Signs, signs, everywhere signs but — who cares?

By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — Last Friday, a groundhog in Pennsylvania failed to see his shadow. That's a sign of an early spring.

Farmers plant crops according to the Zodiac signs and phases of the moon. The Three Wise Men followed a star, another sign, to Bethlehem where they found Jesus.

Several years ago out, two holy people "came down" in Dinnebeto. People flocked there in busloads looking for a sign, according to Gibson Gonnie, a traditional medicine man living in Gallup.

Gonnie dismisses the visitation as something of a hallucination, and interprets it as a sign for Navajos to pray. "That's all that was for: Something's wrong; something's happening. We need to pray," he said.

Global warming, tsunamis, tornadoes inside the Four Sacred Mountains, those are all signs, Gonnie said. "We were given signs."

"They're just telling us what we need to do. We need to all get together and somehow do a prayer, because prayer is in short supply right now. We're just looking at material things. We're not doing our prayers anymore," he said.

"We're kind of overlooking that until we get hurt. That's when we start thinking about prayers."

Gonnie said that in the Navajo traditional way, it is believed that a woman should not be involved with the military. "If women go in there, things will shift," Gonnie believes.

"A woman is supposed to teach love. She keeps everything at a balance. But instead of that, she took the arrow, she took the gun. Instead of being holy within the home, she stepped up and said, 'I want to be a Marine.' She broke her rules of life," Gonnie said.

Because of the shift in the earth, today we have the tsunami. "That's a sign saying, 'You all need to do something about this. Are you going to do something about this, or are you going to look at it and just wait for something to happen?'

"Everybody is looking both ways. They're just so excited and fascinated to see what people call Jesus to come down. They're looking for something exciting," he said.

The Sept. 11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York was a sign of something really wrong, according to Gonnie. "What is the message behind all this? We're not looking at that."

Years ago, the Navajo elders said the tornado was supposed to be outside the Four Sacred Mountains protecting Navajo. Now it is within the sacred mountains. Gibson and his wife, Saia, saw one up close.

"We were on our way to do a presentation in Winslow and there was this big old tornado. I had never seen a tornado, but that's what it was. What I just did is I started singing the songs about tornadoes and things like that, and it just lifted up and went back into the clouds. That's another sign," Gonnie said.

"There are medicine people that specialize in things that have to do with tornadoes. Why can't they do a ceremony? Instead, they go the Medicine Men's Association and they just really like to look nice. But what are they doing? They're supposed to be taking care of these things," he said.

The ways of the Navajo people are changing, he said. Navajos are taking ceremonies from other tribes, putting them inside the Four Sacred Mountains, and then claiming, "This is what we do," Gonnie said.

But as a Navajo medicine man, a Native American Church roadman, or other medicine person, "we're not supposed to be hurting ourselves. We're supposed to be praying for people to get better," he said.

"Right now, Navajo medicine men and roadmen, they pierce themselves in here," he said, pointing to his chest, "and they're hanging on a tree Sundance."

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. I'm sorry to say that, but that's not our religion and that's not what we do," he said.

"As Navajos, we're not supposed to be piercing ourselves. The only place where we can pierce is our ears. That's about it. But these are some of the things that we're doing. Maybe that's why these things are going on people hanging and their blood running all over their body.

"What the medicine men said was that if we start piercing ourselves and stuff like that, we're just letting in sickness and violence," he said.