CHRONICLE

What It Means to Be Navajo and Cowboy

Claudeen Arthur keeps the culture alive by turning brandings into a week-long immersion courses for her grandkids.
— BY JO BAEZA

Claudeen Bates Arthur has been called “the most powerful woman in the Navajo Nation.” She has been the Navajo attorney general, as well as the tribe’s legislative counsel, and she is presently the legal director of the largest Indian legal service in the United States. Despite all that, Arthur prefers to think of herself as “a Navajo Grandma,” a position she takes very seriously.

Every year for the past three years, she has taken a week out of her stressful schedule to teach the family’s 7- to 11-year-olds what it means to be a Navajo and a cowboy. The family refers to this rigorous basic training as “Grandma Claudeen’s Cowboy Camp.” In these fast-changing times, she is concerned about her grandchildren losing a sense of their heritage. “I think your family and extended family tell you what you are and who you are. I think if you eat pork and beans out of a can in a tent with your grandfather, if you go out and round up cattle with your father and grandfather, you know who you are and where you come from.”

“I don’t think I’m exceptional,” she said. “I think I was blessed with a good family who taught me how to work and how to live and how to treat other people. “As children, we climbed rocks, rode horses and did ranch chores. We didn’t have TV, so we didn’t have any desire for all the material things kids want today because of the mass media advertising. We took trips to Carlsbad Caverns and to California to see the ocean. I read a lot.” The three Bates girls were expected to hold up their end of the work during roundup and branding on their father’s purebred Hereford cow/calf operation in the Four Corners area.

“My childhood was happy, very straightforward,” Arthur said. “My family values were absolutely black and white. My dad’s philosophy of life was, ‘If something needs to be done, you do it. If it’s hard, you work harder. If something goes wrong, you figure out what it was and try to make it right.’ “ One of her earliest memories is of riding with her father in a pickup truck, pulling two horses in a horse trailer in a rainstorm. “When we got to a flat we had to cross to get home, the whole place was flooded. The truck sank to the axles. We didn’t have a winch or a tow truck. My father unloaded the horses, tied them to the truck and pulled it out. That’s what my father taught us,” she said.

Determined to pass that work ethic on, the one-time Methodist mission schoolteacher sees to it that all the grandchildren get a taste of cowboy life, as well as fishing, camping, and hiking. They come with their parents from as far away as Chicago to Grandma Claudeen’s home near Window Rock, Ariz., on the Sunday before her brother, Lorenzo, brands calves. “They can’t come until they’re seven,” she said. “Before that they cry, they get lonesome, and they can’t change their own clothes.” There are no malls, no video games, no television. The kids help with chores, ride horses, and play together. In Navajo tradition, cousins are as close as brothers and sisters.

As Arthur’s daughter, Lydelle Davies, said, “My mother provides them with a time to be together and know each other as a family. My cousins are as close to me as brothers and sisters. When I found out that some of my Anglo friends didn’t know their cousins, it was a concept I couldn’t even grasp.” Arthur said, “We want them to know each other, to know that they have a responsibility to each other, but they also need to know that part of who we are is, we do cows.” At branding time, everyone is involved. The men gather the cattle, pen them and separate the cows and calves. Arthur’s brother, Lorenzo, ropes; Todd and Chris Arthur and Edward Davies flank the calves, brand, and castrate, while the kids help hold the ropes and move the cattle around in the corrals.

Lydelle vaccinates; Arthur eartags them. Some days the crew brands as many as 80 calves the old way, without chutes. When the cows and calves are turned out, everyone is ready for barbecued ribs cooked by Grandma Claudeen over an open campfire. By the end of Grandma Claudeen’s Cowboy Camp, the kids have learned to ride, to work together, and to depend on one another. “They learn not only the cowboy work,” Arthur said. “They learn the clans, the traditions, the language.” She is also a lawyer and a pragmatist. “As much as we’d like to romanticize who we are and where we came from, we have to live in the real world and teach our grandchildren to make the tough decisions that will ensure their future,” she said.
— AC

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