For the Navajo, running water is not cut and dried
Inside the hogan, Reed’s mother, 36-year-old Willena Begay, loads another log into the wood stove.
Begay, a small, direct woman with bounteous energy, has no qualms about divulging her water story. She says the nearest water source, a well, is a mile away, but she grew up in the area. Until five years ago, she did have running water, when she lived at the Navajo school where she teaches special ed, but she built the hogan as a way to return to her roots. “I missed the horse corral and the livestock. I wanted to bring my kids back to the traditional ways. I wanted them to put work into things,” she explains. “But last week, a couple of the girls and I went to the well at eight at night to haul water, and it was snowing. It was cold. I thought, We need running water.”
These days, Begay is weighing whether she wants to pay the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority roughly $10,000 to connect water pipes and electricity to her home. “I don’t know,” she says. “Right now, what I have is working—a generator and an outside restroom. Maybe when I get a little extra money.”
As Begay speaks, Reed eyes her mother wearily. “She’s just not very tough,” the girl says. Though she doesn’t yet have her license, Reed often drives to the well, which she enjoys. “Here, it’s more fun than in town. We get to play outside. We get to ride horses. I like it.”
Outsiders might assume that the Navajo water question is binary—that people either have running water or that they don’t and want it. In fact, many Navajo, such as Victor Roanhorse, see living close to the land—ruggedly, without running water—as a cultural value.
Roanhorse, a 50-year-old school nurse, hops in his pickup truck every couple of days and drives nine miles up a rocky mountain road to fetch water for his family, 15 horses, and 30 sheep. He then pumps the water out of the large plastic drums on the truck bed into a 3,000-gallon underground cistern beside his house.
“Well water tastes purer to me,” he says. “It’s from the ground. When people drink water out of pipes, they don’t even know where it’s from.” Roanhorse also appreciates the hands-on nature of the task, especially when it comes to his grandchildren. “They haul water and firewood with me,” he says, pulling out his phone to display a photo of a tiny girl, aged five, helping to lug a five-gallon bucket to a vegetable patch. “They learn to garden, and they water by hand,” he says, his face beaming with pride.
But a lack of water infrastructure can cause socially complex problems too. For Janna Stewart, a single mom, it’s stressful to have running water when so many around you don’t. When relatives come over to shower, they sometimes stay for two weeks. Stewart’s friend and her daughters also come over to shower and do laundry. “But then that started taking on a whole new dimension, because she would say things like, ‘Can you watch my kids?’” she recalls. “I became a child care facility. I had to put up boundaries.”
And sometimes, the situation is simply agonizing. Donna Yellowhorse, a professional weaver in her sixties, and her husband care for 78 head of cattle. The nearest water source is five miles away, down a steep hill and over a dirt road. On the return trip, the road is often too steep to climb, even in the four-wheel-drive Chevy Avalanche that Yellowhorse bought especially for water hauling.
When the road is muddy, she sometimes takes a longer route home—adding an extra 35 miles to the trip. Other times, she has gamed it and paid the price. “I break the CV joint on my Avalanche in the mud,” Yellowhorse says. “That’s happened so often, and it’s just so terrible. When that happens, can you believe it? We just have to walk home.”
A note from Yellowhorse’s doctor states she has “multiple medical problems, including mobility problems,” and she says her grandson worries about her. During his recent visit from Phoenix, where he works in construction, she recalls he said, “Grandma, I’m going to have to leave my job and take care of you.”
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Yellowhorse says, shaking her head in distress.
