1932: WATERLESS MOUNTAIN by Laura Adams Armer, with illustrations by Sidney Armer and Laura Adams Armer
In the month of Short Corn, when drooping clouds floated white against the blue, and fringed dust rose from the washes, Younger Brother tended the sheep.
Here are the first three paragraphs of the “about the author” jacket copy of 1932 Newbery author Laura Adams Armer, worth reprinting in full before we talk about her book:
“In 1859 Charles Wilson Adams walked across the plains to California, driving an ox team to the land of promise. He settled in Sacramento and reared a family of three; Laura, the youngest, was born January 12, 1874. Her childhood was spent in San Francisco, where she attended public school at intervals, to the age of sixteen. Owing to delicate health, she was not able to proceed with the ordinary school education of her generation. This enforced quiet and lack of companionship made her a dreamer, and she remembered the green spring hills of San Francisco as her most beloved environment. Always the beauty of nature was her inspiration and her passion.
From the ages of 19 to 24 she studied drawing and painting at the California School of Design in San Francisco. Arthur Matthews was her instructor and guide, advising her to keep away from systems and academic training. She was married at 28 to Sidney Armer, an art student also working with Mr. Matthews.
Not until she was fifty did she have the opportunity to free herself in the matter of expression. She went to the Navaho reservation in northern Arizona, where the beauty of a mountain and sky, and the mythology of a primitive people loosened the springs of her creative ability, and she painted thirty canvasses. After that she went back every year, interested in Navaho folklore.”
And that’s how we got to Waterless Mountain. Well, it’s not how we got there right away, because Armer first made a documentary film about the ‘Navaho’, and then “copied a hundred sacred sand paintings for the Rockefeller Museum in Santa Fe”. It’s one of the more unusual backgrounds for a Newbery-winning author; she started her career very late in life because her health conditions kept her out of school, she went to art school but was told that art school - or any kind of schooling - wouldn’t do her any good, and then she spent the rest of her career talking about the Navajo, who maybe didn’t need a frail white lady from San Francisco to tell their story for them, but what do I know. The reality is that you weren’t going to have anyone get a Navajo story published in the 1930s unless they were a frail white lady.
Armer was certainly sincere in her passion for the Navajo, but Waterless Mountain is very strange. Most of it is boring, and as you would expect from the children’s books of this era, there’s no discussion of what happened to the Navajo, or why there are a lot fewer Navajo in America than there used to be, or who we would consider responsible for that drop in population. Except, maybe, there is?
I guess my first question for you is “when do you think the United States government stopped doing terrible things that resulted in the mass death of the Navajo”, because oh boy it's later than you think. I mean, as you'd expect, things didn't exactly start off super great. After the Mexican-American war, there was repeated skirmishing and livestock raiding between the new American residents of New Mexico and the indigenous Navajo, leading to an eventual treaty in 1849. The treaty did not fix everything, in the sense that fighting continued between both parties. There was another reason the treaty did not fix everything: literally on his way to sign the treaty, the Navajo chief Hastiin Narbona, a prominent voice for peace between the Navajo and United States was murdered by American forces in a dispute over a horse.
Things, as it turns out, got worse. The early 1860s, referred to as “the fearing time” by the Navajo, saw repeated military action on the part of the United States to kill and enslave Navajo and destroy their food supplies. Many of these actions were ordered and supported by the New Mexico military government, and then a few of them were explicitly forbidden by the New Mexico government but then militiamen did them anyway.
It still gets worse. 1864 to 1866 saw the infamous “Long Walk of the Navajo”, which is a slightly misleading name since it actually refers to over 50 different instances of forced displacement, in which thousands of Navajo were forced, at gunpoint, to walk hundreds of miles from their homeland to reservations. About a third of the interred Navajo population - about 2,400 men, women, and children - died. Some Navajo were enslaved by the American residents during this time, which you’ll notice was after our country ended slavery on paper.
Starting in the 1870s and continuing until at least the 1920s, Navajo children were forced to attend “residential schools” in which they were forbidden from speaking their native language or holding on to their culture, and forcibly folded into American culture (usually Christan culture, as many of the residential schools were run by religious orders). Parents hid their children from the government so they wouldn’t be taken away to these schools.
That brings us into the twentieth century, when you would think Americans would act a little more humanely, but they did not. During the Dust Bowl, the federal government began to worry about the Navajo possibly having too many livestock and stretching the resources in our arable and grazable land. Delighting everyone with their proactivity, the American government then took it upon themselves to purchase, slaughter, and eventually confiscate livestock from the Navajo in the mid-1930s, livestock that was originally provided from the government to the Navajo as part of a peace treaty. For many Navajo families, their main sources of income were destroyed; some Navajo invested their livestock with religious significance.
The bad stuff kept coming. From the 1940s until, like, the 2000s, because Navajo land is sitting on top of a lot of uranium, the government mined the stuff without any real concern for environmental protections or, you know, whether the Navajo were going to get radiation poisoning. Until the 1970s, there weren’t any real regulations on how to mine uranium at all, and then after the 1970s there were regulations but the government doesn’t appear to have made any reparations or even really addressed what they did at all or why Navajo people keep getting cancer.
The history is not great. Waterless Mountain is not about that history. Except that it kind of might be?
Like I said, Waterless Mountain, the story of a young Navajo boy who goes on a few adventures, is mostly pretty boring, but I can’t get past “The Big Man”. The Big Man is an older white gentleman who runs a business near the Navajo reservation. Here’s our first introduction to him on page 7:
“There in a very small room sat a very big man. He did not sit on the floor as Navaho men did. His feet only were on the floor and he sat up in the air on a board supported by four sticks. Another wide board on higher sticks stood in front of him, and the Big Man made queer clicking noises on rows of little round white things that he pressed down with his fingers…Younger Brother [the protagonist] thought he had never seen so kind a face and he knew right away that the Big Man must be a medicine man. He could feel power shining through the blue eyes, and tingling in the fingers that touched his head.”
Okay. Nice. But here’s page 28, the start of the fifth chapter:
“‘But Grandfather [term of respect], I cannot pay for the wire.’
‘Why not, my child? Did I not pay six pesos for your corn?’
‘But Grandfather, I am poor. A little mouse chewed a hole in my wife’s moccasin.’
The Big Man looked up from his desk in astonishment. What excuse would these Navahos make next?...
The Navaho was very serious. He had driven fifteen miles with the corn and he must take back the barbed wire to protect his field. His wife was with him and she had a rug to sell. The trader weighed it and paid her cash. She had intended to redeem her turquoise bracelet which had been pawned i nthe winter, but if her husband needed the wire, the money must go for that. She handed it to the Big Man, saying:
‘Is there enough to buy coffee and sugar, too?’
‘No,’ he answered. ‘There is not enough.’
Kindly though the Big Man appears, the reality is that he controls a large chunk of the economic life and commerce of the entire Navajo settlement. He has power, and they don’t. This plays out in a few glancing anecdotes throughout the novel. Although the Big Man is clearly not the central character, the Navajo are repeatedly asking him for favors or trying to find some way to sell or trade something else to him for more money. Again, he doesn’t seem like a blatantly evil person: late in the novel, when a criminal burns down the local pawn shop, the Big Man comps all of the Navajo for the items they had placed in hock. The Big Man even sets up Younger Brother’s mother to do some weaving in the middle of a museum exhibit so that tourists can watch authentic Navajo weaving in real time. He can help people out.
But you can see how all of this feels off, and while I doubt Armer did this intentionally, Waterless Mountain ends up being an interesting account of one young Navajo boy, living in an era where white settlers were slowly creeping in and beginning to displace their culture and economy. Remember, Armer was an art school lady from the big city, she wasn't a Navajo. Her main claim to fame before this novel, a novel that won the Newbery shortly before the US government took it upon themselves to curb the Navajo livestock herds, was copying their sacred art and getting the copies into a museum. She's an outsider - but only an outsider could have gotten a book deal in this era - and the passing remarks she makes about the Big Man, read in a more contemporary light, are a little more unsettling than Armer likely intended. You can almost hear the ominous string cues when somebody says “oh boy I'm going to be broke soon unless the Big Man decides to be nice enough and help me out”. The book that started out as weirdly paternal grows into something weirdly prophetic. Almost a century later, the foreground has become boring and the background has become much more significant.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1942 medalist, The Matchlock Gun by Walter D. Edmonds.