Introduction
Young Diné people are at a unique point in our Diné history. As my daughter states, “confusing: balancing between cultures from what is right, wrong, and taboos.” Young natives like my daughter listen to their parents’ and grandparents’ oral history. Children of this generation listen to the oral history and are fortunate to read about oral history and stories of Diné identity at home and school. However, it is not easy to adapt and apply the teaching to today’s modern living of being successful. It is difficult to balance the culture of modern teaching and traditional teaching. As my daughter states, “being excluded from some ceremonies or activities is painful and make you feel that you are from a different culture.” My job in this unit is to merge old teaching and new teaching about identity at a deeper level. Yes, young Diné have heard the creation stories and oral history of the Diné. But young Diné missed the connection of oral history and creation stories to the idea of Diné Identity. Parents, aunts, uncles, grandmother, and grandfather did their part of passing along the importance of being Diné and self-identity. My generation shared the stories as our parents did before us. We even interpret them with simplicity, but the connection to self-identity was lost.
So why am I concerned to merge the old teaching and new teaching of identity again? While I was teaching sixth grade reading standards last semester, I noticed the children not connecting to the story of the Navajo Warrior Twin Hero that the author consistently referred to in a book called Under the Eagle: Samuel Holiday Navajo Code Talker by Samuel Holiday and Robert S. McPherson. The author was using the traditional oral story about the hero twins and philosophy of discipline. These ideas were integrated to being a Marine and the essence of being a strong code talker. The author tied brave acts of the Hero Twins to the courage that a code talker should have to endure dangers. Students in my room raised their hands and asked, how does the scene in the Hero Twin story and Mr. Holiday’s brave act relate to each other? And how does that comparison relate to the identity of being a Diné?
It is this scene that has brought my attention to the need to merge old teachings and new teachings and to stress that the foundation of being Diné is in creation stories and oral stories about Diné history. Our younger generation must know these teachings to continue to keep our identity.
To understand and teach identity at a middle school, I undertook interviews to draw a better knowledge of my people. I found that even within one family group, ideas about identity varied. I was able to interview two male siblings from the same family and three family members from the same nuclear family. The result brought about an interesting concept. The outcome showed that the passing of oral history within a family is still happening but not consistently to everybody.
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