Monthly Archives: December 2021

Hi blogsters.

I promised yesterday I’d be telling you some more about Curtiss Cohoe, and I will.  But this morning I feel more inclined to tell you about his aging mother and aunt.  In his own way, Curtiss is a study in humanity, in human flaws and tragedy, challenges encountered and not-overcome.

His mom and aunt are studies in something human, too.  Something a person doesn’t encounter much these days.

About 30 miles south of Ramah, New Mexico, is a piece of Rez called Pine Hill.  It was established to be a trial, an experiment in the way a Rez might become self-sufficient.  They called it a self-determination Rez, and the governance and laws for it are somewhat different than you find on the greater Din’e Rez.

Curtiss’ ancestors had a fair amount of land on the Pine Hill Rez, and the family still does.  Curtiss’ share is 160 acres of hilly, juniper covered acreage, scenic and remote, with a thrown together house that’s seen better days.  His mom uses the land to graze her sheep, while she lives in another house down the hill a quarter-mile away, much better kept and with electricity.

The two ladies live together there, occasionally with other family members when they’re not staying in town, or in jail.  They occupy themselves with their sheep, with gathering the materials for dye, with preparing the wool they’ve sheared, and with weaving on an old-style loom, if they’re not gathering medicinal herbs or doing various Din’e religious activities.

These two women almost never go to town.  Most of what they need is, either right there, or someone brings it from town when they come back.  They haven’t much regard for town, disapprove of what happens to Navajos in town, what they do there.

The Din’e Rez extends from Pine Hill, on the south extremity, to southern Colorado, southeastern Utah, and west into Arizona, spackled here and there with private land.  There are 160,000 Navajo living on the Rez, maybe the largest Rez in the US, and a middling portion of those rarely go off the Rez.  That’s the reason a person only knowing them in town could get the impression Navajo are the sorriest people on the face of the planet.

Many of the ones who go to town are the sorriest the Din’e have to offer, which is the reason they’re in town.  Town, for the Din’e, is where the dregs drift, the tired, the hungry, the huddled masses.  For the most part, the one’s who’d make a better show of themselves don’t get in much.

This is something of a generalization, so it’s got a share of embedded untruth, but it’s nearer the truth than the impressions you get if you’re just seeing the ones who stagger up to you on the streets of Gallup and Farmington with a slept-in-the-gutter look to panhandle you.

I’ll tell you sometime about some of the evils out there, deep in the Rez.  They’re there, same as anywhere, though with a different style.

But today I wanted to tell you about Pine Hill and the Cohoe women, show you a rug they weaved from sheep they raised and sheared, dyed with dye they made from plants and crushed rocks. (Note from Jeanne: the rug in the photo is not the same one Jack’s referring to, I couldn’t locate a picture of that one. This one is also a Navajo rug, though!)

Later, another time for the rest.

Jack

As the post-non-Y2K hard times hardened I did a lot of scrambling trying to make ends meet. One by-product of that squeeze was that I began doing some trading with the tribes for pottery, rock art, rugs and other products to resell.

This got me acquainted with a Navajo man who became a running buddy for a while. Curtiss Cohoe.

A man about 50 years old. Pine Hill (Self-determination) Rez. Good family a generation earlier. His mom and aunt still raise sheep, shear, dye the wool with dye they make from crushed rock and plants, and weave good rugs the old way. The next generation was less successful in most matters.

Curtiss was much of a man in a lot of ways when he was sober, or mostly sober. Which sometimes happened. One day I drove up to a place he was doing some artwork painting on a table top in an alleyway next to the Railroad track in Grants. I was just in time to see three semi-drunk Din’e toughs in their mid-20s approach him, exchange a few words, and start swinging.

By the time I got out of the truck to help him he didn’t need any help. The two fully conscious ones got to their feet and left at a stumbling run.  The less-conscious one stuck around long enough for me to try to stop the bleeding by tying a bandana around his head while Curtiss intermittently kicked in his rib cage.

Early in his life, Curtiss started out pretty well. Worked for the US Forestry Service as a fire fighter, then as a Ranger in California until things went haywire. Back in New Mexico, a cop raped his younger sister and got by with it. Curtiss came back and beat the cop to death with his fists, which got him 10 years in prison.

Once that decade of bars was over, Curtiss never really got back onto the right track. He had a lot of anger in him, and he had some brothers who were in and out of prison a lot, who kept the pressure on from the law. (Curtiss was fairly frightened of one of the brothers, whom he described as a bad-ass. The other was an evangelical preacher who sold some drugs and stole in between-times).

Another time I’ll tell you how Curtiss came to be back in the pen for another five years, last I heard.

Jack

Background:

During the hard, hungry times after my return to civilization following the Y2K non-event I discovered I had a lot left to learn about survival. I’ve told a bit about the Y2K experience elsewhere on this blog, but I’ve never discussed the aftermath here.

The nearest decent sized town to my cabin and everything I held dear was Grants, NM, about 60 miles north. After I settled my mind that I had to move back to town, I picked Grants, mostly because I expected to get a job there, but hoped I could still make frequent enough trips to the cabin to keep the chickens healthy, fed and watered.

But that’s another story.

I was as nearly dead-broke as I’d been since my youth. But I was operating on a number of faulty assumptions. Never had any trouble finding a job in my life, older now with a good job history and an education to be envied by a young person, one of my faulty assumptions was that I’d have no trouble finding work.

Grants is a town about 60 miles west of ABQ, once a uranium mining center, surrounded by Rez of various kinds on all sides. After uranium went away, Grants became a town that re-emerged as a prison center, thanks to the war on drugs. Touristas and prisons.

There’s a NM State prison for men, a State prison for women, and a private prison for spillover from the State, plus a couple of thousand federal prisoners.

I’d never thought much about working in a prison facility, but it seemed a reasonable choice. One of my degrees is in English, and though I’d never taught in a formal setting, I’d spent several years during the ‘80s teaching adult literacy as a volunteer, one on one. In my innocence I believed I could be an asset teaching prisoners.

I applied for a teaching position at the private facility because it happened that 60 of the workers there’d been fired the previous week because they’d failed drug tests, or for various other causes. I was new in town and didn’t realize this was a regular pattern, happening every month or so.

However, going there for interviews, going through gates, chain-link tunnels, layers of attitude and ribbon wire just to interview, I experienced a sinking of the spirit with each visit and ebullience each time I exited. As it turned out, the prison system didn’t want a 57 year old with my qualifications, but by the time they made that decision, it was clear to me the feeling was mutual.

I discovered there was nobody much in that town who did want a 57 year old with my qualifications. Eventually I lied about the education, claiming never to have been to an institution of higher learning, so’s to snag a minimum-wage graveyard shift job at a local motel, where I worked a couple of years.

A person can’t reside in Grants, NM, half-a-decade without learning a lot about prisons. Everyone seems to work in one, have a relative in one, sell drugs to people who work in them, or be a prisoner on work release. During those years I became the acquaintance of people involved in all those capacities.

In some later blog entries I’ll be relating some of the experiences involving that pleasant phase of my life, why I believe the prison and criminal justice system in this country is a disaster, why the War on Drugs, I believe, is destroying the institutions of the nation, and why I’ve come to believe Americans are helping to bankrupt themselves for the empty satisfaction of keeping a segment of the population in cages for victimless crimes, but accomplishing nothing. Zero. Zip, in doing so.

Jack