WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. — Jill Biden knows enough about Navajo culture to meet with the women first.
“We’re a matrilineal culture, and women are seen as the leaders,” says Memarie Tsosie, regional director for Arizona’s early childhood agency First Things First. “So I just thought that was very respectful that the first meeting that she scheduled was with women.”
It was Biden’s third visit to Navajo Nation in eight years, each to a different part of the nation. In 2013 Biden, then second lady and a community college writing instructor, gave a commencement speech at the Navajo Technical College. In 2019 she came back for the opening of the first cancer center in Indian Country, which made it easier for patients to get treatment without having to drive hundreds of miles. This time, she was returning as first lady to praise the nation for vaccinating “more than half of those living on tribal lands, with few resources, reaching people in some of the most remote areas” and being “a leading example of the covid response in the United States,” she said in a speech.
At the listening session with Biden at the Navajo Nation Museum, Tsosie introduced herself in the Diné language by naming the clans of her mother and grandmother, as did most of the other eight women there. They were experts on various sectors of Navajo life — a silversmith, the director of Navajo United Way, the president of the Navajo Board of Education — and each told Biden the challenges they’re facing as the nation tries to recover from having been one of the country’s worst hotspots of the pandemic, which has claimed 1,273 Navajo lives. The crisis has exposed a raft of inequities, from lack of broadband to even lack of electricity and running water in many parts of the reservation.
“I think it’s appropriate for you to come before the president, as a woman warrior among warriors,” said Gloria Grant, a member of the board of regents for the technical college.
“I’ll take that back to him!” said Biden, laughing.
Biden explained that the American Rescue Plan would be bringing money for broadband, education, prevention of violence against women, and infrastructure, and said it could create jobs.
“Maybe the money is on the way already. Maybe it’s already arrived! I don’t know!” she said. But the important thing was, the president understood what the sister warriors needed from him, and had acted. “I want you to know that my husband has heard this, he knows this, he has heard you,” she said. “It’s not like it’s going to happen. It’s already happening right now.”
Biden was pointedly making her visit to Navajo Nation in the early days of her husband’s administration. Record Native American turnout in 2020 helped secure Arizona for Biden, which helped secure the presidency. According to Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez, there’s a word in Navajo, jooba’ii, that means “compassion” and sounds a lot like “Joe Biden.” “And that’s how a lot of our elders remembered it at the polls,” Nez said.
During the campaign, Jill Biden had held numerous virtual forums with native leaders and promised that a Biden-Harris administration would stand with Indian Country — a term that encompasses all Native American reservations in the United States.
Now she was on Navajo (as residents of the reservation call it) to say that the administration was keeping that promise.
“In Indigenous communities, if you’re not from the community, your role is to listen,” says Tsosie, the early-childhood program director, “but you don’t typically get that from a lot of leaders.” (Tsosie praised Biden afterward, saying, “She listened most of the time.”)
A few minutes into the meeting with the sister warriors, Biden asked for everyone to sit in chairs and scoot as close together as social distancing allowed. “Let’s sit around a circle and talk to one another like a group of women,” she said. She wanted it to feel “more like a conversation”; she also wanted to stop standing in her Jimmy Choo heels. “You guys have the right shoes on,” she said, laughing and gesturing at their wrapped-leather moccasins.
Later, the first lady listened some more as a series of speakers held forth for well over an hour in 43-degree weather with 20-mph winds underneath Window Rock, a sacred sandstone mountain with an oval hole worn through it to reveal the sky beyond. It is also the site of a veterans memorial for Navajo code talkers and the Navajo Nation Council building. The sister warriors ceremoniously wrapped Biden in a Pendelton blanket to keep her warm.
Biden was slated as the final speaker at the event, which was being broadcast live over the radio to all of Navajo Nation. That’s how most news travels out here, along with the Facebook and the Navajo Times. The distances on Navajo Nation are vast, and the infrastructure is scant. Families stock up for the month at the nearest grocery store, which might be a two-hour drive away. Many children still go to boarding school (some of which were built for a U.S. government program of forced assimilation, but now teach Diné language and culture) because it would be too much to bus in and out every day. At 27,000 square miles, it’s the country’s largest Native American reservation, a land mass bigger than West Virginia that spans across Arizona, New Mexico, and a corner of Utah. It’s so vast and remote, so far from a decent-sized airport, that Bill Clinton was the first modern president to have visited, in 2000, during a five-hour stop. Laura Bush also made a visit. The closest Michelle Obama came was giving a commencement speech at the Santa Fe Indian School.
Jill Biden spent two days and took the long route, driving three hours by motorcade from Albuquerque to Window Rock. The drive was so long she even had the motorcade pull over at a Flying J truck stop for a brief break. No one seemed to recognize her there, but officials seemed to appreciate Biden’s history of making the trip. “I don’t think that there’s ever been any dignitary of that magnitude that has come here as often as you have,” said Seth Damon, speaker of the Navajo Nation Council.
It is hard to measure the impact of a visit by a first lady, but Navajo Council Member Amber Kanazbah Crotty says there is a huge symbolic power in a high-ranking member of a presidential administration standing between the four sacred mountains, to which the Navajo people returned after the U.S. government moved them to a desolate patch of eastern New Mexico. (President Nez showed Biden the Treaty of 1868 that had restored the Navajo to their ancestral homeland.) On a more practical level, Biden’s visit allowed for an exchange of information. Crotty, who chairs the council’s subcommittee on sexual assault prevention, learned that there is now unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs that will investigate the crisis of missing and slain Indigenous people. It was recently set up by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a Native American from the Laguna Pueblo outside of Albuquerque.
“So, it was really, really directly impactful,” says Crotty of Biden’s visit. “Right after I spoke with her, she was like, ‘Okay, talk to this person and that person.’ ” The councilwoman says she has a meeting with Biden’s staff next week to discuss gender-based violence in the Navajo community, which is reeling from the killings of four women in recent weeks.
Dawn A. Yazzie, an early childhood mental health consultant who works with Tsosie at First Things First, says she cried watching Biden thank front-line workers at a vaccine center in the parking lot of the Tséhootsooí Medical Center in Fort Defiance, Ariz. Things were so bad during the worst part of the pandemic, and federal aid was so scarce, that hospital workers had to sew their own gowns, caps and feet coverings out of surgical blankets, she says. And Sarah Dahozy, a two-time breast cancer survivor who believes her health was compromised from growing up “downwind” from one of the many uranium mines that were active for 40 years on Navajo land, sees a sister warrior in Biden for her perseverance after losing her stepson Beau to cancer.
The next day, Biden went to another listening session — this time with middle and high school students. She told them how she’d been texting with her own students that morning — Biden teaches at a community college in Virginia — as they nervously prepared for final exams. She encouraged the native students to keep a journal (advice she had also given fifth-graders at a school visit in New Hampshire), “Because when you have your own children, and you tell them about the pandemic of 2020 and 2021, [they’ll] say to you, ‘But Mom, what was it like?’ ”
In a private discussion without press, Lesley Tohtsoni, a teacher at Navajo Preparatory School who’d brought students to the meeting, says Biden talked about how distant she feels from her college students, teaching them virtually two days a week. Tohtsoni says she told the first lady about how Internet access on the reservation is so bad that teachers had to make paper packets for students to pick up. One of her students missed class because her parents couldn’t pay their electric bill. Others sometimes couldn’t connect because wind or snow knocked their power out. “I have students who’ve driven to the KFC and Bashas”— an Arizona grocery store chain — “for WiFi. One of my students took his final on top of his house,” says Tohtsoni.
It’s a small thing, but a female student in the room said she gained confidence from just knowing she could speak to the first lady of the United States, and from knowing that Biden is, says Tohtsoni, “somebody who has her own career and her own path.” Another student told Biden he’s planning to go into politics to write laws that will keep education in the Diné language alive.
Still, the Navajo are used to being let down by presidents. “I don’t ever think the federal government is going to live up to expectations, just based on personal observation,” says Crotty, the councilwoman.
“I just need action. I just need a plan. A blueprint of how they’re going to fix some of these systemic issues, so that we’re not stuck in the red tape.”
A visit is nice, she says, but solutions are even better.