Until that day there'd only been a rumor, and the Navajo Reservation hadn't seemed like the place where the government would start. The Navajos were the strongest and most populous tribe, and most of their land was poor. The White Mountain and Mescalero reservations had much better land. And the Nez Perce; even the Pine Ridge. I suppose the government decided that if they took the strongest first, and relocated its people, the other tribes would lose heart and do what they were told. I used to wonder if that's how it worked out.
Within forty minutes there were ten of us in the two hogans. Everyone but me had clothes stored there, and boots, and a rifle. I was lucky to have worn boots that morning instead of oxfords; the weather forecast had given me that. And two of the pickups had rifles racked in them, so there was one for me. I didn't know who I would worry with an old.30 caliber Winchester hunting rifle. Two infantry riflemen had more firepower than the ten of us.
Of course, the idea wasn't to get in fights anyway. It was to make little armed demonstrations, get on the television and in the newsfax, and get the American people on our side. That had been the strategy of the Indian rights movement for more than a century. But the government was paying less and less attention to the people.
It stopped snowing that night. Meanwhile the government had shut down all the tribal radio stations, and Navajo language programs on other stations, and banned any mention of what was happening. We tuned in Gallup, Flagstaff, Farmington, and Holbrook, and they never mentioned that anything was going on.
The guys I was with talked it over. They decided to sit tight and take it a day at a time. If we didn't hear anything tonight, maybe we'd send out pickups in the morning to visit the nearest groups. Maybe we could work something out.
No one asked my opinion; I wasn't Navajo. I wasn't any kind of Apache-any of the Dinneh, or Tindeh. . the people in the Apache languages. I was originally from the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota, where the country was soggy muskeg instead of timbered mountains or rough, stony desert. I'd married a Mescalero, learned the language, and done my Ph.D. research on them. Also I spoke pretty good Navajo. But I wasn't really one of them. Not then. I even had enough European genes to give me blue-hazel eves. But if they had asked my opinion, I'd have gone along with what they thought best. I had nothing myself to suggest. I was no chief then. I was an educator.
As it turned out, the army came to us, at about 3:30 in the morning. I suppose their instruments picked up the heat from our stovepipes, even though we kept very small fires. They'd have taken us entirely by surprise, except that I had waked up and had to urinate, so I pulled on my boots and went out of the hogan. And heard the soft, rumbling hum of landing craft settling into a meadow in the woods-what the Spanish and Anglos in the southwest call a cienega-a hundred or so meters downslope. I went into both hogans and woke everyone up.
We fooled them; we fought. It seemed unreal then that we'd do that. It seemed unreal to the army, too; that's why we did as well as we did. Some of us didn't even take time to lace our boots, just wrapped the laces around our ankles. The others strapped on snowshoes and went down the draw toward the cienega. I didn't have snowshoes; I just waded along the best I could in other people's tracks.
The troops were in no hurry. They were still in the cienega. They'd unloaded from the two light landers, I guess a platoon of them, and were forming up to move on us.
None of us had a night scope, of course, but the soldiers weren't wearing camouflage whites, and there was moonlight. With the snow cover, it was easy to see them. But it was too dark to use the sights on our rifles. We just aimed down the tops of our barrels and started to shoot from behind trees. We had time to shoot two or three rounds each before they started shooting back, but when they did, it was the most frightening thing in my life, before or since. It sounded like four hundred rifles instead of forty. I could hear bullets hitting tree trunks and rocks, and branches falling off the trees above and behind us. They fired for about half a minute, I guess.
Then they stopped, and started moving forward. Someone said later that they'd gotten orders through headphones in their helmets. They were to take us prisoner if they could, and they thought they'd intimidated us; thought we were ready to quit, and I was. One or two of our people started shooting again though, so the soldiers did too, and then the rest of us did. I shot two or three times more before Lemmi yelled to cease fire and surrender. After a few seconds, the soldiers stopped shooting again, too. They came up and arrested all or us. A few started to beat us with their rifle butts, but their sergeants swore at them and made them quit. We'd shot a few of them-I heard we killed three-and the rest were pretty mad. Five of us had been shot, and two were dead.
Another lander came down in the cienega, and they loaded us and took off. They didn't stop at Lukachukai. They flew us straight to Window Rock, where they'd set up a fenced compound with army field shelters, just for guerrillas, and mostly still empty. The other Window Rock internees were kept in the community college and high school auditoriums, and the livestock-judging pavilion.
The field shelters we were in didn't have any power cells in the heaters, so they seemed pretty cold, especially for sleeping. Especially when we lay on our cots in summer-weight sleeping bags, shivering and looking out through the transparent roots, seeing stars through holes in the clouds.
Actually, most of us didn't know what it was to sleep cold. Not then.
The army let us know about our families-Marilyn was at the high school-but they kept us segregated. We were guerrillas. I never thought of myself that way, but we were. They kept bringing more people to the guerrilla compound, some of them women. This went on for several days. The Navajo Reservation is bigger than some states-about the size of West Virginia-with a thousand canyons, a thousand ridges and mesas, and a lot of its people live out among them on isolated ranches.
The army didn't know who or where the guerrillas were. So they waited for attacks, and killed or rounded up the attackers, and checked out little ranches for groups of men with weapons.
Quite a few White Mountain Apaches had driven up from the Fort Apache Reservation-seventy or eighty at least-and maybe forty or fifty from the San Carlos, connecting up with the Navajos they'd contacted earlier, through the committees. The police and the army didn't try to keep them from coming. Maybe they wanted them to come and get rounded up; they probably thought that those who came would be the hardcore resistance on the other reservations, and they'd get them now instead of later. There were also twenty or thirty Jicarilla Apache, and nine who came all the way from Mescalero in a van, expecting to get arrested and jailed on the way. There was even a work van load from the tiny Yavapai Reservation, mixed-blood Apaches and Yavapais who spoke only English.
Those numbers are not exact. I've estimated from hearsay, and from how many ended up in the guerrilla compound. The nine Mescaleros are the only ones whose starting number I learned exactly. Four of the nine were killed or hospitalized, or maybe escaped to hide out somewhere; the other five were interned with us.
The compound got more and more crowded until, after eight days, more troops arrived. Not the U.S. Army this time, but CoDominium Marines. Russian-speaking. Someone said the army wasn't happy about having to do that job, and that the whole thing had gotten out. Soldiers had told their families on the phone, also the newsfax and television, and the government couldn't pretend anymore that nothing was going on.
Then shuttles landed at the Window Rock airfield and they started loading us. I was lucky: I got a seat by one of the windows. After a few minutes we lifted, moving upward and outward till the rim of the Earth curved blue and white against black, and still outward till the curvature was strong. If I'd had a better view, I could have seen the Earth as a great beautiful ball. Finally, out beyond the outer Van Allen Belt, we docked with a converted freighter waiting to take us to Haven. I was feeling pretty bad; I thought I'd never see my wife again. But before they finished shuttling people up, they'd brought all the internees, Marilyn included, and we were together again.