Joe Kee, UNM-Gallup’s new full-time Navajo language instructor, understands the challenges of learning to read and write the language, even for a native speaker like himself. He made the journey years ago. He is passionate about the difference literacy makes in ensuring the survival of Navajo culture. Now he is ready to help others in the Gallup area acquire those skills.
Photo: Joe Kee
Kee comes to UNM-Gallup after spending three years at home in Steamboat, Ariz., where he returned after a long teaching stint at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. An NAU graduate with a master’s degree in Navajo literacy, Kee devoted those years to “non-academic” research, attending local events, observing ceremonies, attending chapter meetings and social functions and even herding sheep. During that time, he developed a new approach to teaching Navajo.
“I introduce students to where I come from, and engage them in learning by talking about how I came to be the person I am today,” he said. “I stress family, relationships and kinships inside the classroom to make learning fun. I try to help students learn not just words, but to learn through the meaning and context behind the vocabulary.”
Kee recalls a very traditional rural upbringing, in which he spoke Navajo as his first language. Later, at school, he picked up English, as did his classmates, at around eight or nine. He describes the process as “relatively painless,” compared to struggles older American Indians recount, when they were sent far from home to boarding schools, forced to speak only English and to forget their native tongues.
By the time he got to college, Kee knew he wanted to study the Navajo language. But studying Navajo literacy was something new.
“Although I was a fluent speaker, it took me four and a half years to grasp Navajo literacy,” he says. “But afterward, I felt proud and empowered that I could speak, read and write my language.”
Kee traces the history of Navajo literacy for his students from the 19th century. Linguists traveling through Dinetah listened to the language in various parts of the reservation, and began to write it down. A written alphabet was standardized.
But this process was interrupted by two factors, according to Kee: the introduction of the boarding school system – where students were forbidden to use Navajo so that they might be more easily assimilated into the dominant culture – and World War II—when the language was used by the military to transmit secret tactical messages via Navajo Code Talkers in the Pacific Theater.
“The language became classified,” Kee said. “The government wanted care taken about how the language was taught, and to whom it was taught. We had to accommodate these circumstances, although Navajo remained strong inside the home, regardless of what was going on outside.”
It would be at least 20 years after the war before the government relaxed its strictures against teaching Navajo; but when it did, the effort to spread Navajo literacy began to gather momentum.
As an advocate of Navajo literacy, Kee has come to UNM-Gallup well prepared to answer questions from traditional Navajos about why an oral tradition should be written down.
“Older people would share with me that our tradition should remain intact as an oral history, and that to write things down is not right,” Kee says. The elders point to the example of the Anasazi, who, some believe, wrote too much. “They believe that writing things down exposes you to the outside world, and then you’re sharing too much. I have to explain to them that we are losing a lot of the history and the language, and that writing it down can help us document it and help it continue.”
Students in Kee’s classes –Navajo 101 and 102, and the literacy course, Navajo 105 – will become familiar with such paradoxes as they learn not only how to speak, read and write Navajo, but also learn the stories of the people. Currently, most taking the classes have done some work in Navajo; in the future, he hopes to design classes to reach out to beginners and non-Navajos.
Kee is greatly impressed with the reasons his Navajo students give for wanting to learn the language of their people.
“Navajo students want to communicate with their great-grandparents before it’s too late, to show appreciation to their elders,” he said.
Kee says he sees great potential for UNM-Gallup to grow its Navajo language and studies program.
“I am really excited to be here at UNM-Gallup, in a town I visited as a child,” Kee said. He was born into the Black Streak Wood People Clan for the Mexican People Clan. “I hope to build a program where students will come to Gallup to take the language. And, I am really thankful that I am able to use my language and make my living by it.”
Media Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920; e-mail: cgonzal@unm.edu