Jacqueline Keeler: Hair represents who we are as Navajo people

On Tuesday, after Labor Day weekend, my children went back to school. The week before, I had taken my son to the barber to get a haircut—but it was his choice. Such was not the case with another Navajo boy, Malachi Wilson, who was refused entry into his first day of kindergarten and told he would have to cut his hair to get an education. Ironically, Malachi’s school district, despite being 81% white, is in Seminole, Texas, has an American Indian warrior with long flowing hair as their mascot and refer to their students as “Indians and Maidens.” Malachi was allowed to attend school after his mother contacted the Navajo Nation and provided proof her son was Native American. He received a religious exemption to allow him to keep his long hair, which was neatly braided and hanging down his back.

I have often heard that, for Navajo people, hair is our memory. Before my traditional Navajo wedding, my long hair (it went down to my waist) was washed with yucca root. It foams up quickly. Afterward, my hair was brushed with a bundle of stiff grass called a be’ezo. I still have that bundle and I occasionally brush my children’s hair with it. The act of caring for the hair, one relative to another, like my grandmother and family did for me, is an expression of love to me. Sharing it with my children feels natural. In fact, I cannot imagine not doing it. I can still hear my mother, my shi má making comments in Navajo as she brushed my hair.

My Aunt Lucy tied it up for my wedding and bound the long strands up into a traditional bun called a tsiiyéél which is wrapped in white sheep’s wool spun into yarn. This is how I wore my hair to my wedding that night in a hogan (an eight-sided traditional Navajo dwelling). I remember walking in: a fire lit in the middle bathed my relatives’s faces and my husband’s relatives’ in a golden glow as they knelt on the dirt floor and smiled at us. I wore a traditional woven dress and my husband wore his traditional Mohawk regalia. His people are from the Eastern woodlands of New York state and his garb, including a guhsto:wa (feather headdress), were strange and foreign to my Navajo family’s eyes. The walls were adorned with the Navajo rugs my grandmother wove in her traditional Storm pattern.