Mary Blackmountain on daily life at home on the Navajo reservation

Mary Blackmountain: Back home, I mean, I was raised with non-educated parents, and our ways were very traditional. No running water, no electricity, just horses and wagons. I had two older sisters, and I'm the youngest one. ​

So I was raised like that, where I had to walk for…  just to catch the bus, in snow  — and those days [17:30] we’d get heavy snow, and there was no such thing as snow boots, so my mother would just wrap, our mother would, me and my other brother, they would just wrap our feet with — they would cut up old jeans and, something heavy and thick, that’s what they’d wrap our shies in just to get to school. 

We had to walk quite a ways just to get to meet the bus.  The snow was big, and we had to build a fire while waiting for the bus. So that's why, when I went to school, it was hard.

Even up to … we just got running water not too long ago, maybe even or eight years ago, maybe nine. And it's a blessing now. We enjoy it. We enjoy running water. And electricity is the same way. A lot of people still out there that live in remote areas, they don't have electricity, and  they don't have running water. 

Even our roads are not paved. Our roads are not even paved. We live about maybe half a mile [19:00] off the highway, and we live in a high elevation, so we get all the snow and the rain, and our road is really terrible. A lot of time we can't even drive through to the road to our home. So we have to park up the road to walk home. If we go to get food, we have to take several trips just to get our food and stuff. 

So it would be like that. We had a long winter, hard winter. And we had to chop wood and get wood and those are our heating system. And stores are far away — you have to drive an hour just to get to the nearest store. There are local ones, but they're very expensive. [20:00] Even just on the reservation, gas is too expensive, very expensive. 

... So those are just things that are, that’s what goes on on the reservation. We live on the Navajo Reservation, one of the biggest tribes with the biggest population. We have agencies, but they don't really help. We got snowed in a few times, and we couldn't even get out. The snow drift was this high. We couldn’t even get out. We tried to call around to these agencies (and they would say) ‘Oh, that’s a private road, we don't do that. [21:30]

Even on the reservation, they it call the chapter house, it's more like a band office, you know, even that. They couldn't even help us. They say, "Only people that are in need of medical, severe disability, we can help." I mean, they know me. They say, "You're OK. We can’t ask somebody to help you." 

These are the kind of things we have to live with. It's very hard living on the reservation. It's who you know. It's who you know. That’s how you get around. Yeah. We just try hard. We're just taking care of others. So that's what we do.

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