On our second night in Gallup, we met Brian and Sahara. They were from the other Gallup, the one that we hadn’t seen on Highway 66—both of them were white, not Navajo, and had recently graduated from the local private Christian high school. Nonetheless, they had some interesting stories about the local folklore—in particular the supposed beyond-the-grave hauntings at the local church and surrounding area. They also told us about the Navajo legend of the skinwalker, a mythical beast that used to be a man and could assume the form of a wild animal. In order to become a skinwalker, Brian said, you had to kill two of your own relatives.
It was nice to meet both of them, but the next morning the exchange left a funny taste in my mouth. In a mostly poor Navajo town, it seemed strange to me that our only extended interaction had been with the two people whose socioeconomic background was most similar to our own. It made me wonder if we were sequestering and sheltering ourselves just like if we had not started traveling at all–in other words, if we were just being tourists.
I should have known that history had already proven that fear mostly unfounded. And the next day, we got to finally meet two gentlemen from the “other” Gallup that Brian and Sahara had so little to do with. While we were still hanging out in the Wal-Mart parking lot, two Navajo men approached the bus and asked for some food or money. They explained that they had just been released from prison (although they did not say for what) and had nothing.
Their names were Chet and Bill. We invited them on the bus and gave them some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Over the course of the meal, they started talking about a four-day event that was starting in Piñon, Arizona that Thursday, a Navajo ceremony called a Sun Dance. We knew practically nothing about it, but they said we were welcome, and we resolved to make a stop there on our way to Phoenix.
