Born of Two Worlds
Cheii and San Rafael: The Long Road Home
Survivors Like Us — Part One of Five
What the Horny Toad, the Coyote, and Other Sacred Animals
Can Teach Us About Navajo Resilience
By Nicole Parham, DHSc, MEd, MLS(ASCP)
I brought my daughter with me to a science conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During our sightseeing, we stood on the original grounds of Fort Pitt.
Fort Pitt is known to be one of the first places where smallpox-infected blankets were distributed to Indigenous tribes. Standing there, I felt the weight of that history settle into my chest in a way that is difficult to describe. My daughter was beside me, curious, asking questions. And I stood there thinking something I had never quite put into words before: we are here because someone in my ancestral line either did not take the blanket, or survived the blanket.
That is a sentence that contains centuries. It contains grief and it contains miracle. It is the most compressed version of my people's story that I know how to tell.
"We are here because someone in my ancestral line either did not take the blanket, or survived the blanket."
I am half Diné, half Hispanic from New Mexico. I grew up mostly on the Navajo Reservation. I do not speak Navajo. I do not speak Spanish. For a long time, I thought that meant I did not fully belong to either world.
I was wrong.
I am the living intersection of two underrepresented Southwestern cultures who grew up on the land they both call home. Both have always turned to teachers, from the land and from spiritual belief, for protection, guidance, and survival. The belief is that these teachers wait to provide their lessons. This is me, finally showing up to learn.
This series has five parts. Each one holds two cultures at once. A Navajo animal teacher paired with a New Mexico Hispano spiritual protector. Not because the pairing is forced, but because when I look honestly at both traditions, I keep finding the same lessons waiting in different forms. Survival. Memory. The refusal to disappear.
We begin where every long journey begins: with the question of home, and what it costs to find your way back to it.
Cheii, the Horned Lizard and San Rafael, the Archangel
The Navajo Side: The Long Walk of 1864
In the summer of 1863, the United States Army began a campaign to remove the Diné from their ancestral homeland in what is now the Four Corners region of the Southwest. By 1864, approximately 10,000 Navajo men, women, and children had been forced to march more than three hundred miles to a desolate internment camp called Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico.
The walk itself killed hundreds. Bosque Redondo killed more. The land was poor, the water was bad, and the crops failed. The Diné were told they would learn to be a different kind of people on that land. They did not.
In 1868, after four years, the Diné negotiated the Treaty of Bosque Redondo and were permitted to return home. The moment their leaders saw the sacred peak of Dibé Ntsaa, Hesperus Mountain, one of the four sacred mountains marking the boundary of Diné Bikéyah, their homeland, they wept.
They had survived. They came home. They rebuilt on the same sacred land their ancestors had always known.
This is the story of Cheii, the horned lizard. In Navajo tradition, Cheii , which means Grandfather, is a figure of protection and endurance. He is small. He is ancient-looking, armored by nature in a way that seems almost too deliberate, as if the earth itself gave him what he needed to survive. He moves slowly, but he does not leave. He stays close to the ground, close to home. He knows the land because he has never stopped knowing it.
The Diné who walked back from Bosque Redondo carried Cheii with them in their understanding of the world. You endure. You stay close to what you know. You come home.
The New Mexico Hispano Side: The Patron of Travelers
San Rafael the Archangel is not as well known outside of New Mexico and the broader Catholic tradition as figures like San Francisco or the Virgin of Guadalupe. But in the villages and parishes of northern New Mexico, San Rafael has watched over travelers for more than four centuries.
He is depicted carrying a staff and a fish, guiding people safely through dangerous roads. His name means God has healed. He appears in the Book of Tobit, serving as a guide to a young man on a long and uncertain journey, revealing himself only at the end as the angel who had been present all along.
The Spanish settlers who traveled the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the Royal Road of the Interior, north into New Mexico in 1598 brought San Rafael with them. They were walking into the unknown, into a landscape that did not belong to them but that they were determined to make their home. San Rafael was their protection on the road.
Four centuries later, his image is still carved into bultos, small hand-carved wooden saints, in New Mexico homes. Families pass them down. The saint-makers who create them are still working, still carving from the same cottonwood roots and painting with the same mineral-based pigments their grandmothers used.
San Rafael is still walking with travelers. The road is just different now.
What They Share
Cheii and San Rafael are not the same figure. I am not trying to collapse the distance between two traditions or suggest that they are secretly telling one story. They are not. They belong to different peoples, different spiritual frameworks, different histories.
But they rhyme.
Both say: know where you came from. Both say: the road home is long, but it exists. Both say: you were given what you need to survive this, even when you cannot see it clearly.
The Diné who returned from Bosque Redondo knew their homeland by its sacred mountains. They oriented themselves by landmarks that had been part of their understanding of the world since the beginning. They came home because they had never stopped knowing where home was.
The New Mexico Hispano families who carried San Rafael north on the Camino Real were also orienting themselves by something they brought with them. A belief. A protection. A guide who would reveal himself fully only at the end of the journey.
Both traditions understood that survival requires more than physical endurance. It requires knowing what you are surviving toward.
"Survival requires more than physical endurance. It requires knowing what you are surviving toward."
Myself
Standing at Fort Pitt with my daughter, I was not thinking about survival as a concept. I was experiencing it as a fact. My ancestor either refused the blanket or survived it. Some version of that choice or that luck traveled forward through generations and eventually produced me, standing on the original grounds of a colonial fort, with my daughter asking why I had gone quiet.
I did not have a clean answer for her that afternoon. I am working on one. This blog is part of that work.
I grew up without fluency in either of my languages. That is not an accident or a personal failing. It is what happens when systems work as designed. The boarding school era was designed to sever Native children from their languages. The broader assimilation pressures on New Mexico Hispano families were designed to fold a distinct cultural identity into a generic Americanness that had no room for either Diné or Hispano specificity.
It worked, partially. I do not speak Navajo. I do not speak Spanish. But I am here, learning both traditions, finding my way back to stories that were always mine.
Cheii sits in the sun, patient, close to the earth, waiting.
San Rafael walks beside travelers on long roads, present whether seen or not.
Both say the same thing to me: you were never lost. You just had not yet found your way back.
I am finding it now.
Next in the series:
Part Two: Mąii and El Coyote — The Trickster Belongs in Both Worlds
Nicole Parham, DHSc, MEd, MLS(ASCP) is a laboratory scientist, educator, and grant writer based in Maryland. She writes about science, culture, and the places where they meet.
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