I met Jay Youngdahl at Harvard Divinity School in 2004. Jay had taken a sabbatical from his work as a labor lawyer to consider several pressing questions that had arisen in the course of his career. In our numerous conversations, the Navajo experience held a particular fascination for Jay. It was not only the heartrending history of dispossession and violence that Navajos had endured as a nation or the high rates of life-threatening injuries that Navajo workers suffered on the tracks of the southwest United States. It was the cultural invisibility of these people—written out of the consciousness of...

This book is the story of the Navajo workers who leave their land each year for work on the railroad, performing the difficult and dangerous work of maintaining the railroad tracks of the Desert Southwest and beyond. It describes how these Native American men work “to transform the world into which one is thrown into a world one has a hand in making—to strike a balance between being an actor and being acted upon.”¹ Because of historic as well as contemporary hiring practices, railroading has always been a predominantly male profession. Although a small number of Anglo and African...

On a cold, sunny day in late December, I struggled to guide our truck through the mud on the roads of the Navajo Nation. With my two Navajo friends and translators, Julie and Zina Benally, my wife and I were on our way to visit a retired railroad worker, Jerry Sandoval. Jerry lived with his son at the end of a road on a beautiful small mesa overlooking the main settlement of Tóhajiilee, New Mexico, a portion of the Navajo Nation located southeast of the main body of their land. Spanish records show contact with the descendants of this Cañoncito...

While conditions are unique for each person, as a group the Navajo people practice a common, though eclectic, set of religious traditions. Three forms of religious practice predominate in the Navajo Nation today: “traditional” Navajo religion, the Native American Church, and myriad versions of Christianity.

The rich variety of religious practices that characterize life on the rez can be seen in the story of Tom Martinez, who was one of the first men I interviewed. It was a beautiful June day in Cuba, New Mexico, when I spoke to Tom. The sky was a radiant blue and the air was...

In his famous essay “What Makes a Life Significant,” the American philosopher and polymath William James wrote that life is “soaked and shot-through” with “values and meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view.” He cautions against a failure to realize that the “meanings are there for others, but they are not there for us.” Understanding this is the “basis of all our tolerance, social, religious, and political.” He continues:

No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in...

The story of Navajo railroad workers cannot be complete without a look at the specific relationship between these Navajo men and the main US government agency responsible for relations with Americans Indians, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).¹ This agency has been and continues to be a major force affecting the life of Navajos. While the next chapters describe the role of the primary governmental actor in this story, the Railroad Retirement Board, the BIA did poke its head into issues regarding Navajo railroad work. With the help of kind federal archivists, I was able to find a number of...

I met Tom Caydaitto in Cuba, New Mexico, on a bright August morning. The story Tom told me combined many of the elements that I had seen repeated in the lives of Navajo railroad workers I had met. Tom, a friend of Julie’s, began work for the Union Pacific Railroad in the early 1950s, getting his job through the local trading post on the rez. As with most Navajo trackmen, his employment was sporadic. However, by the early 1980s work steadied and he worked all over the Union Pacific system. The gangs he worked on often had Native Americans from...

Like many of the men I interviewed, Leroy Yazzie Sr., a pleasant sixty-year-old man with a sparkling Navajo sense of humor, got work on the railroads through his trading post. He worked for several different railroads in his career. He got his job on the Rock Island Railroad after talking to a trader at the local trading post. The trader told him to “round up some Navajos.” Leroy found some men willing to go work at the railroad. All of the Navajo men got in the back of the pickup, on which the trader had put a camper. The trader...

In order to attempt to understand and fully appreciate our fellow human beings, Michael Jackson writes, we need to remember the importance of listening to the actual words of those who are speaking:

To apprehend the intersubjective life in which we are immersed, we not only need theoretical models that are constructed outside the empirical field, then brought to bear upon it; we need to examine the metaphors, images, stories and things that human beings everywhere deploy as ‘objective correlatives’ of the give and take of their quotidian relationships with others. The ways in which we arrange and organize words...

In the contemporary world, the dialectic of anchoring and adaptability is a complex one. During my time at Harvard Divinity School, I wondered why, during the span of my life, finding bases for moral or ethical guidance seems to have become more and more difficult for those facing complicated existential or ethical questions. And, once one has committed to a position, sharing common bases seems even more problematic. Are there timeless truths that can anchor our considerations and choices, or is everything subject to contestation? Can any common attitudes or truths be shared by all? The dearth of clear responses...

Finally, in concluding my research, I returned to say hello to John Sandoval. Swooping crows were silhouetted against the sky as we arrived, gliding silently as they hunted for food among the sagebrush. Consistent with the Navajo notion of reciprocity and the kind of hospitality that existed in my culture in the South when I grew up, I brought John some food—bacon, coffee, and sugar. But, as we had arrived just after John had received his government check, he had been to the store the day before, and his refrigerator and kitchen shelves were quite full. We talked briefly....