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We finally met Joe Hubbard, our host vicar, Sunday evening, June 18. We introduced ourselves and heard all about the Mission and a bit about Joe’s experience with the Diné people and the wider Diocese. Joe’s wife had just graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary in May and was headed to the Diocese of South Dakota to serve as Canon for Formation. Despite Joe’s incredible devotion to the Diné people they had decided that as a family it made the most sense for Joe and the kids to join her there and so this week would be their last at the Mission.

I had many meetings with Joe leading up to the trip and had come to understand that our time with the Diné people would be as superficial or as rich as they determined it should be based on our attitude and interactions with them. In other words, they would open up to us if they deemed us worthy. Based on our research of the treatment of Native people this seemed fair, and if you know anything about the personality of RYG, this was also somewhat of a challenge. We had already come to love the landscape of Bluff in two days: the ice cold water of the San Juan river and the magnificence of the Bluff cliffs. Now we hoped to get to know and love the people as well.

We began our Monday morning divided into two groups. One group would stay at the Mission, learning from Joe about the people and places in the region and helping to clean up the mission orchard. The second group went with Kathy, an Elder, and her younger brother Walter, deep into the reservation to move her out of a trailer and into her new home, which was not quite ready for her. Kathy and Walter asked for one from our group to join them on the drive out and Michael acquiesced. He helped Kathy get in and out of the truck and was incredibly engaged and engaging with both of them learning about their time in the residential schools and their experiences with the US government.  They clearly developed a rich connection with Michael and by the end of the day even gave him a nickname in Diné, which translated means “Tall Boy.”

The drive through Monument Valley was mind blowing, every turn or valley seemed to reveal another massive statue of God’s making. An hour into the trip we slip-slided on sand roads, crossing our fingers that we would make it up a hill or around a turn. We came out in a valley that looked something like the planet Luke grew up on in Star Wars. The wind was intense and the sand was everywhere. We were really in the desert. There was basically nothing green to be seen in any direction.

We quickly got to work loading Walter’s trailer, asking questions as we went and learning about this outpost of the Episcopal Church. The trailer was a stone’s throw from St. Mary’s which had been Kathy’s church for a period of time. She was an ordained homeschooled Episcopal priest, and her past husband had been the first Diné Episcopal Bishop for Utah. She and her daughter were ordained in the same service, though her daughter attended Seminary at Berkeley. The politics of the region and the Diocese were complicated to us outsiders but it was clear that Kathy was holding onto a great deal of sadness regarding her husband's passing, her own ministry, and the loss of her children. This was a hard life and we were beginning to understand why so many of the young people leave to live elsewhere.

The RYG kids were incredible, both with Kathy and the work. They were loving, careful, conversational, and they genuinely absorbed everything that they were experiencing. We worked for many hours and when the trailer was loaded Kathy and Walter asked if we would like to see the Church. It was difficult to get the lock open, a common occurrence in the desert because sand gets lodged in the locks. It was hard to fathom a community that had vibrantly existed in this place that felt like a wasteland. But we explored the space and Kathy lovingly reset the altar and shared stories of her time there and of the community as she had known it.

 Behind the altar, and at St. Christopher’ too, there was a painting of a medicine man attending to a mother and child. Behind the medicine man was Jesus in a radiant glow that conveyed a sense of God with them all - the medicine man, the mother and the child. We asked Kathy about this and she said it is how they see Jesus in their community. The medicine man is still important but they understand that it is Jesus and God who ultimately care for everything. Throughout the week it became clear that this is why the Diné tradition and the Episcopal tradition work so well together. The Diné have always known that God existed as the Alpha and the Omega, and when they learned about Jesus from Father Liebler they naturally understood the importance of Christ’s role in their faith as well. This seamless adaptation to both traditions suggests a rich sense of knowing who they are as a people, and a willingness to accept a broader perspective, rather than be threatened by it.