Who the hell was Lyndon Za?
He was raised near Bitter Springs, not far from the Little Colorado River, on a small expanse of rocky desert where his family scratched out a meager living raising livestock: some sheep and chickens. They also had a few head of cattle, a couple of horses, and three or four dogs that came and went like wild coyotes.
Lyndon was a Checkerboard Navajo and looked it. His kin had mixed with the Pueblo peoples, and he shared the physical traits of both. He stood about six feet tall and was all shoulders and no hips. His nose was flat like a boxer who had taken too many blows to the face, and his skin was the color of mocha. His shiny black hair extended below his shoulders and was usually tied in two long braids. His hands and feet were long and his mannerisms were steady and deliberate. He also had the quizzical look of a scholar.
Lyndon’s mother’s clan was Kinyaa’aani, Towering House People, the original Navajo Clan. He was “born to” his father’s clan Azee’tsoh Dine’é, Big Medicine People. And Lyndon’s clan was Táchii’nii, Red-Running-Into-The-Water-Clan.
The complex Navajo clan system was primarily a hedge against incest in a gene pool that was quite small. It also explained one’s lineage in a fast and concise manner. It was how strangers quickly figured out who a person was, where their family came from, and whether they might be related in some way to one another.
Indians didn’t associate themselves with Anglo names. They didn’t think of themselves primarily as Navajo. The term Native American was meaningless. They didn’t care a lick about silly labels like Anasazi, or politically correct monikers like Ancestral-Puebloans. If they had to pick, most were comfortable with the ridiculous name, Indians, which white people mistakenly came up with because they were lost but now found offensive. Navajos defined themselves by the clans of their mothers and fathers, and the rest simply didn’t matter.
His musical clan was something else. Lyndon’s earliest memory was hearing Bob Marley, and he considered the Jamaican Rasta musician a god. He grew up listening to Bob’s reggae songs of resistance and justice. Bob Marley shirts were his trademark. His most prized possession was a gold pendant the size of a silver dollar with Bob Marley’s smiling dreadlocked face etched in black. Lyndon carried the treasured medallion in the leather medicine pouch that he wore over his crotch under his pants.
Lyndon had gone to public school in Page, from elementary through high school. He hated everything about school. The whites treated the Navajos like throwaways; they thought they were better than the Indians. It was a constant struggle, and Lyndon never won because the deck was always stacked. Neither of his parents had ever gone to school, so they could not understand what he was going through. The bus ride took an hour each way, and his fellow riders were outcasts like Lyndon from isolated homesteads on the northern edge of Navajo land.
It was hard for him to make friends. He was not an outgoing person, and most of the things his classmates liked—TV, sports, drugs, partying—were not part of his sheltered existence.
Lyndon found his studies equally uninteresting. He barely managed to maintain a C+ average. His teachers found him likable, but they agreed he lacked “proper motivation.” But computers fascinated him, and he excelled at writing code and programming. It was the only thing he was ever any good at. He even won a few awards. But awards meant too little to entice the young man to join the Computer Club or compete against other schools. He liked to sit in a quiet place and dive headfirst into the Web. Plus, he could do it almost anywhere, including the family hogan, which was blessed with a reliable internet connection that emanated from a small cellphone tower behind the nearby Church of the Latter-Day Saints.
Lyndon liked girls but had never had a steady girlfriend. He had kissed a few girls at school, but that was about it. The social life of the high school in a small town like Page was centered on the Friday night football game in the fall or the big basketball game in the winter. Long before those contests started, Lyndon was home with no way to get back to school. He couldn’t leave unless someone else was driving, and those options were severely limited. So sports were out, and so were girls. Anyway, none of the girls in school wanted anything to do with the tall, gangly Bob Marley freak.
Lyndon’s school experience resembled a criminal work release program.
He got on the bus in the morning at the end of a gravel road off Highway 89 that was the family driveway. He came back on the same bus in the late afternoon and walked down the same dusty road to his family’s hogan above Hot Na Na Wash where he lived with his mother, father, and twin sister Grace.
Twins were rare in Navajo culture, and as with the Hopi, were considered imbued with special powers. Both cultures had mythological Hero Twins. According to Navajo legend, Born of Water and Monster Slayer were the twin sons of Changing Woman. Their mission was to rid the earth of the monsters who were killing the Navajo people. So in one respect, twins were worshiped. But at the same time, they were strange and unpredictable. As in the Hopi culture, twins were not disliked, but they were feared and kept at a distance.
Lyndon’s sister had caught meningitis when she was five. The disease had stunted her growth and left her crippled for life. Grace was being homeschooled by the whole family as best they could with their limited resources. As Grace could only get around in a wheelchair, she rarely left their little ranch.
Lyndon loved his sister.
Over the years, he taught her coding and computer skills, at which, like her brother, she was adept, but without the spark to grow her talents. Lyndon often marveled at how the disease changed the wiring of his sister’s scrambled brain. She was a quick learner and could follow difficult instructions, but she could not show any initiative and struggled to anticipate. It broke Lyndon’s heart.
Grace was Lyndon’s closest confidant, though her handicap limited her ability to speak. But she had a lovely smile that always lifted Lyndon’s spirits. Grace blanched the good and the bad in Lyndon’s life.
After graduating from high school, Lyndon worked remotely for a software company that ran shopping algorithms for large department stores. It paid far more than he could ever have earned working some menial blue-collar job in Page or Tuba City. And it allowed him to stay at home and help with Grace and the family chores. Aging, his parents welcomed the help.
Two years before, Lyndon had purchased a used 2012 Polaris Indian Chief motorcycle that he stumbled on one day in Flagstaff. That’s when he began growing into a man of destiny.
He had always liked hiking in the dry washes around Bitter Springs, all ending at breathtaking rim views of the Grand Canyon and Colorado River. The motorcycle allowed Lyndon to expand his horizons and explore canyons farther and farther afield.
During these forays into the isolated tributary canyons on both sides of the Colorado River, Lyndon encountered other kindred spirits—mostly belegana granola types—but occasionally, he ran into fellow Navajos. Slowly, he began developing a casual network of local hiking friends that branched out to include Navajo computer geeks.
Lyndon soon realized that the limited wideband service available on the Rez explained why there weren’t many Navajos proficient in computer science. He had grown up with an internet connection, so he assumed everyone else had one too. But that was not the case.
After a little investigating, he discovered the Navajo government had never put any pressure on the telecommunication companies to provide internet service across Navajo land. They hadn’t even asked.
The more he dug into the affairs of the tribal government, the more incensed he became. There were small Navajo towns like Montezuma Creek, Utah, on the far eastern edge of the Rez whose people lived right next to the San Juan River but had no rights to the water from that river. White ranchers a hundred miles away in Colorado did. How could this be allowed? Water rights were based on first use. The Indians had clearly been there first, so why didn’t they have water rights? Where was the Navajo tribal government when the people needed them?
It took a few years for Lyndon to knit together a crew of like-minded Navajo—hikers, bikers, environmentalists, reggae lovers, computer heads, and political advocates. When the Grand Canyon Esplanade came knocking at the Navajo Council door and was welcomed inside with open arms, that had been the final straw.
Chairman Jimmy Greyeyes and his fellow Council members had not seen Lyndon Za coming, but he and his young friends had been building like storm clouds over Navajo for years. When they finally unleashed their fury, nothing could stand in their way.