The Great Stories: Mid to Late 1920s
- It's the winter, and Chester is sitting around the fire with his family, listening to Father and Grandmother tell stories.
- His dad is talking about the origins of the Diné people (another name for the Navajo people), and how way, way back in time the Holy People had provided four mountains to protect them.
- Then Chester's grandmother picks up the thread of the story. She talks about how at the dawn of creation, four Navajo words were spoken: light, earth, water and air. With these words the sun, the earth, the oceans, and the air appeared.
- Grandmother says that the first Diné entered into the world from three underworlds. Coyote, the trickster, helped First Man and First Woman to fling the stars into the heavens.
- But then monsters started showing up and going after the Diné.
- Then Changing Woman married the Sun. She had two twin sons with daddy Sun. Daddy Sun gave his boys lightening bolts as weapons against the monsters.
- The twins aimed their lightening bolts at the monsters and killed them. The monsters turned into stone.
- Chester's grandfather talks about the hard times that the Diné went through after the arrival of the Spanish and other European settlers in America. They popped up and shoved the Diné and other tribes into smaller territories.
- Now Grandmother tells the story of the Long Walk. It starts with the Diné's fight against the white settlers who were trying to steal their land.
- One jerk-faced white man, called Kit Carson, burned Navajo crops and killed Navajo livestock, and then told the Navajo to surrender and gather together at Fort Defiance in Arizona.
- Grandmother's mother (Chester's great-grandmother), who was alive at the time, was forced, along with other Navajo, to walk from Fort Defiance to Fort Sumner in New Mexico. That's three hundred and fifty miles on foot.
- Hundreds of Navajo died on the Long Walk. The few who made it to Fort Sumner were locked up in something like a concentration camp, along with members of the Apache Nation. There were too many people kept together, the soil was bad so no one could grow food, the water was bad, and lots of people got sick.
- Grandmother says how this terrible time in Navajo history is remembered as the Long Walk. Eventually, the Navajo were allowed to leave Fort Sumner, and some moved onto the Navajo Reservation, while others settled on land near the reservation. Chester's family was among those that settled near the reservation in the area known as the Checkerboard.