but they've rolled together to become memories of a single Christmas when I was somewhere between the ages of 6-8.

When I was six, I attended the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) school on the hill above the mission at Teec Nos Pos. That was where I learned the Christmas song “Up on the Rooftop” with my Navajo classmates. I learned it in Dummitawry English, and that’s how I still sing it to myself around the house these days. “Gib en a dolly dat laffin’ an’ cryin’, One dat openin’ and closin’ his eye.” And so on. My mother tried to correct me when I came home singing it, but her corrections, as with so many attempts to correct my Nava-glish, just sounded wrong. And I was stubborn. After all, I’d learned it in school.

 Read More 

This essay was first published a few winters ago in the Gallup Independent in very similar form.

On the magnificent golden butte that overlooks the ruins of Chaco Canyon, ancient astronomers, ancestors of the Pueblo peoples, created a massive solar calendar. They were not only astronomers, they had among them highly talented engineers that were able to place three enormous slices of sandstone in perfect alignment so that, as Earth revolves around the sun, sunlight strikes a spiral carved on the foremost rock in targeted locations. It happens on the fall and spring equinoxes and on the summer and winter solstices. 
 
Long before I knew about this calendar, I imagined us little humans on our little clod of Earth moving inward and outward on a spiral as we moved away from the light of the sun on the summer solstice and toward the sun on the winter solstice. I didn't envision the spiral and the light in the configuration created by the Chaco astronomers; for some odd reason, I imagined our winter movement toward the light as if we found ourselves at the very center of a great inner ear, the spiral called the cochlea, moving outward from the darkness into the glorious light. And at the time of longest light—summer solstice—strange as it seemed, we moved along the spiral toward the darkness once again.
 
Important things happen in the dark. We sleep, and our bodies and minds are restored by an unseen magic. In sleep we dream and process daytime problems that have gone unsettled, sometimes for years. In the darkness plants germinate before they reach into the light. Bears hibernate, owls hunt, storytellers entertain us and move us in new directions. The lights we humans create—candles, lanterns, lamps—glow, visible in the dark.
 
Important things also happen in the light. We move our bodies. We do work. We create. Plants synthesize the sun's energy. Daytime animals move about. We rejoice in the light. We long for the light during the darkness of winter, for it is not only the nights that are dark but also, often, the days. Thus, people the world over celebrate the knowledge that, on whichever hemisphere we find ourselves in the season we call winter, our half of the Earth is once again returning to the light.
 
Just now, it is the northern hemisphere that tilts and returns to the light, beginning on the winter solstice, which will be on December 21 this year. On that day, I will again find myself in the tiny town of Elk Horn, Iowa, where my daughter works at the Museum of Danish America. Some years, the museum celebrates our return to the light with a huge evening bonfire. In the Jewish tradition, there is a festival of lights, Hanukkah, which has just passed. During Kwanzaa, a celebration of African American culture held in the dark of winter, people light a candle every night for seven nights, and each night they teach a different life principle. The Christian Church chose to celebrate the birth of Jesus at this time of year rather than in the spring, when scholars say he was actually born, in order to celebrate a great light come into the world. We humans seem to naturally want to cheer ourselves through the remaining darkness of winter, reminding ourselves that brighter days are coming.
 
Speaking to his followers, Jesus once said that we—you and I—are meant to be the light of the world. I often buy tea from a company that prints a message on the tags. My favorite one reads, "Live light. Travel light. Spread the light. Be the light." From a tea tag—a teaching about ways that you and I can become "the light of the world."
 
What would it mean to live light and travel light? To not have so much stuff, not be burdened by material things. To not use more of the Earth's resources than we need. To think before driving off somewhere, asking if we really must use up that gas and add to our carbon footprint. To be generous, maybe even until it pinches a bit. To be grateful for all things.
 
What does it mean to spread the light, to be the light? To let our first response be yes rather than no. To share good news. To listen—the greatest gift of all. To love, because love is what makes people blossom. To offer an experience if it might help and if it's wanted.
 
As the Earth turns toward the sun, let us, "Live light. Travel light. Spread the light. Be the light."

For the past several years I've joined the Read Harder Challenge from Book Riot. The challenge lists 24 categories to read from over the year, and readers choose the books they'll read to fit the categories. Last year was the first year I completed the challenge, not because I didn't read that many books; I usually read about six times that many over the course of a year. The challenge is meant to stretch readers––get us reading outside our comfort zones, and I must confess that in other years I didn't want to get stretched that far. One category last year was to pick a category from a previous year, and I picked number 4 from 2022: Read a book in any genre by a POC that's about joy and not trauma. There couldn't have been a better pick than Ross Gay's book of essays, Inciting Joy.
 
My book club of two, which meets every Monday afternoon to discuss books mostly about social justice and racism, has one chapter left in our current book, We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina Love, who teaches at Columbia University, where she's been instrumental in establishing abolitionist teaching in schools. Love says abolitionist teaching is 'built on the creativity, imagination, boldness, ingenuity, and rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists to demand and fight for an education system where all students are thriving, not simply surviving." She shares some wonderfully triumphal examples from the early abolitionists and from contemporary co-conspirators.
 
Some weeks the book has been a really hard read, as it calls on the White reader, to do the necessary work to build a foundation for conspiring to radically change the educational industrial complex, which is really about changing US society. This past Monday in our club meeting, Janet kept talking me down (or maybe it was up) from my despair over ever being able to get it right, over the violence (not only physical) against each other that humans engage in over and over again, seemingly without hope that we'll ever change. Tuesday, I was still in a major funk. Wednesday, with gentle self-coaxing, I began to come out of it.
 
One thing I love in this book is Love's repeated emphasis on the necessity for teachers to recognize and nurture joy in their students. She refers to it as "Black joy;" in other places she calls people of color "dark folx," and that led me to call this post, not "Black Joy," but "Dark Joy." Dark joy is joy that "originates in resistance, joy that is discovered in making a way out of no way, joy that is uncovered when you know how to love yourself and others, joy that comes from releasing pain, joy that is generated in music and art that puts words and/or images to your life's greatest challenges and pleasures, and joy in teaching from a place of resistance, agitation, purpose, justice, love, and mattering."
 
The urging that we must see and respond to dark resilience, dark joy, dark creativity, is what gives me hope, moves me to be part of the struggle for justice in ways that I can. It helps me think about times in my own work with dark youngsters when I called on their capacity for joy. It also reminds me of so many more times I could have and didn't and need to forgive myself for missing and carry on.
 
My choice of image on this page, exemplifies dark joy to me. My painter and poet friend Gloria, who is Diné, has fought for justice all her life, and she has done it with humor and creativity. If you don't recognize it, her End of the Trail is a parody of the 1894 sculpture of that name by James Earle Fraser, which has become almost kitsch in its popularity. Fraser intended it as a commentary on the travesty settler colonialism and the US government wreaked on Native people. But it has also been interpreted as a statement that Indigenous people were destined to die out. Jeffrey Gibson, a sculptor of Native heritage said in an interview, "I saw [End of the Trail] as an image of a shamed, defeated Indian. It always made me feel bad about myself, and I wondered if this was really how the rest of the world viewed us, as failures." As Ross Gay does in so much of his writing, Gloria has embodied "dark joy" in her satire, resisting projections of hopelessness with strength and humor, imagination, boldness and a rebellious spirit. She has given me and many others pause to both laugh and take her message seriously.
 
If you're not familiar with the original sculpture, you can find many images of it online.

…in the aftermath of violent histories, telling stories and listening to stories are acts of peace. ~ Connie Braun, Silentium

All day long these children and I
trade stories
we weave colors and textures
we write together in journals
we tell what it is all about
we trade love for love
I hold their tears

I am the story basket
and in me the stories change
color and shape and sound
they take on rhythm
drum beats

 Read More