Prayer

Every desk I ever had on the reservation was graffitied with the phrase (Name) was here. Maybe wuz or waz or wus, but always that phrase–  Sheradiin was here. Caleb wuz here. Andy waz here.

My new school does not have graffiti. Not really. This school is a privilege won by kids with years of dance training, whose schools could afford theater teachers and a theater class to begin with, not the sort of dumb-dumbs who sign their name into crimes. Who had poetry classes and a library to begin with. Ours was burned down.

Their desks are smooth without razorblades, their bluetooth headphones, their complicated vocabulary (entendre, racism, heteronormative), and these seem important somehow – those tiny markings of our differences. If I do not list them, I will forget them. I will lose the part of myself that belongs on the reservation and become like them.

I used to think it was disrespectful. It ruined the desk for everyone else. Wasn’t it enough that the Sharpie of our predecessors left stained bruises? Must you leave your own scars too?

But now, I think there is a plea. Passed down from generation to generation. Richie wuz here. And so was Richie’s son – Jaime waz here. I was somewhere once. And I left proof.

They don’t write I was here off the reservations. Maybe I’m just not looking hard enough. But to them, I think it would be like writing the sky is blue today! Of course you were. You do not carve your existence into the world. Yours is a baseline. You already exist – you always have. 

Navajo is an oral language. Its transfer to writing is always incorrect. Navajo-English dictionaries mistranslate at least a few pages. They don’t teach it in school. Can’t have you sounding any more un-American than you already do. So the graffiti is English. Purposely misspelled to leave another reminder encased in the scars – I was here. I am going to leave proof. But make no mistake. I am not like you. I will never be like you.

In spoken Navajo, slang terms tie two languages together in a test and a punchline – “Naye, you’re just like a real glahni.” Glahni (spelled as it is pronounced) means a drunk (Indian) bum. A term used in elementary school to describe the kids who slept in class and stole extra servings of lunch, as well as the fathers who lingered outside the only grocery store for a hundred miles in piss-stained sleeping bags.

These terms are not to be used in front of elders, who levy them alongside a spanking. These terms are used ironically – to acknowledge and apologize for being native in one breath, I know I’m Indian and I know I sound like it. Don’t worry. I hate it just as much as you do.

And if you pronounce them with an English accent, without the high, harsh lilt of Navajo, then kids know. They know you are not really, “one of us.” You’re still not getting it. You’re still not understanding that being Indian is a kind of stink that will follow you no matter how American you sound.

Run from the reservation borders. By all means – it’s a rite of passage. You’ll always find your way back. You can carve all the declarations of existence you want in the white world. Off the reservation, they are sanded and painted over on the government’s dime. That’s why you always end up coming back. The reservation is the only place that the self is not temporary.

At some point, desks run out of room. But the carvings keep coming. This is different from erasing or replacing. When you put your own name over another, it is like prayer.

We are making them proof of existence. Promises to the rest of the world that only our own children have the right to erase us. Only children desperate enough to make their pleas permanent will have the right to take another slice of the self away. The old traditions are dying, but make no mistake. We are replacing them.

Jesse Begay is a writer born and raised in Shiprock, New Mexico. Their work typically revolves around familial relationships and cultural trauma. Their work has been published in Scholastic's 2021 Best Teen Writing and Dreams of Montezuma 2: An Anthology of Poetry and Proses. Jesse is a two-time Gold Key winner and a Gold Medalist of the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, as well as a recipient of Bloomberg Philanthropies' 2021 Best-In-Grade Scholarship.