BRUCE BURNHAM INTERVIEW

   

   [BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE 1]

   

   This is Brad Cole from Northern Arizona University.

It's July 17, 1998.  We're with Bruce Burnham, in

Sanders, Arizona, at the R. B. Burnham and Company

Trading Post.  Also present in the room is Lew Steiger

running the sound and camera equipment.  We're going to

do an oral history with Bruce about his years as an

Indian trader.  This is part of the United Indian

Traders Association Oral History Project.

   

   Cole:  Bruce, what we'd like to do is just kind of

have you tell us about your life.  We'd like to start

at the very beginning.  When and where were you born?

   

   Burnham:  In 150 words or less?

   

   Cole:  You can go up to 2,000, if you want.  (both

chuckle)

   

   Burnham:  Well, I was born in 1940 in Farmington,

New Mexico.  I like to tell everybody I was born on the

reservation, because my parents owned the Bisti Trading

Post at the time I was born, and also an interest in

the Burnham Trading Post, which is over near Two Grey

Hills.  So I like to tell people that I was born and

raised on the reservation.  I was actually born in a

hospital in Farmington in 1940.  We lived at the Bisti

Trading Post at the time, so my earliest childhood

recollections are of the Bisti Trading Post.  It seemed

to have really influenced my life inasmuch as the

exposure I had early on to people were Navajo people,

and very rarely white people.  So I was very inclined

to be drawn to the Navajo people.  The first women that

I knew in my life were housekeepers and nannies, and

they were Navajo and they spoke Navajo.  My playmates

were their children.  So you might say I left Bisti

with a five-year-old vocabulary of Navajo.

   I have a sister who is three years older than me,

and when it was time for her to start school--she

started school one year late, she didn't start school

until she was seven.  So I had just turned five years

old when we moved from Bisti to Farmington so that we

could go to school.  Therefore, I was then away from

the reservation until I got out of the Army in 1960.

In 1960, I went back to work on the reservation.

   During the period of time from 1945 to 1960, even

though I was away from the reservation, I still had

kind of an interest in the Navajo people.  We didn't

live that far from the reservation, so I still had a

little bit of association with a few Navajo people.

These basically were Navajo families who had moved off

the reservation into town.  One of the kids I remember

was one of my best friends when I was in Farmington,

was a boy named Richard Simpson.  I've lost track of

him now, but in talking to a mutual friend, I found out

he's done quite well in life, and he's probably as un-

Navajo as I would be.  He's kept some affiliation with

the tribe, but he's never moved back to the

reservation, so basically he's just been absorbed in

the dominant society.

   When I got out of the Army, I got a job delivering

Coca-Cola.  One of my first stops on that Coca-Cola

route was the Shiprock Trading Post.  And I remember,

to this day, it's a fresh memory in my mind, and that

was thirty-eight years ago, that when I went in that

wareroom to deliver the Coca-Cola, the odors in that

wareroom just overwhelmed me.  It was the odor of

mutton fat that had been walked on and walked-into the

floor.  It was kerosene where you'd fill a kerosene can

and slosh a little on the floor.  And it was the odor

of the sacks of flour--you know, this huge pile of

flour back there.  And then there were some sheep pelts

back there.  So it was a combination of all those odors

of that trading post that just brought back every

childhood memory I had--and even some I didn't have,

because there was just something that was so appealing

to me there, because of the nostalgia of that odor,

that I went in and applied for a job on the first day

of my job as a Coke delivery man.  I went in and

applied for a job in the trading post.  They didn't

hire me there, but they referred me to another store

which was the Red Valley Trading Post--or the Red Rock

Trading Post is the name of the store--owned by Jewel

McGee and Troy Kennedy.  So they hired me, and this was

kind of, oh, late in the fall.  I went to work there,

and we were in the process of shipping lambs when I

went to work there.  I stayed there through the winter,

and I had just married a non-Navajo, and she couldn't

stand living on the reservation, so we had a lot of

problems stemming from that.

   In that day and age, when you went to work at a

trading post, you went to work for so much a month and

your board and room.  And then you were expected to

live there twenty-four hours a day.  So even your day

off you had to stay and guard the store.  But then

periodically you could get to take a Saturday and

Sunday off once a month to go to town.  So that was

just more than she could handle, so we moved back to

Farmington, and then I got a job delivering milk for

the dairy there.  I still had to call on trading posts,

and every time I'd call on a trading post, I would just

feel like that was where I needed to be.

   And then Elijah Blair called one day and said, "I've

got a vacancy here for a manager.  Would you be

interested in taking a job working for me as manager of

the Aneth Trading Post in Aneth, Utah?"  And I said,

"Well, I'll come look at it."  (chuckles)  I had

started at $250 a month and my board and room at Red

Rock.  And then I think Elijah offered me $300 a month

and my board and room, which at that time was far less

than what I was making as a delivery man, but I just

couldn't resist it.  I went back to work for the

trading post, went to work for Aneth Trading Post.

   So then I stayed there for about four years and a

divorce.  My wife just wasn't inclined to stay at the

store, and I wasn't inclined to live in town.  She

wanted us to live next door to her parents in

Farmington, so we just got a divorce.

   Every morning I'd look out the window and watch this

same old Navajo man.  His name was Sagetnitso, and I'd

watch that man ride his horse up out of the valley and

down through this wash and come up on our side of the

wash.  He was always just ramrod straight.  The man had

dignity, and it always impressed me, because he didn't

slouch down in the saddle, he was just always ramrod

straight, and in perfect cadence with every hoofbeat.

He'd just lay that quirk on the horse's flank just with

every stride.  He wasn't whippin' the horse, he was

just--that was part of the cadence of him riding up out

of the wash.  So every morning I watched the same

fellow.  He's the only Navajo I've ever met in my life

that was absolutely punctual.  It wasn't five minutes

after eight when he came to the store, he wasn't

waiting there at five minutes 'til eight--he was there

exactly at eight o'clock every morning, and he was just

absolutely punctual.  There was a ritual about that

part of his daily routine.  He would come in the store

and he'd roll a smoke with the makings that we kept on

the counter there.  He'd roll a smoke and buy a Nehi

grape soda.  He'd walk over in the bull pen there and

sit down on the bench with that smoke that he'd just

rolled, and he'd have his open Nehi pop.  He'd sit

there on the floor and then he would light that Bull

Durham cigarette and fill his mouth with smoke, and

then take that Nehi grape soda and take a little swig.

And that carbonated water would burn the inside of his

mouth, and he'd really salivate.  Then he'd go

(ptooie!) and spit on the floor.  (laughs)  I'd go get

a mop and mop it up.  He only spit on the floor once a

day, and that was just that opening ritual every

morning.  It just so intrigued me, because the guy was

just a great man.  There was an air of nobility about

him.  He was a great guy.  As long as I live, I'll

never forget him.

   I was watching him ride up out of the wash one day

and I said, "You know, here I am, twenty-four years

old, and I'm watchin' the same old Indian ride the same

old palomino horse up out of that draw every morning to

come in here and spit on my floor, and I'm gonna hafta

mop it up.  You know, there must be more to life than

this.  The whole world's going a hundred miles an hour

out there, and I'm stuck in Aneth, Utah, watchin' that

same old Indian every morning."  And it just started

festering on me, and finally one day I just walked in

and I took my keys and I threw 'em on the counter and

told Lij, "I'm gone.  I can't stay here, the whole

world's passing me by."  And so I left and went back to

Farmington and helped my father for a little while.

   And then Lij Blair sold out to Roscoe McGee, and

Roscoe McGee called me and said, "Bruce, you gotta go

back out there and run the store for me for about three

or four months while my daughter and son-in-law get

acclimated to it and everything.  Would you please do

that?"  I don't know whether it was because Jewel and

Roscoe were my cousins, or what it was, but I felt a

little bit obligated to go back out.  So I did, I went

back out for about three or four months and then I

left.

   Aneth, Utah, was a difficult place for me.  I don't

know whether it was my age or what it was, but it

seemed like I had a fist fight with every Navajo within

twenty-five or thirty miles of there.  Every time a

young Navajo guy would get drunk, he'd figure, "Well,

I'm gonna be the one that whips the trader."  And he'd

come in…  I got so paranoid, I guess, while I was

working there, that it just didn't take anything to

aggravate to the point of going to blows.  It just was

eating on me, because I thought, "One of these days,

one of these guys is really gonna clobber me."  And the

way luck had it, I never did get whipped while I was

there, but I was agitated about it enough that I had

kind of ill feelings about Aneth, Utah.  To this day, I

would never consider going back to Aneth, Utah, simply

because I felt like everybody just had a chip on their

shoulder there.  And it was probably more me than

anything else.  I was young and I was gonna assert my

authority and be respected, so I whipped the guys that

challenged me.  It was kind of a tough period in my

life.

   So anyway, to make a long story short, I left Aneth,

Utah, and loaded everything that I owned in this world

in a little Volkswagen convertible, and decided to go

to California and make my fortune.

   

   Cole:  What year was that?

   

   Burnham:  That was 1964, late 1964.  So I went to

San Francisco and lived in Haight-Ashbury for a year-

and-a-half.  I was working for Delta Airlines there, a

full-time job.  And then I had a part-time job as a

certified mortician's air service.  And what I was

doing, I was helping ship the bodies back that were

coming back from Vietnam.  We'd pick 'em up at the

Oakland Army Terminal, and then because of my knowledge

with air freight and air freight scheduling, that was

what my job was, was to route those remains of the

soldiers.  It paid good and everything, but I was just

a duck out of water out there in California, and I

found out that it was goin' the same speed as anywhere--

it wasn't passin' me by.

   Well, after a year-and-a-half there, I don't know

whether I was tryin' to be a beatnik or what it was,

but I was kind of enjoyin' a different kind of

lifestyle.  But my father had emphysema and was pretty

sick, so I came home to visit him.  And when I did, I

had worked a full shift that day and got off at eleven

o'clock in the evening and headed for home.  Well, I

drove from eleven o'clock in the evening until five the

next afternoon, and I was in Tuba City on my way to

Farmington.  And so I thought, "Well, old Lij Blair

owns the Dinnebito Trading Post down here, so I'll just

go down there and visit him.  I need a place to stay

tonight anyway, I'm too tired to drive on the rest of

the way.  So I drove out to Dinnebito and got there and

asked Lij if I could spend the night and he said,

"Sure," and put a cot in the wareroom of the trading

post.  (laughs)  Boy, I'll tell you what!  I thought

I'd sleep like a baby, but I didn't.  I was awake all

night.  The smells of that.  Every trading post has the

same odor.  You know, you could probably blindfold a

trader and walk him through a thousand businesses and

he'd tell you which ones the trading posts were, just

from that same odor that you have in every trading

post.

   The next morning over breakfast, Lij says, "Well,

when do you want to go back to work?"  And I said,

"Well, it's September now.  Soon as deer season's over,

I'll go back to work."  And he said, "All right."  So I

went back to work for him at Dinnebito and stayed there

for about five years, and then struck out on my own

after that.  I've had a lot of really great pleasant

experiences working around the trading posts.  That's

where I met my wife, was while I was at Dinnebito.

   It's a little ironic.  One summer my younger brother

was working for us, and he asked me one day, "Bruce, do

you think you're ever going to get married again?"

See, I was pushin' thirty then.  He says, "Do you think

you're ever going to get married again?"  And I said,

"Yeah, I'm gonna get married again."  And he says,

"Well, who you gonna marry?  You don't ever go to

town."  I got in a rut where I didn't even go to town

anymore.  He said, "Who you gonna marry?" and I said,

"Well, somebody like that girl over there, Virginia

Deal [phonetic spelling]."  I think she was about

seventeen at the time.  And he says, "Oh, yeah?  When

you gonna get married?"  I said, "I don't know, before

I turn thirty."  I believe I was about twenty-eight

when that conversation happened.  As it was, two or

three years later I called my brother and said, "Well,

I'm gettin' married."  He said, "Who you marryin'?"  I

said, "Virginia Deal."  (laughter)  Needless to say,

she didn't know I existed 'til later on, but I was

always impressed with her--not only was she a beautiful

young lady, but she had a poise and something about her

that just had class.  I was infatuated with her years

before we ever got married.  I asked her one time,

"Didn't you know I existed?"  She said, "I didn't even

know you were in this world!"

   But anyway, I've had a lot of great memories with

Navajos.  I would say that almost all of my closest

friends have been Navajos.  There's a young Navajo man

that worked for us at Dinnebito--his name is Robert

Silas.  I hate to see this book written without an

interview with him, but he's dead now.  He was a great,

great guy.  I have many, many fond memories with just

things he and I did.  We used to go to squaw dances

together.  He was always gettin' me in a jam.  He was

settin' me up constantly when I was tryin' to learn to

speak Navajo.  He'd tell me to say something, when I'd

say it, it'd come out wrong and everyone would get a

good laugh, you know.  We were great friends.

   I left Dinnebito Trading Post with the thought in

mind--that was 1970--of buying The Gap Trading Post.  I

had made a deal with Troy Washburn to buy The Gap

Trading Post.  Well, we went over there and I spent, I

think, only eight months there.  In that eight months

we more than quadrupled the business and were really

goin' to town, really had a goin' business.  When he

saw the potential of the place, he just reneged on

sellin' it to us.  So I left there and came over here

to Sanders and bought the Cedar Point Trading Post from

C. G. Wallace, and we ran it for a year or two.  I

didn't like that store necessarily, because it was on

an interchange on Interstate 40, and it was just very

difficult to trade with the Navajos and deal with

tourists at the same time.  And so we sold out there

and put in a silversmith's shop not too far up the road

here at Corino Canyon [phonetic spelling], had forty-

five silversmiths working for us full-time.  We did

that for about three years, and I still didn't feel

right, not havin' a tradin' post.  So we came down and

built this building then in 1974.  And so that was, I

guess, when we took on this location.

   We built this rug room on the back of the store

about five years ago.  We've been here ever since.

Looking back now, I see that we've been in this

community for twenty-eight years, and it's no wonder

that I see so many of these customers that come in that

are adults now that I've known all their lives,

practically.  And for some of 'em, where I had a strong

influence in their lives was because of the years that

I spent trading with their parents--primarily their

mothers.  And so the polite form of greeting here is to

call a man Shicheii, which means "my grandfather."  And

a lot of these young Navajo people around here call me

"Grandfather" in the true sense of the word.  It's a

reward in itself to reach that stature in the

community, I think, because it affords you a lot of

respect.

   That kind of brings you up to speed.

   

   Steiger:  How would you spell that, Shicheii, if you

had to?

   

   Burnham:  Oh, S-H-I-C-H-E-I-I.

   

   Steiger:  And I've got one other question--not to

interrupt.  How would you describe that trading post

odor?  You mentioned it, but could you describe it, and

how would you, if you could?

   

   Burnham:  What do you mean?

   Steiger:  What does it consist of?  You said "all

the trading posts have the same smell."

   

   Burnham:  Yeah, it's the odor of your customer--my

grandmother used to describe that odor as a "stale"

odor.  It's a combination of a Navajo's clothing that

is cooking over a greasewood fire.  It's that

greasewood smoke, it's little bits of mutton fat that

drop on the floor and then are ground into the floor.

It's the floor-sweeping compound.  It's the kerosene.

It's the sheep pelts.  We used to buy a lot of sheep

pelts, and the odor of those sheep pelts.  And the odor

of a big pile of flour in the wareroom.  Those are all

odors that exist in almost every trading post.  Not so

much so anymore, because so many trading posts have

converted over to being mini-supermarkets or

convenience markets.  But the old-time trading posts

that dealt in general merchandise, bought lambs and

bought wool…  See, that's another thing, there was

always a bag of wool layin' around in a wareroom, so

lots of times you kept some of the colored wool and

didn't ship it, because you would sell it back to your

customers to card and make the natural greys to go into

rugs.  So there were always those odors [that] just

almost labeled a tradin' post.

   

   Cole:  Did the odor change throughout the year much?

   

   Burnham:  So much of that odor was just imbedded in

the wood floors of the store that it never really

changed a whole lot.  Of course now the odor from the

wool would be the odor of the lanolin plus the urine

that is on the wool.  So that establishes part of the

odor.  The other strong, dominant odor would be from

the sheep pelts, the flesh side of the pelt, where

there was fat or oil of the fat still there, and even

getting a little rancid.  You cut a sheep up and you

got chunks of fat layin' around, and those just get

kinda ground into the floor and into the soles of your

shoes and you walk on the wooden floor, so those are

all just odors that become so strong in a tradin' post.

   

   Cole:  You mentioned kind of how you fit into this

community.  Maybe if you could describe for us a little

bit what the trader means to the community.

   

   Burnham:  Well, my wife and I just got back from

Houston, Texas.  Yesterday, almost the entire day, we

discussed that--what the trader's role is in the

community, and how the trader's wife played such a

different role.  I would say that the role of the

trader in the community was almost family-like,

inasmuch as you had a responsibility to take care of

your customer.  You had a responsibility of making sure

they ate year-round.  A trader couldn't just

merchandise his wares, because what would happen would

be, the temptation would be just too great for the

customer to just spend all their buying power in a six-

week period, and then have two, three months of no

ability to buy at all.  And so a trader had a grave

responsibility of budgeting his customer.

   That changed with the cash flow.  When there became

a lot of welfare assistance on the reservation, the

trader's cash flow really changed, because there were

many days where we didn't see a dollar in the cash

register in cash, and yet we did a volume of business

that day.  But as that cash flow increased, to where

there was money on the reservation, and your customer

had some money to spend, you weren't quite as prone to

keep your thumb on a customer and not let 'em buy

somethin'.  You knew always, within ten dollars--I

don't know how we did it--but a good trader always knew

within ten dollars of what every customer owed.  And

you knew that they would have ten, twelve bags of wool,

or you knew that they would have seventy-five or eighty

head of lambs to sell.  So you knew what their capacity

was to pay their bill, so you kind of gauged 'em and

only would let 'em spend so much every month, knowing

that by the time wool season was here, or the time lamb

season was here, they would be pretty much at their

limit.  It's just ironic how things seem to work out.

   We knew within ten dollars of how much a customer

owed.  We knew within ten or fifteen dollars how much

they would have in assets to pay.  So it was a funny

system, but that was probably the gravest

responsibility that a trader had.  But it wasn't

something that was explained to him, it was just

something that you took for granted, and your customer

took it for granted, and that's just the way it was.

You didn't do anything that would put a family in a

position of not being able to eat.  You had to be

pretty hard-nosed about things sometimes.

   I always enjoyed a story that Walt Scribner told me

up in Farmington.  Walter started tradin' when he was

thirteen years old.  He said that a trader told him…

I forget who the trader was now, but anyway, they said,

"Now, look…"  This was at Shonto Trading Post.  He

said, "All you've got to do…"  It was Hugh Heflin.

He said, "All you've got to do is learn how to put

everything on those shelves that the Navajo wants, and

then learn how to say �dooda.�  That means, "You can't

have it."  (laughter)  It's kind of an amusing story,

but the thing of it is, you had to learn how to say no.

Some traders learned how to say no, and other traders

couldn't say no, didn't know how to say no.

   You had to be able to say no, without offending your

customer.  What a lot of traders did to manage that was

they would put like the Levi's and the socks and the

tee shirts and the underwear--everything that wasn't

absolutely essential to have--they'd put in a box.  And

then old Hosteen Shorty might walk up to you and say,

"I want a pair of Levi's."  Well, he couldn't see 'em

openly on a shelf, so you'd say, "�din, we don't have

any."  And then he would understand, and that was a way

of saving face for your customer.  You didn't have to

say, "No, you can't have 'em, 'cause you owe too much."

You just said, "We don't have any."  And he knew you

had 'em, I knew I had 'em, but if you said, "�din,"

then that meant that it wasn't embarrassing to him or

humiliating.

   The next guy in line to step up might be the same

size as Hosteen Shorty, and he'd step up and say, "I

want a pair of Levi's," and you just go over to the box

and get a pair of Levi's for him.  All there was, was a

waist measurement that we sold.  The length didn't

really matter because it just meant you either had more

or less of a cuff to roll up.

   So anyway, that's what it meant.  That was part of

the gauging of a customer's credit, and slowin' 'em

down, or lettin' 'em have something.  It was a real

balancing act or a juggling act the trader went

through.  And yet that was probably the determining

factor for success or failure for a trader.  If you

went out and just sold everything that they wanted, as

they wanted it, and then they couldn't…  You'd have

had to then carry 'em above and beyond the amount they

were able to pay, or you had to cut 'em off and starve

'em.  And no trader ever was successful at starvin' his

customers.  So that was, I'd say, probably the essence

of being a trader, was that ability to manage his

customer's resources indirectly.

   

   Cole:  What about today in your trading post?

   

   Burnham:  Today it's changed, because we have a cash

flow.  Now, we merchandise.  In our store we try to

make it attractive and build a nice display of items we

want to sell--the same way they do in town.  Now we

want to sell it to them.  Now we don't say "Dooda."  We

still do to an extent, because we still run credit, we

still have thirty-day credit on Social Security checks,

but thirty-day credit is far different than six-month

credit.  So it's easier to gauge your customer, but we

still do to a certain degree.

   

   Cole:  Bruce, how would the trader be seen as a

community-builder?  Would he be part of that?

   

   Burnham:  Oh, definitely!  You know, if you

understood that in the early days of trading, it was

almost the same out here as it was in the book The

Grapes of Wrath.  You had a bunch of people that

weren't tryin' to make a fortune, they were tryin' to

feed their family.  And if you looked at some of the

old trading posts that were originally built, many of

'em had dirt floors and very crude buildings.  I

remember the Bisti Trading Post when I was little.  We

had a wood floor in it, but that was a pretty modern

store.  But the whole house was probably smaller than

this room, and yet it was adequate.  But everything

that we had focused in running the store.  We didn't

eat all the cheese, because we needed it for our

customers.  We were very meager in what we ate out of

the store, because it was really our inventory we were

depleting.  We didn't have refrigeration, and so there

was just…  And the customer knew that when you went

to town to get your supplies different times of the

year, how long they had to come in and be able to

expect to buy some fresh bacon, instead of salt pork;

and how many days there would be cheese available; or

how many days there would be bologna available.  And so

your customers got used to that.

   

   Cole:  How long would that be?

   

   Burnham:  Well, usually two days.  By noon Tuesday

you were usually out of cheese and out of bologna.

Now, if it was in the wintertime when it was cold, then

we had a little storage room that was always in the

shade and stayed pretty cold, so that time would

extend.  But the customers always knew what day of the

week you butchered, and then there'd be fresh meat that

day and half of the next day.  That's the longest you

could keep it without it spoiling during the

summertime.  From early spring up until--well, from

about January until probably June, was a period of time

when they didn't butcher many of their own animals;

one, because they were poor; two, because they were

lambing.  So we would butcher at the store, and so they

knew that if they wanted cheese and regular bacon that

they would come in sometime between Monday morning and

noon Tuesday, and they might get some regular slab

bacon, or some cheese or bologna.  Then they knew if

they came in on Wednesday, up until maybe noon on

Thursday, they might be able to buy a piece of fresh

mutton.  And so we ate the same provisions.  That was

the way it was.  It was really a deal where you'd hire

somebody and they were more concerned about just having

shelter over their head and feeding their family.  That

was the main criteria.  It wasn't real lucrative until

probably the early sixties it started becoming much

more lucrative to own a trading post.  And so I guess

what I'm trying to say, the early traders came out,

they weren't wealthy merchants, they were young people

that were trying to make a living, just doing anything

they could to feed their family.  And I think in doing

that, they came to grips with the fact that if they

built the community up, that as the community went, so

they did also.  If they built the community up,

improved the livestock or got a better price for the

wool or did this or did that, the community would come

up.  Well, it would also bring the trader up in the

process.  So the good traders were builders.  Just by

trial and error, the proof was in the pudding.  The

successful traders were the traders that stayed in an

area a long time.  And the reason they stayed in an

area a long time was because they were building the

community.  They were doing something to enhance their

position there, and in doing that, it always brought

the community up with 'em.  And so it was kind of…

You knew there was so much livestock in the area when

you went there.  Now, to capitalize on your investment

of being there, and your time spent there, you knew

that you had to develop a better rug-weaving area, in

order to capitalize on your being there.  So you

improved the rugs, you improved the livestock, you gave

silver out and had 'em silversmith for you.  Anything

that you could do that would create extra income

greatly enhanced the families that you were dealing

with, and it enhanced your position there also.  So it

was important that a trader have the wisdom to help

guide these people along, into a little bit better

circumstances.  If you had a family that was kind of

struggling to eat, you would find a job for the man of

the house, maybe.  You might send him off to the

railroad, or you might find him a job working on a

farm, or herding sheep for someone in Mancos, Colorado.

And then he would send money home.  The trader had

quite a dynasty, and traders had a lot of power to

enforce their decisions.  Oftentimes the men didn't

like that, but the Navajo women liked it because it was

a matrilineal society out here, and the women were

pretty much in charge.  So when the trader found her

husband a job, the husband didn't really have the right

to say "I'll go or not go."  The woman would say,

"Okay, you go."  And he was under pressure to leave

then, and send money home.  A lot of men resented

havin' the trader spoil his good deal.

   You know, I think we understand that as Navajo men,

early on, were just like any of the tribal cultures--

they were the warrior and the raider, they were the

protector of the homestead.  But the women were really

in charge of everything to do with the family.  They

had the biggest responsibility there.  Well, as these

tribes were put on reservations, they lost that need

for having a protector or a warrior or a raider, and

then it went down to a deal where these men didn't have

that role any longer, going off to war or going off and

raiding.  But the women didn't relinquish any of their

power in the family, and that's how it became such a

strong matrilineal society.  Well, a lot of the men

thought that was all right, too, because it became his

sole purpose in life to father children.  And if his

wife was pregnant, then he could move on to greener

pastures 'til she'd had her child.  Then he'd come

back.  So a lot of the men…

   And they're not lazy.  I tell you, you could hire a

Navajo man and give him a shovel, and hire a guy on a

backhoe and at some point in time, that Navajo's gonna

shovel more dirt than that backhoe will.  (chuckles)

At some point in time, because of their tenacity and

their patience--he'll overtake the backhoe.  They're

great people, but I would imagine if I was a Navajo

man, I wouldn't like some white guy tellin' me when I

needed to go off and go to work.  (chuckles)

   But people realize that within their communities--

after Basque Redondo--and this is the critical point in

history for Navajo people--up until Basque Redondo and

the Long Walk, they were pretty much a nomadic…

They weren't just tied to one spot.  They did a lot of

raiding and things like that, and they got away with

it, but all these treaties that were broken caught up

with 'em, and then they were sent off to Basque

Redondo.  In going to Basque Redondo, they lost that

role in life as being the protector and the warrior.

So the traders that understood that were keen on

understanding that the economic development of the

community just absolutely hinged on the trader--and

that's what gave them such a strong, strong hold on

their area.

   Another thing.  You will not find a trader that has

something good to say about the tribe, as far as tribal

government--or the BIA.  But I'll guarantee you there

is not one trader that you talk to that would complain

about the fact that the BIA and the Navajo Tribe

protected your investment, protected your interest to

the point that they wouldn't let some other trader come

in and compete against you.  And because of the two

different cultures that we come from, and the economics

of these, and just the cultural lifestyle and

everything, you have got one group here that says,

"Well, we have to have that trader in order to get

ahead here.  But boy, he's crooked, and he's no good,"

and that's because they don't understand the profit

motive.  But based on that, they're saying that traders

are all crooks, they're no good.  "They buy something

for a dollar and they sell it for two dollars, they

sell it for more than they paid for it."  Well, see,

they don't understand overhead and profit motive.  And

so they say, "I guess we have to endure one of 'em, but

we sure don't want two of 'em!  We don't want to have

two of 'em.  Boy, we'd be double-bad then!"  Well, you

know, they just didn't understand that if they would

have opened up another trading post within a half-mile

of that trading post, or a quarter-mile of that trading

post, that they'd have had competition, they'd have had

much better prices.  So this is the trader's…  You

know, the trader's always cussin' the tribe and FTC.  I

agree with the traders that FTC just absolutely was a

law written and applied to a different circumstance

that what it was written for.

   You know, if we understand that traders were really

the heart of the economy in the community, then we

understand how they had so much control and what our

power really was.  It's really changed with the cash

flow.

   

   Cole:  Describe a little bit, if you can, the two

different economic systems--especially the Navajo

system as you perceived it as a trader.

   Burnham:  Well, the system that I see in place with

the Navajo is that if you pay a Navajo $1,000 for four

bags of wool, they will immediately convert that--not

so much now as they would have in the past--they would

have converted that cash to jewelry or goods, because

they don't see the money as having any value until it's

spent.  Once it's spent, then it is something that is

tangible, something they can use.  You know, you've got

that money in your hand, you can't eat that money, so

it has no value.  So I think you're going from one

culture that doesn't place any priority on saving

money, to a culture that in business tries to amass

money.  Everything's towards that end, of amassing

wealth.  To a Navajo, an acceptable form of amassing

wealth is to buy lots of jewelry, and then you have

that jewelry to use, and that's, you might say, the

interest on your savings account, up until the time you

decide to pawn it and convert it to something else that

you need.  And so the pleasure of ownership, which the

Navajos have a different idea of ownership…

   There are few things that the Navajos consider total

ownership of--one is your horse.  And even through

time, now, that has even evolved into the ownership of

your vehicle or your car.  If you ask a Navajo, "Whose

horse is that?"  The Navajo would say, "It is Chee's

horse, or it is So-and-So's horse."  But if it was his

horse, he would say, "Eii sh� shi���."  That means,

"That is my personal horse."  He says, "sh� shi," "sh�"

twice, you know, "my my," so that labels it as his

personal--not something owned collectively by his…

If it was collectively, he would say, "Eii nihi���,"

"it is our horse."  But he doesn't say "our horse,"

because that horse belongs to an individual.  Even if

it was another individual in that family, he wouldn't

say, "It's our horse," he would say, "It's my brother's

horse," or "my sister's horse."  So that is one thing

that Navajos really believe that they own personally,

is their saddle, is their horse.  It doesn't extend out

to "my livestock."  That's not "my my" cow.  That's

"my" cow.  But that personal, that emphasis on it being

mine mine makes it different.  And so a Navajo's idea

of ownership is radically different than ours.

Everything that I own is mine, and not in the sense of

the word, "It's mine until I need to convert it to

something else."  This possession and ownership, to us,

we feel that we own the land that we build our home on.

The Navajo doesn't feel like you have the right to own

Mother Earth.  It's not that final acquisition of it

becoming mine and no one else's.  It's only mine to use

while I need it, and then I can convert it to something

else, in the nature of being Navajo.

   So I don't know if that answers your question much.

We come from two different philosophies, and our common

denominator between these two philosophies is the very

thing that we have such a difference on, is the

ownership.  You can funnel that right down into the

focus of cash.  Man, that's my hundred-dollar bill,

period.  Probably, to us, it might be more valuable to

us in the stage of being cash, because it represents

the power to be able to leverage.  With the Navajo,

it's only yours until you need something.  It's serving

no other purpose.  Can you understand what I'm saying

there?

   

   Cole:  Yeah.

   

   Burnham:  So that one basic difference in our

philosophy really tells the whole story about the rub,

or the differences between the trader and his Navajo

customer, and why his Navajo customer feels like he is

crooked.  But that is why Navajos in general are not

capable of running a trading post, is because they have

that Navajo philosophy of life, that Navajo cultural

identity that prevents them from absolute ownership of

something.  It's complex.  Some traders understand that

outright.  Other traders have fit in, really not

knowing how or why they were successful, or what the

differences were in their lifestyles, in their

cultures.  But in order for a trader to be successful,

he has to deal with that idea of just the simplicity of

money not having any value until it's spent.  If you

understand that statement, then you understand how

important it is for us to save some of that money, and

how unimportant it is for a Navajo to save some of that

money.  In terms of being Navajo, if you wanted to save

something, you would buy 200-pound sacks of corn and

save it.  That corn might not be available when you

need it.  (laughs)  Then you'd just be stuck with a

hundred-dollar bill.  It's a difficult thing to

overcome.  And the Navajos, by choice, have chosen to

still keep that cultural identity and just let the

traders more and more kind of manage their affairs--

even the modern-day families, modern weaver families

still let, and still expect the trader to fulfill their

needs--on a daily basis, almost.  I had a gal in here a

couple of days ago that I bought a rug from for $2,500.

The next day she wanted to borrow $500 against her next

rug.

   

   [END TAPE 1, SIDE A; BEGIN SIDE B]

   

   Cole:  This is Brad Cole from Northern Arizona

University.  We're at the R. B. Burnham and Company

Trading Post in Sanders, Arizona.  It's July 17, 1998.

We're speaking with Bruce Burnham about his years as a

trader on the Navajo Reservation.  Also present in the

room is Lew Steiger.

   Bruce, you had mentioned something about the fact

that trading really became lucrative in the 1960s.  Why

was that, what changed?

   

   Burnham:  Well, it was the Great Society.  You know,

it was the fact that the states came out and had these

social programs, welfare programs and everything, that

the Navajos really hadn't been--I think they were

qualified to receive welfare, but never had the

opportunity to apply, just because they didn't know it

was there.  And so there was a thrust of wiping out

poverty in the sixties, and part of that thrust was to

let everyone know that they were eligible for welfare

benefits.  And so in the mid-sixties, I know in Arizona

they sent case workers out to the trading post.  These

are case workers that weren't familiar with Navajo,

they didn't speak Navajo--those came later--but the

early bunch came out, and they would use the trader to

interpret.  Well, the deal was that if an individual

owned 500 head of sheep, they weren't eligible for

welfare.  So what they would basically tell us to tell

our customer, or their future welfare recipient, was if

they would transfer their grazing lease and ownership

of those sheep to a daughter or somebody, then they

would be qualified for welfare.  If they would divest

themselves of their wealth, they would be eligible for

$260 a month.  That's just a figure I'm pulling out of

the air, but they would be eligible for this welfare

assistance.  So the Navajo people just thought of that

as a great opportunity--and so did the trader.  Because

what the trader could see was, well, sure, they're

going to give that livestock to a daughter, and they're

still gonna have that wool to sell, collectively, as a

family, plus we're going to have the bonus of Mary Rose

getting $260 a month cash.  Well $260 a month in cash

was equivalent of a $1,500 livestock account in the

store.  That's a pretty good-sized livestock account,

someone that had $1,500 worth of wool that came in and

paid twice a year, either $1,500 worth of lambs or

$1,500 worth of wool was the equivalent of what this

lady was going to get just for divesting herself of

this herd of sheep.  And from a pure standpoint of

economics, boy, that was the thing to do.  I didn't

know a Navajo that got rid of their livestock.  They

only transferred the ownership over to a relative--

usually a daughter--and so that doubled their

resources, their source of income.

   With that came the biggest change to ever hit the

Navajo Reservation, and that was that all of a sudden

there was money, everybody had money to spend.  So

stores started converting from behind the counter to

self-service and merchandising.  Boy, you know, we

thought that was just great!  I guess we weren't smart

enough to see that we were signing our own (chuckles)

death certificate as traders, because with this cash

flow came pickups.  Everybody could make a down payment

on a pickup and then the big investment in a Navajo's

life became their pickup truck.  And this whole $260

went to make a truck payment.  That left 'em with

havin' to come up with money to buy gas and all that.

So there's a short period of time in there between

receiving the welfare check and finally buying a pickup

truck, that the traders just really profited, because

it gave us a whole new type of business, and that was a

cash flow business--cash and carry business.  And with

that, we were selling so much more in goods, that we

wanted to find where we could buy goods the cheapest,

so that we could offer a little bit better prices and

stuff, because we were starting to merchandise.

   So Kimball [phonetic spelling] Mercantile in Gallup,

they quit carryin' us for six months credit at the

tradin' post.  They started requiring that we pay our

bill every thirty days, as did Malco [phonetic

spelling] Gas and everybody else that used to carry us

for six months.  So with the knowledge of us converting

to that cash system, they demanded their money up

front.  Well, in doing that, if they were only going to

carry us for thirty days, there wasn't any incentive to

stay with Kimball's any longer, so we were one of the

first trading posts at Dinnebito to switch to

Associated Grocers, and really greatly expand the line

of groceries in the store to where it was more like a

supermarket.  We were treating these people like they

lived in town, and we gave 'em choices that they'd

never really had before.  The old theory to a trader on

the Navajo Reservation is you don't necessarily sell

'em what they want, you sell 'em what they need.  And

that changed with that influx of cash.

   So that was when the trading really changed.  And

it's been changing ever since, because two things

happened when the Navajo bought a new pickup.  Their

first wave, they bought old trucks, to where it wasn't

that big of an investment.  Second wave was they liked

new trucks, too, just like you and I.  So they bought a

new pickup truck.  So then not only had they spent the

largest portion of their welfare check on a down

payment on that vehicle, they also had to buy

insurance.  If they bought a new vehicle and financed

it, they had to have insurance, too.  So they ended up

almost using up their entire disposable income just to

have that pickup truck.

   But the other thing that came with that pickup truck

was their freedom of movement.  And so they always had

a neighbor or someone that was willing to put a tank of

gas in their truck to haul 'em to Flagstaff or to

Farmington or to Gallup or to Page.  And so, boy, here

the pickup's goin' fifty-five miles an hour (whoosh!)

past the front of the trading post, heading for town.

That's where things really changed.  All of a sudden we

had to start competing with town.  We never did have to

compete with the other traders, because we weren't

close enough together, and our customers didn't have

transportation to go any farther than they absolutely

had to.

   So things changed in a hurry, so all of a sudden

we're at a point now to where we have to compete with

traders in town and businesses in town.  And so it

opened up a whole new concept in trading.

   As the Navajo people started going out farther and

farther into town to trade, they started not paying

their bill, leaving the trader holding the bag.  We

still had livestock accounts, and darn, all of a

sudden, you saw a truck whizzin' past the front of the

store at forty miles an hour with eight bags of wool

piled on the back of it.  And I'll just about guarantee

you those were eight bags of wool that had already been

spent, that needed to be paid on their account in the

trading post.  And so they went on by and said, "Well,

we need money right now to buy new tires for this

truck, so we're gonna go ahead and sell these bags of

wool in town to get somethin' we need in town, 'cause

we can get it a little cheaper in there."  Well, the

long and the short of it is that the trader got stuck

for the livestock account, so the traders quit givin'

long-term credit on livestock.

   It worked the same way with rug weavers.  It got to

where you weren't sure you were gonna get the rug

anymore, so you quit grubstaking the weaver.  You quit

lettin' her take an advance against the rug, because

her primary objective was to get all she could get for

her rug, and that meant that in order to do that, she

at least had to shop around.  Not very often does a rug

come back from town to the trading post, even if the

trader was willing to give as much as she got in town,

or even more than she got in town, very seldom do they

ever bring it back from town, because they're in town

where they want to spend the money, and so it's just

easier, more convenient to sell it and do their

shoppin' right then.  And more than likely, the rug

doesn't come back to the tradin' post because there's

$300-$400 owed against it.  It's put the trader in a

precarious position of not being able to secure any of

the accounts any longer.  They're all open accounts,

and with no recourse for collection.

   It's changed the complexion of trading, just having

the pickup truck.  So that's the way these economies

have clashed in so many ways, because the Navajo is

still--they've got the cash in their hand, but they

still have the same motivations that they did before,

of that money not having any value to you, spend it.

So it really changed the complexion of how much the

trader could trust his customer, is what it boiled down

to.  To this day, I still write off thousands of

dollars of credit every year that I can't collect,

simply because they come in and…  Rug weavers come

in and work me over.  They come in and maybe I've

bought every rug they've made in the last three years,

and if they want an advance on the rug, I always made

'em pawn.  Well, I get to know 'em well enough that

they come in and they want a couple hundred dollars

'cause they've got a real critical circumstance that

they need the money for, so I'll loan it to 'em.  And

better judgement every time tells me that if that

weaver is that important to me, I would be better off

to give it to her as a gift than to loan it to her,

because more often than not, that ends our relationship

as a trader and artist, simply because she gets behind

the eight ball.

   Don't get me wrong, a lot of traders say that that

Indian just sits up here on the side of the hill and

tries to figure out how they can get to you, how they

can do one up on the trader.  They're not that way,

they're great people and they're wonderful people.

They've got good intentions.  I've known very few

Navajo people that intentionally swindled you.  They

had every intention of doin' what was right.  And their

philosophy on an unpaid debt is, "What are you worried

about?  What are you complaining about?  I'm still

here, I'm still alive.  Here I am.  So why are you

worrying?"  As if to say, "Sooner or later I'm going to

get around to paying you."  And it's such a standard

statement that there must be something there that I

don't fully understand in that statement, because I've

heard it so many times, exactly that way.  "Why are you

worried?  I'm still here."  In other words, "Don't

start worryin' about it until I'm no longer here.  When

I die you can start worryin' about how you're gonna get

your money."  (laughs)  So there has to be somethin' in

that statement that I fail to really comprehend.  I

think I've got it figured out, but there's somethin'

there that I can't quite put my finger on, because it

is such a logical answer for a Navajo to give you, of

just saying, "What are you worried about?  I'm still

here."

   

   Cole:  When you mentioned that initially you'd take

a pawn for a loan, so you actually were giving the

loans for longer than thirty days then?

   

   Burnham:  Yeah, six months.  And then that's what

requires if you're gonna advance to a weaver.  Lots of

times it's six months before the rug is done.  And you

see, about the time the FTC hearings came about, I

moved off the reservation.  I could just see…  Well,

I was a little paranoid, I think, that I could see so

many restrictions and controls coming down on the

traders, that it was no longer going to be lucrative

for a trader to be in business out there.  They were

talking about forcing you to give 'em a copy of all of

your invoices, showing how much you paid for an item,

and then they were going to tell you how much your

markup could be, and things like that.

   I think more than anything else, this was just some

bluff talk.  It's totally against the free enterprise

system to fix prices.  In fact, the laws about price

fixing go both ways--it's not just to protect the

consumer, it's also to protect the business.

   

   Cole:  In that case, when you say "they," who do you

mean?

   

   Burnham:  We were thinking government conspiracy,

BIA conspiracy, FTC--the Fair Trade Commission--

conspiracy.  You have to admit that we operated in a

very remote area, and we weren't necessarily up on

every bit of the information all of the time.  A lot of

it was one trader gettin' together with another trader

and sayin', "Boy, have you heard what they're gonna do

to us next?!"  And so these tactics, these things kind

of built up.  And so pretty soon we're thinking that

they are going to enforce these kinds of things.

   The Food Stamp Program is thinking about enforcing

some of those kinds of price structuring and things

like that.  The WIC Program does require traders to

give 'em copies of their invoices and stuff like that.

They're saying that you've got to keep your markup

within a certain percentile of what it cost you.  These

are really things I think that are really against the

law.  First of all, you can't take money that comes

from federal taxes, which is where, I would assume, the

money comes from for the WIC Program, and then

selectively say who can participate in a program and

who can't, and how much you're allowed to charge and

how much you're not and things like that.  I think

those are violations of ethical business practices.  If

you want to enforce price controls, then you'd better

do it by using usury laws and not demanding a

structured markup system.  In other words, where

they're gonna tell you how much you can make.  That

just doesn't fit into the free enterprise system.

   

   Cole:  Maybe kind of walk us through how the whole

FTC thing came about, and what happened at the

hearings.

   

   Burnham:  Well, right at the first, traders were

very tentative about what was happening, and

intimidated by it.  People were very nervous.  We

didn't want to be the guy on the hot seat, and there

wasn't a trader on the reservation that wasn't in

violation of parts of the new law the Fair Trade

Commission was coming down the road with.

   

   Cole:  And when did that law come into effect, do

you remember?

   

   Burnham:  That was in the early seventies.  And when

they came in with this Fair Trade Commission laws…

We had a lot of warning, there was talk about it for

two or three years before it ever really came to

fruition.  It wasn't something that just all of a

sudden they passed it in Congress and then the next day

came out and enforced it.  They passed it on Congress

into law, and that's all it was, was law.  It hadn't

been implemented yet.  So they started waitin' for a

chance to implement it.  And so what happened was some

traders were very opportunistic--an opportunist to the

nth degree.  They would take advantage of every

situation that came along to make a little money.  And

so they found violations here and violations there, but

what they needed was one individual that they could

really come down on.  And so the United Traders

Association had a meeting and said, "Well, are we or

are we not going to defend the traders in this issue?"

And what it was, it was to become a class-action suit.

   Now, some of the traders were members of the

Association, some were not.  Some were sometimes, and

some were not sometimes.  Some joined when they saw

something bad comin' down the pike, and would drop out

of the Association when the threat was gone.  And that

seemed to have been the criteria that they used for

saying whether or not they would defend this issue.

The thing of it is, they could have come out to

Dinnebito Trading Post and filed charges on us.

   

   Cole:  What change happened?  Mainly around pawn?

   

   Burnham:  Pawn was the big focus.  There was some

idea about what you could and couldn't do as pawn.

They didn't say per se that you couldn't do pawn

anymore--they just said that you couldn't even charge

as much interest as the bank charges you, because it's

a secured loan, for one thing.  The pawn was the most

affected, and every trading post took pawn.  There were

many other things.  You couldn't intimidate your

customer into paying their bill.  Or you couldn't

demand that your customer had to get their check in

your post office box in order to have credit in your

store.  And you couldn't intimidate 'em into payin' the

bill, simply because…  In other words, you couldn't

let 'em charge up to the full limit of their check and

be in compliance with the law.  And so there were a lot

of these issues that really were blanket issues that

had to do with every trading post on the reservation.

   I, for one, felt--and I don't know, maybe I was the

only one that felt that the United Traders Association

should get behind it wholeheartedly.  It wasn't just

one trader that was brought to trial, it was several

different traders.  Some of 'em were just about as

clean as a trader could be, but even then there were

gray area issues that they were guilty of.  There were

other traders that were guilty of some pretty tough

infractions, but I am inclined to think that the

violations that they were prosecuting over were set up.

They were situations where the opportunity was made

available to the trader to violate it, to probably a

little bit bigger degree than he normally would.  So I

think in settin' 'em up, the biggest case to go before

the FTC was what the United Traders Association

attorney seemed to think was an undefendable issue.  So

they said, "I don't think you want to defend that."

   Well, I think it was shortsighted to take that

stand, because it was something that affected Indian

trading totally, regardless of who was on the hot seat.

It may have been that we could have represented this

individual, whoever he was.  If our attorneys could

have defended him, maybe they could have made it a

personal violation and not a class-action suit, to

where his indiscriminate behavior would have been

accountable only for himself, and not for traders in

general.  Maybe that could have happened, had we had

something to do with his defense.  It was certainly, in

my lifetime, the biggest thing that ever affected

Indian trading.

   The other big thing that's affected Indian trading

is the conversion to cash, and that's the Triftway

Markets.  I think that it's something that has evolved

in time.  I don't feel any malice towards Jerry Clayton

[phonetic spelling].  He will go down in history as

probably being the most influential person in

history…  (tape turned off and on)  Anyway, what I

was touching on here, was that Jerry Clayton will go

down in history as having affected more change on the

reservation than any other trader in history.  That

probably includes Lorenzo Hubbell, or J. B. Moore, or

any of the famous Indian traders.  And it's simply

because he was in a position to convert the reservation

to this flashy-lookin' convenience market operation

where in today's society, probably the most important

purchase that Navajo makes now is the gasoline for that

pickup truck.  And so they converted not just to the

flashy-lookin' service station, but fast food, and

potato chips and pop.  They don't carry stock groceries

like the necessities--the flour and coffee and sugar

and all the necessities.  They have been replaced by

islands of every kind of candy and everything from

sunflower seeds to potato chips.  But, he's something

to be reckoned with.  He's pretty much taken charge of

the reservation, as far as the type of business goes.

   

   Cole:  And who exactly is Jerry Clayton?

   

   Burnham:  Jerry Clayton is a man with a vision.  He

was working in a gas refinery and had the opportunity

to buy that refinery when it was kind of an old-

fashioned refinery that didn't have a whole lot of

production, but it was functional, and the guy that

owned it was gonna close it down and sell it out for, I

understand, scrap metal prices.  And somehow Jerry

talked him into lettin' him buy it and pay it out, out

of profits that he would continue making.  I think the

first thing Jerry did was buy it and then scout out a

few old run-down tradin' posts that were along the

highways going across the reservation, so that he could

retail his own product.  So it just grew, and the

Navajos liked it.  But what it did, it took enough of

the trader's business away, that it started to get to

the point to where the trader was havin' a hard time

makin' a livin'.  But you have to understand, the

trader had just come off of this period of time in

Indian trading that was the most profitable of any

time, and that was the sixties when everything was so

profitable.  Now, the shift is kind of settling back

somewhere to the middle.  But the trader is seeing a

downsizing in business as the convenience market sees

more.  And so this trader's sittin' here, and he

doesn't know how to scale back down again.  Even a

trading post today would be so much more lucrative than

a trading post was in the early fifties.  But it's not

anything like the heyday of the seventies.  So it's

just not attractive to the traders any longer, because

they don't want to scale back to where they're back in

a barter system again, and back into really havin' to

be creative to do business.  It's some of the changes

we've gone through.

   

   Cole:  What other things did the FTC decisions…

Did you actually go to the hearings yourself?

   

   Burnham:  No, I didn't.  No, I was too busy runnin'

my own operation by then.  By the time the hearings

happened, I had already moved off the reservation to

Sanders and felt like I wasn't really affected by the

FTC hearings.

   I guess the traders could blame the Bureau of Indian

Affairs more than anybody for the FTC to have this

power to enforce such ridiculous laws in pawn, because

someone had gotten the idea about writing a plan for

what was acceptable for taking pawn on the reservation.

Nobody, nobody used that law to go by, or those rules

to go by, because it was practically impossible to do

pawn according to the way the BIA figured you needed to

do it.  Everybody stayed within a pretty standard

policy of charging 20 percent interest on a pawn

transaction, but then holding that pawn for six months

to a year before it went dead.  A lot of pawn that a

trader had in his pawn vault was pawn that had been

there for two or three years.  It was in those good old

belts and good pawn--good old treasures of families

that you dealt with.  The idea wasn't, "Oh, let's kill

it so we can sell it."  The idea was, "Let's get it

back into the family's hands."  The family knew that

you had it in your pawn vault, and they knew you

weren't sellin' it, you weren't threatening to sell it,

so it was safe where it was at, so let's just leave it

there.  So that was kinda the way it went.

   The BIA said you couldn't do it that way, you could

only charge 'em 2 percent to do pawn, and then you

could charge 'em 1� percent--and I'm not sure on these

percentages--but 1� percent per month thereafter.  Then

if you sold it then, you couldn't sell it for less than

fair market value, and you had to go back and give your

customer the difference between what it went dead for

and what the fair market value was.  It was ridiculous.

   Well, a lot of these things like that happened--

that, and the fact that you couldn't require that your

customer get their check in your post office box in

order to have credit.  That was illegal.  Just a lot of

other little things that you couldn't do.  And it just

seemed to encompass almost everything the traders did.

But they wrote those laws probably thinking they were

dealing with a modern type of business.  Well, Indian

trading has never been what you would call the normal

mode of business.  There's some balance in there

somewhere.

   You know, I was thinking [about] Norman Rockwell's

pictures that they used to have on The Saturday Evening

Post magazines, and it would show the guy in the

supermarket with a chicken on the scale, and the lady

that's buying the chicken on the other side of the

scale.  They're looking at each other smiling.  The

grocer's got his thumb on the scale on one side, and

the little old lady's got her finger under the scale on

the other side, and they're just smiling at each other.

(chuckles)  There's a balance in there somewhere.

   I've known very few traders that were downright

scoundrels that I would consider as being thieves.  One

popular thing for a dishonest trader to do was if a

check came in--like in the early sixties there was a

railroad retirement adjustment of benefits that went

retroactive for several years.  And so the men that

were working on the railroad and had been signing up

for railroad retirement benefits got these huge checks.

I say "huge"--for the time and everything, they were

big checks, like a $2,500 check.  And I know an

individual that would cash those checks for those

people, and a $2,500 check became a $250 check.  Those

are the kind of guys that needed to be weeded out, but

ironically enough, I don't think any of those traders

were touched by FTC or anybody else.  They continued to

do their outright dishonest acts, even after FTC.  They

were blatantly illegal before and after, and they just

continued on doing what they were doing.

   I would almost come out in defense of�.  He's caught

a lot of heat over the FTC hearings.  I would be

inclined to defend his position inasmuch as he was a

long-term trader in an area that has always been a good

area--the Navajos have always done well in that area.

It was a big enough area that he always had

competition.  So he must have been doin' somethin'

right to keep that many people as loyal customers as

long as he did, and keep them on the upswing as far as

their economy goes.  I'd say that he's not near as bad

a person as a lot of other traders have almost tried to

tar and feather him.  I know him, and he was probably

our nearest competition for Dinnebito, but I know him

personally, and I know that he's not a totally

unethical person.  I think that they skillfully set him

up and then he took the heat for the whole thing.  But

I also feel like he got shortchanged as far as no

defense from the United Traders Association.

   It was just such an issue that it had to do with all

of us, and I don't see how the Association could ever

take the position that it didn't affect all of us, and

that even though maybe his charges and position was not

defendable, that didn't lessen the fact that we were

all liable to a certain degree to the same laws.  So it

did affect us all.

   

   Cole:  Were you ever a member of the Indian Traders

Association?

   

   Burnham:  You know, I never was, because I didn't

have a trader's license.  I was working for Elijah

Blair, and he's the one that held the trader's license.

Usually I went to all the meetings and everything, and

never was challenged on it, until there was a real

close vote one time, and I was voting our vote from

Dinnebito.  I was asked to leave the meeting, because I

was being a little outspoken about something.  It

wasn't the vote whether or not to defend on the FTC--it

was another issue--but I was somewhat politely told

that I didn't have a vote to cast.  (laughs)

   

   Cole:  What were the meetings like?

   Burnham:  A very professional-level meeting where we

came in and we discussed issues and business.  And it

wasn't just lighthearted visiting, it was meaningful

dialogue on the issues that were affecting the traders.

You'd have a good attorney, have professional

leadership always at the helm, and it was conducted as

business.  After the business was taken care of, we

usually had a dance and a dinner and a social event.

That was a social event.  But the business at hand was

what was discussed at the meetings.

   

   Cole:  Do you remember some of those issues, other

than like the FTC?

   

   Burnham:  Railroad Retirement Board and how they

were gettin' so bad about not wanting to pay railroad

retirement benefits to individuals that came home

without being laid off, where family circumstances were

that they had to come home or something.  That was one

of the issues.  Another issue was whether or not

imitation arts and crafts should be allowed to be sold

anywhere on the reservation.  Just all kinds of

different issues like that, that affected most of the

traders.  And what about the issue of whether or not

traders could have permission to have a private well on

their trading post lease site?  The tribe's stand there

is that any well on the reservation that is drilled has

to be pumped and made available for everybody in the

community--it can't be pumped for one household or one

individual.  There were a few trading posts that came

with wells, but if anyone made much of a stink of it,

then you had to pump that well and make the water

available to everybody in the community.  So just

different issues like that of dealing with the BIA and

discussing the lease sites and the upcoming renewals.

And the tribe was posturing about how they were going

to increase the lease rates, increase the percentage on

the leases.  Just different issues like that.

   Taxation on the reservation.  Taxation of the state

or the county levying taxes on someone that was

residing on the reservation--primarily traders.

Everyone realized that the state had no right to levy a

tax on a Navajo, even though he lived within the state,

that state didn't have the right to levy a tax against

him.

   State income tax.  A white person working on the

reservation pays state income tax.  A Navajo working on

the reservation does not pay state income tax.  So you

see that taxation problem came into focus.  Well, they

finally won it, that they couldn't tax a trader on

property tax when he was operating on the reservation--

for your fixtures and everything in your store.  The

county has an assessment on the value of that equipment

in your store--I have to pay it.  However, I don't have

to pay it anymore now, because I am recognized as being

within the exterior boundaries of the reservation, so

I'm not subject to that tax anymore, even though I own

the property.  Those issues like that is what the

United Traders Association defended.

   Back in the inception of the Association, there was

imitation Navajo jewelry being made, and they organized

to help lobby legislation that would keep that from

proliferating.

   

   Cole:  Do you know who some of those earlier members

were?

   

   Burnham:  The earlier members of the Association?

   

   Cole:  Yeah, the ones that maybe started it out.

   

   Burnham:  Well, Russell Foutz was one of 'em.  My

father was one of 'em.  Jay Springer probably was one.

C. G. Wallace I'm sure was one of the original guys,

'cause he was really into Zuni jewelry.  See, and it

wasn't…  We have a tendency to think that it was

just Navajo traders.  It ended up being just almost all

Navajo traders in the Association over the years,

because there were fewer and fewer traders on the other

reservations.  And so it came into focus almost as

being the Navajo Indian Traders Association.

   But, yeah, they had a purpose in organizing--it

never was a social club.  It was always there for a

purpose.  They had some pretty wise management.  You

can imagine how wise that management had to have been

to take twelve or fifteen or twenty dollars dues and

end up with $250,000 pot of gold at the end of the

rainbow, and pay for all of the legal counseling and

all of that in the meantime.  So they had some pretty

wise decisions, and it was probably--I'm not sure who

it was who was smart enough to buy AT&T stock when they

did.  I think it was AT&T stock that was what made the

nest egg grow.

   

   Cole:  Did your dad have one of those numbers, do

you know?

   

   Burnham:  Yeah.

   

   Cole:  Do you know what number that was?

   Burnham:  I don't remember what it was.  And I don't

think he ever really used that number, because he

wasn't in an area that manufactured jewelry.  He was in

an area that was primarily rug weaving.  I do know that

they had a lead seal that went on a rug.  It was a wire

that went through the rug and pulled back through the

lead seal, and then you'd squash it with this thing

with the number on it, and it would put your number on

that lead seal, and that was to guarantee the

authenticity of it.  But there never was much of an

issue about Navajo weaving, and needing to use it on

rugs.  The issue was on silverwork.  But yeah, he had

the number.

   

   Cole:  What was your dad's name?

   

   Burnham:  Bob Burnham, R. B. Burnham.

   

   Cole:  And your mom?

   

   Burnham:  Phyllis Burnham.  She came from Cache

Valley, Utah, which incidentally is where…  The

prophet of the Mormon Church called my great-

grandfather and his brother, my great-great-uncle, to

come to Kirtland, New Mexico, to establish a branch of

the Mormon Church there.  And that was how we came to

this country.  And then we came from Cache Valley,

originally.

   

   Cole:  What year, do you know?

   

   Burnham:  That was in the late 1800s--I can't

remember exactly when it was.  I had a book that

covered all of that, and I lent it to somebody and they

lost it, never got it back.  But anyway, they built a

church there in Kirtland, and then the prophet told my

great-grandfather, "You stay there and support the

missionary effort there, and open areas of commerce and

trading with the Indians."  That was how we came to be

Indian traders.  My great-great-uncle was called to be

the first bishop there, and was a bishop there.  They

called it Burnham Ward in Kirtland, and he was bishop

there for thirty-some years.

   My great-grandfather was trading from a wagon, and

he would start in Mancos, Colorado, and trade all the

way down to Gallup, across the reservation and back.

He'd leave Mancos with a wagonload of lumber.  Well, he

might have a wagonload of sheep pelts by the time he

got to Gallup--or rugs or whatever.  He'd load up there

and head back the other way, just tradin' whatever he

could trade.  He wasn't selling anything to anybody for

cash, I don't think.  He took goods, comin' both

directions.  So that was how he traded, and then my

grandfather first built a store at a place they call

Tsaya, which is over by Chaco Canyon.  And then after

that he built the Burnham Trading Post.  And then my

father was partners with him there.

   

   Cole:  Where was that?

   

   Burnham:  At Burnham.  It's up near Two Grey Hills,

kind of by Sanostee, up in that area there.  Then my

father had the opportunity to buy the Bisti Trading

Post, which is just about eighteen or twenty miles from

Burnham.  And so they kind of had a little dynasty

there.  He and my grandfather had the Burnham Trading

Post, and then the Bisti Trading Post my father had on

his own.  And then I had another uncle that had Coyote

Canyon Trading Post.  And that whole area of the

reservation right there were people just like my father

and grandfather who were actually from Kirtland, New

Mexico.  That's where Russell came from.  And see, the

thing of it is, their fathers, that settled Kirtland

and built farms there, were farmers, but there wasn't

enough land there to support extended families farming,

so they ended up being Indian traders as a source of

income, instead of loadin' up and movin'.  A lot of 'em

did move over around Blanding and Monticello, where

there was farmland available, and Dove Creek and all

out in there.  And they ended up moving out there.  But

those that stayed in Kirtland, New Mexico, their

extended families became Indian traders.  And so almost

every trading post up on that quadrant of the

reservation had a trader from Kirtland that was a

Mormon, because they came from that Mormon stock that

settled Kirtland.

   Incidentally, the name of Kirtland back then was

Olio, and they called it Olio because of the blending

of the cultures there.  There was all different

cultures there, and so they called the place Olio--

later changed it to Kirtland.

   

   Cole:  How long did your dad own Bisti?

   

   Burnham:  Well, my father owned Bisti probably just

about five or six years.  My father was determined to

not be one of the traders that lived in town, where he

had his family living in town and he had to commute out

to the trading post, or stay at the trading post by

himself.  So he sold out, and by then my grandfather

and uncle had established a couple of trading posts in

Farmington, so he went in and established a wholesale

supply house to supply traders, and then got in the

trucking business and pretty much stayed out of it for,

oh, about eight or ten years, and then ended up going

back into the business and managed the Shiprock Trading

Post for Russell Foutz for two or three years, and then

went to The Gap Trading Post and managed that trading

post for a couple of years for Troy Washburn.  By then,

my father had emphysema pretty bad and wasn't able to

really work very hard.  And so then he ended up,

because of his health, moving back to Farmington and

reopened the old trading post in Farmington.

   

   Cole:  And what was the old one?

   

   Burnham:  Well, that was the name of it, the Old

Trading Post.  There's a little rug out there that was

woven for my father that says "The Old Tarding Post."

And the deal of it is, she just misspelled the word.

When he got after her about it, she said, "What are you

complaining about?  It's all there, it's just not in

the right sequence."  (laughter)

   

   Cole:  How many brothers and sisters did you have?

   

   Burnham:  I've got two brothers and two sisters.

   

   Cole:  Are any of them traders?

   

   Burnham:  No, I'm the only trader.  I really

regretted to see that, because we all had been pretty

much raised on or around the reservation.  I think

every one of us had spent a period of time in our young

years in a trading post.  Mine was before I went to

school, and my other brothers and sisters had a stint

of being in the trading post after they were in school--

some of 'em in high school and what not.  And to this

day, probably everybody except my youngest sister, has

a very strong interest and pull towards the Navajo

Reservation.  And it's too bad.  I feel like they

should have pursued trading.

   I've got a brother that today as we speak he's

probably in New Zealand or Australia or China or

Jerusalem.  That's all he does is travel, all over the

world.  He's a public relations man for Duke Energy,

the corporation he works for.  He's very successful.

I've got another brother that's a publisher.  He's an

editor for a publishing house in New York.  I've got

another sister that lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Her husband is high up in the BLM.  Another sister, her

husband farms 5,000 acres in Idaho.  Everyone's pretty

much gone a totally different direction--not just

physically in a different direction, but different

professions and everything.

   

   Cole:  So once you were in Farmington at school,

were you involved in any trading activities as a youth

at all?  Work on the posts, or work in the stores in

town?

   

   Burnham:  A little bit in my uncle's store.  He

called it the Chief Trading Post.  No, really not as a

trader or anything.  Just, you know, hangin' around and

sweepin' the floor--just for a place to hang out, do

something to get a strawberry pop.  You know, that kind

of thing.  No, I was away from trading until I came

back in, I guess it was 1961.

   

   Cole:  And you went out to work with Troy Kennedy

and Jewel McGee?

   

   Burnham:  Yeah.

   

   Cole:  What were they like to work for?

   

   Burnham:  Salt and pepper!  Just totally different

guys.  Troy was more excited about rugs.  And Jewel was

kinda the old livestock guy.  I think they really had

opposing philosophies of trading:  Jewel's really

centered around livestock, and Troy's centered in

developing rug weavers.  And it was really Troy Kennedy

that got Desbeth Tutt [phonetic spelling] to weave

those "whirling log" rugs that she's so famous for.  So

you really have to take your hat off to Troy and Edith

as really being real strong in making something happen--

whereas Jewel, as far as being an old-time trader,

Jewel was probably right up with the best of 'em.  He

was tight as the bark on a tree, knew where every

nickel was every hour of the day, and was just totally

in focus all the time as far as trading goes.

   

   [END TAPE 1, SIDE B; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]

   

   Cole:  This is Brad Cole from Northern Arizona

University.  It's July 17, 1998.  We're with Bruce

Burnham at his store, the R. B. Burnham Company Trading

Post, in Sanders, Arizona.  Also present in the room is

Lew Steiger, who's running the camera and sound

equipment, and this is the third tape.  This is part of

the United Indian Traders Association Oral History

Project.

   We were just talking a little bit about Jewel McGee

and Troy Kennedy, who were the first people you worked

for.  You mentioned Jewel was into the livestock end of

it.  What kinds of things did he do to better that?

   

   Burnham:  Primarily what he did was he encouraged

the people that had cattle to use better bulls.  Every

year he would bring out new blood.  He'd say, "A little

injection of new blood never hurt a herd of sheep."

He'd bring out good rams from somewhere to sell, and a

better-bred--to his notion--better-bred livestock,

better Hereford bulls to mix in with the livestock that

was already there.  So he was into improving the grade

of livestock in an area.  There wasn't much any trader

could do about the value of the wool.  The wool was

just gonna sell for "X" number of cents per pound, no

matter what, because of the amount of dirt in the wool.

It never was deemed as being a very good-quality wool

produced on the reservation, and basically that was

because of the fact that the sheep didn't graze in the

high mountain meadows where there was deep grass and

little sand--they were in the same terrain the year

round, and that was a sandy, high-mountain desert.  So

there wasn't much you could do to improve the price of

the wool, but you could improve the lambs by bringing

in a breed of sheep that would either make the lambs

bigger or healthier or thicker--basically, a heavier,

better-built lamb.  And white wool was always worth

more than colored wool in the open market.  So you

wanted to eliminate the breeds of sheep that generated

a lot of black sheep.  There were a lot of things that

he did to improve the livestock.

   I don't think there ever was a trader that wanted to

improve the horses on the reservation, because the

horses have always been a real grazing problem on the

reservation.  Because of the significance of it being

an acceptable display of wealth, there's always been

too many horses.  For every horse you see on the

reservation, for all those horses you see, there's

probably one out of twenty-five of 'em function, as far

as having a use of riding or herding sheep on.  Most of

'em are just there in these huge herds of horses, just

as an acceptable display of wealth for a family.  So I

don't think any traders came in and tried to…  There

was this fellow--I think his name was George Simpson--

he did try to import a blood line of Kentucky

thoroughbred horse to the reservation.  I think he had

some children--he was not Navajo himself--but there

were a lot of Simpsons.  I even knew a George Simpson

that was Navajo, which was probably a grandson of this

original George Simpson that settled in the country

back in the 1860s.

   That was what Jewel did, and Jewel was always trying

to get a better price for the lambs, or a better price

for the cattle.  He was in full support of the ranch

lifestyle of the Navajo people, trying to upgrade their

product.  So that was what Jewel did, and pretty

successful at doing it, too.  Jewel had a little ranch

around Farmington where they'd buy a lot of cattle and

take and put 'em on their ranch and then sell 'em when

they were fat, or when the prices came up or whatever.

That was basically what Jewel was known for in his

trading days.  I would like to watch his interview and

see how he characterized himself.  And through the eyes

of a twenty-one-year-old young man, he may have not

been anything like I remember him being.  That's kind

of the reputation he had among the other traders, as

having been one of those cattle/livestock-type traders.

   

   Cole:  And what about Troy, then?

   

   Burnham:  A lot of Troy's focus was on weaving.

Troy liked to visit with rug buyers, I think is how you

might describe that.  There was a fellow, his name was

Edwin Kennedy--no relation to the Kennedys here--but he

worked for Kerr-McGee when they were mining all the

uranium up around Cove, which is an area near Red

Valley.  He would stop in the trading post at Red Rock,

and Jewel or Troy would sell him old pawn and rugs.

And he became intrigued with Navajo weaving, especially

pictorial weaving of the whirling log rugs that were at

the time, in the late fifties, early sixties, those

rugs were basically taboo to weave, and he was

interested in those and bought every one of them that

Desbeth Tutt made.  And I think that for that reason,

it really got Troy charged up and interested in

weaving.  Desbeth Tutt wasn't the first to weave those

rugs, but she was probably one of the most famous.

   

   Cole:  Was she doing them when you were there those

couple of years?

   

   Burnham:  Yeah.  Now, see, I was only there at Red

Rock just a few months.  (chuckles)  That was a long,

rough, rutted, bad road to travel, and my wife at the

time absolutely hated it at the reservation.  And so

there was just no way in the world that we could live

there and traverse that road.  What would happen, her

parents would come out to visit her and she'd say,

"Well, I want to go home with my folks for a little

while, and you come get me."  So they'd come out and

get her.  I don't know how she contacted them, but she

could.  (chuckles)  It seems like on demand they'd show

up.  Then they'd load her up and she'd go back to

Farmington.  Then when I got tired of batchin', I'd

have to go to Farmington and bring her back out.  So

she disliked it enough there, that there was just no

way that we could have stayed there.

   

   Cole:  Were you a fluent Navajo speaker at that

point?

   

   Burnham:  Oh, no, no.  I don't know how many traders

would make the claim that they were fluent.  I don't

make the claim that I'm a fluent speaker.  I always

seem to manage to be able to speak enough to do what I

want to do, or have what conversations I do.  It's not

necessarily always a good idea to be fluent, or show

your fluency in Navajo.  For one thing--and this just

might be some romantic idea I've got about it--but I've

come to think or believe that when you speak in Navajo,

after you've been out here thirty years, and you speak

in Navajo, you're also thinking in Navajo.  And when

you're thinking in Navajo, whether you like it or not,

you're placing yourself in that same cultural identity

that a Navajo has.  You're somehow taking yourself out

of the cultural ideals that you have, and you're a

little more apt to be susceptible to that philosophy of

life that they have.  I think any trader would admit to

you that it is much easier to deny somebody something

in English than it is in Navajo--especially if you've

been around long enough to be thinking in Navajo while

you're speaking, because there's a real … philosophy

there of being obligated to each other.  So it's hard.

Then when you turn them down in Navajo, then they can

say, �Ni �� doo jooba�ii da,� �you're an unkind

person.�  (chuckles)  You say that in English, it's

water off a duck's back.  But you say it in Navajo, and

it has a little impact on you, if you understand it in

Navajo.  You know, that's really telling you where you

fit in.

   Navajo is a language that doesn't have profanities.

You can say things in Navajo that are vulgar and not

proper to say in mixed company, but it's not profanity.

English is such a profane language.  There are so many

profanities in English, and we're so accustomed to it,

that we think nothing of it.  The nearest thing to

profanity in Navajo, are little cliches of "that's what

the coyote is called," and just little cliches that

aren't really profanities.  And so when you take such a

humble language as Navajo and you converse in that

language and you understand what you're saying in that

language…  There are a lot of things that I say in

Navajo that I have a difficult time translating into

English.  And yet when I use it in Navajo, I know what

I'm sayin'.  But it takes a full paragraph to explain

in English, just one word.  And so it's not always to

your best interest to be speaking in Navajo.

   One time my wife, when we first met, I was talking

to someone, and she was standing there, and she didn't

know it was me talking.  And I was talking to an old

Navajo guy, and she was listening while she was

stocking shelves or something, and she turned around

and she says, "I thought that was two Navajos standing

there talking."  (laughs)  She said, "I didn't realize

that was you talking to him."  And she was a little bit

shocked, because she'd never given it any thought about

whether or not I spoke Navajo.

   As far as fluency, I would be a little bashful to

say that I was fluent.  Certain thoughts in my thought

process, especially if I'm dealing with a Navajo, I

just switch to Navajo without thinkin' about it.  And

even when I converse with non-Navajos, there are

certain things that I try to say in Navajo that get

said a little bit better.  And I don't know if that

enters into some area of fluency or not.

   

   Cole:  I guess by fluency, I guess I meant at what

point you kind of became capable of at least dealing

with the language in trading.

   

   Burnham:  Oh, I started to become, just two or three

months into trading, I started picking up a lot,

because the sounds of Navajo were still familiar to me,

after being five years old with a five-year-old

dialogue.  One time I went into a place with my mother.

My father was telling me about this.  He says we went

into a place called the Palace Market in Farmington,

New Mexico, and I walked up and told the storekeeper

there--he was just an Indian trader to me, in my eyes--

I walked up and said, "T� �ich�� �a�, Shicheii,"

"Give me a red pop, Grandpa.  I want a red pop,

Grandpa."  And he thought that was so cute, and so he

was teasing my mother about, "Where's your little

Navi?"  They called Navajos "Navis" back in those days.

My father thought that was pretty cute, but my mother

didn't think it was cute at all--she was a little bit

offended by that.

   Having had that basic knowledge of sounds, the

sounds of the language, it wasn't too difficult for me

to start picking up the language.  It didn't take me

long--especially after I became a bachelor.  I started

associating more and more with the Navajo people,

whereas before, if I had a day off, I'd automatically

just go to town.  Well, after I got a divorce, I didn't

necessarily go to town when I had a day off.  I might

stay and go help some Navajo hoe corn or work in a corn

field, or go to a squaw dance or do something like

that.  I wasn't quite as prone to goin' to town.  What

I did like to do, I liked to accumulate days off, and

then take a week off and go up in the mountains,

fishing or something like that.

   After I started affiliating more and more with the

Navajos on a personal level, that's when I really

started pickin' up a lot of Navajo.  Like I say, after

I got a divorce--I guess I was about twenty-two years

old, I got a divorce--from then on my friends were all

Navajos, the people that I associated with were all

Navajos with the exception of a few schoolteachers in

the area.  So I started identifying more and more with

the Navajo all the time, and it always felt so natural

to me, that it was a far more compatible lifestyle for

me than going to town was.

   If I went to town, I was like a chicken with his

head off.  I'd go get drunk and raise hell and do

things I wasn't supposed to do.  I was much more

content on the reservation.  I recognized that right

off when I was working out there.  I had a sense of

belonging on the reservation.  I don't know how many

traders ever had that sense of belonging there, or that

same identifying it with being where I wanted to be and

being home.  So I don't know how the other traders

would answer that.

   But Navajos are a very, very pleasant people,

congenial and polite and courteous.  You can just make

a list of ethics and go down the list and they just

rate so high on so many things.  They're really family-

oriented, and basically really honest people.  It's

just when we come into that clash of that dollar bill.

Even when the cash flow got started, that was where a

lot of the clash started happening.  Up until then,

there wasn't that clash, because the dollar bill wasn't

the mediator--it was the pound of wool, and ten pounds

of wool equaled a pound sack of coffee.  That barter

system.  You know, Navajos are just a wonderful people

that had just as difficult a time coming to grips with

the cash economy as the trader did in converting his

business to that cash economy.

   My career--you know, the area I would probably brag

about, and not necessarily feel like I'm braggin'--had

been the influence I've had with rug weavers.  Even at

Dinnebito, that was my input to the trading, was that I

had a natural interest in the rug weaving, and the rug

weaver.  You become so well-acquainted with the

individual you're dealing with, when you're dealing

with a rug weaver, and you really develop some strong

relationships, and they're pleasant relationships.  And

that is the thing that has held my interest, my entire

career, has been my interaction with the rug weaver.

   And as I left one area, when I left Dinnebito and

came over here, it was like stepping into a different

world, because over here I didn't have Elijah Blair to

answer to, or any other trader, and I was on my own.

And so the proof was in the pudding, so to speak.  I

could do whatever I wanted to, and if it didn't produce

a livelihood, then I would have been out of business.

So I've pretty much dedicated my time and effort from

the time I moved here until present in arts and crafts--

not necessarily always rugs, but because during the

jewelry boom of the seventies, boy, it was just like

crazy.  It was like shootin' fish in a rain barrel.  It

didn't matter what you produced, there was a ready

market for it.  And so I got real heavy into arts and

crafts, or into jewelry.

   But I always had that little nagging in the back of

my mind that the weaver and the rug was really where I

belonged.  And so we really have had an impact on the

rug weavers.  I've got a rug that I want to show you

after a while when we kind of sum it up, and tell you a

little story about that rug.

   In the late seventies there was a company producing

what we call roving, and it's a carded wool that the

weavers can separate then, and spin into yarn and weave

with, and it's very good, produces a very uniform,

finely-woven rug.  And so that was a big input that the

Babbitts had into the rug-weaving period.  I was real

strong on it too, because Lij and I had conflicting

views there.  Lij wanted to keep the weavers just

carding and spinning their own wool and using it, and I

wanted to use this roving, because it allowed the

weaver to do a better finished product.  So we had a

little conflict there.  But I was the one that was at

the store all day, every day (chuckles), so I kinda

won.  But we converted the Dinnebito Trading Post from

just a saddle blanket weaving area to a recognized

quality weaving area.  Lij and I both worked on that.

I used to wear the knees out of my jeans, just from

bein' down on the floor, lookin' at rugs, and showin'

weavers where we wanted them to improve and what not.

Well, by the late seventies, this roving wool was being

used everywhere on the reservation, and we were

starting to see some rugs we didn't know where the wool

was coming from, but we started buying rugs from the

Shiprock area that were made of a pre-spun yarn.  We

really didn't know the difference, and there wasn't

much of a way to tell a difference, because it was the

same roving that was pulled down into a weight of yarn

that was good for weaving, with a machine.

   Then I think it was about 1984 I found where to buy

that wool, and I bought it, put in a huge inventory of

it here, and I started selling it to all the other

trading posts on the reservation.  Well, this same

wool, you know, the Foutzes had been using it for

years, but they just hadn't told anybody what it was or

where it was coming from.  And so I kind of let the cat

out of the bag and started selling it to all the

traders so that weavers all over the reservation had

access to it.  And I became the biggest customer of

Brown Sheep Wool Company, up in Nebraska.  But I never

was satisfied with the weight or the texture of the

rug, so I found another mill in Pennsylvania that does

a woolen system type carpet yarn, and that's what we

sell today, and it produces a rug that has much more of

the feel of hand-carded and homespun yarn.  And so by

then I was selling $250,000 worth of wool a year,

primarily coming from Brown Sheep Company, and it took

a lot of guts on my part.  I don't know if I'd have the

guts to make that kind of a change again--but I quit

selling that wool completely.  I took it out of my

store, and started selling the one that we developed in

Pennsylvania.  And our wool sales went from $250,000 in

a year, down to about $60,000 a year.  But it's just

slowly worked its way back up to where we're just about

up to that old level again.  That's neither here nor

there.

   The thing is that I feel that if there has ever been

one thing that has influenced the weavers in weaving

and really doing a better rug as far as the integrity

of the rug is concerned, it was switching to that Wild

'n Wooly carpet yarn that we sell.  And so I've had

somewhat of an effect on almost every weaving household

on the reservation.

   

   Cole:  Is the Wild 'n Wooly what's being sold pretty

much everywhere now?

   Burnham:  Yeah.  We're probably selling a little bit

more Wild 'n Wooly than Brown Sheep right now.  But

we're getting more popular all the time.  So I see it

as being sooner or later we're going to really take

over the yarn market on the reservation.  The days of

carding and spinning your own wool are past.  Not every

household has access to wool anymore, because there's

just not enough land to support that many sheep.  And

if you card and spin your own wool, it's gonna take you

three times as long to make a rug.  And the rug you

make with the pre-spun wool is gonna look better, too.

So you're lookin' at a six-to-one ratio.  It takes you

three times as long, and you get twice as much for it.

So in my calculation, that's six-to-one.  So we don't

encourage carding and spinning anymore.  So with that,

that has given me access to the weavers like nothing

else I ever did, is introducing this new wool.  So that

has enabled me to really get into their mind, into

their heads, and really develop this long-lasting

relationship with them.  Not a whole lot of them.  But

the things that I do with a lot of the weavers that

weave for me almost exclusively is we influence a lot

of other weavers.  They end up copying what we're

doing.  So we end up, I think, having a major impact on

rugs all over the reservation, with the exception of

the y�iis and pictorials.  You know, this just isn't a

y�ii or pictorial area, so we have very little to do

with those rugs.  But, we've pretty much made the

Burntwater into the rug it is today.  We started a

revival period of the transitional period rug weaving--

you know, the chiefs' blankets and the late classic

period.  I think we started that revival or renaissance

here.  We've made the Newlands outline rug what it is

today, which is the latest rug to be recognized as an

area style weaving.

   And yet the most exciting thing I've ever done as an

Indian trader is to start the Germantown rug period

over again.  And that is the thing that we went back to

the mill in Pennsylvania, which is in Germantown,

Pennsylvania, that does the Wild 'n Wooly, and we had

them reproduce a Germantown yarn, a true three-ply

Germantown yarn, and then with that palette of yarn and

colors, we come back in and get this Germantown period

restarted.  And part of the excitement is teaching the

weavers that part of their history about Basque

Redondo, which is where Germantown weaving started.

Once they get into the mindset of those weavers of that

period, they become so creative and excited about what

they're doing, and look how brilliant the colors are.

You know, the colors are brilliant, the designs are

different, and it just gets 'em excited, and it's nice

to be a part of that excitement.

   It's also nice, the fact is not all the traders on

the reservation have access to this Germantown yarn,

I've been pretty stingy with it.  I haven't gone out

and tried to sell it to the other traders.  It was so

expensive to develop that I sold half of it to Jed

Foutz to defray the costs.  But I vowed when I sold it

to him I was only gonna sell it to one other trader

other than myself, and if he wanted it, he could have

it.  But I also made him promise to just use it in

Germantown rug reproduction.  But that to me has been

the most fun I've had, and the most excitement of

anything I've done.  Even the fringe, putting the

fringe on those rugs, has really kind of stopped people

and made 'em look twice, because the one rug period,

weaving period, in history that fringe was acceptable,

it was the Germantown period.

   Well, now there's a lady that's writing an article

for, I think, the Philadelphia newspaper.

   Cole:  The Enquirer, or something like that?

   

   Burnham:  Yeah.  It's much the equivalent of the

Arizona Highways magazine.  Well, she's writing an

article about that, and we got talking.  I said, "You

know, it's really funny, because the people that refer

to themselves as the people of the second Long Walk are

the people that are now doing the Germantown

reproductions.  It was the people that were on the long

walk at Basque Redondo that did the Germantown rugs.

So it's a little ironic that now these people consider

themselves to be on the second Long Walk, and here they

are doing a Germantown reproduction.

   

   Cole:  Why do they consider themselves to be on a

second Long Walk?

   

   Burnham:  Because of the forced relocation of the

Navajo-Hopi land dispute.  And you know, most people

aren't aware of the fact that Basque Redondo, or the

original Long Walk, that's what it was, it was a

relocation.  They rounded up the Navajos and

incarcerated them there, held them there, not as a

sentence that they were imposing on them, that they

were going to keep them there so many years and then

turn them loose.  They picked them up and brought 'em

there and were going to hold them there just long

enough to round up the Apaches also, who were the other

tribe that was givin' everybody a pain in the hindside.

So they were gonna get 'em both there at Basque

Redondo, and then they were going to march 'em over

land, by foot, all the way to the Oklahoma Indian

Territories, and that's where they were gonna relocate

the Apaches and the Navajos.  That way they could get

'em all together, all the problem Indians that they

were havin' problems with.  They were gonna get 'em all

together, and then they could take care of their

problem that way.

   You know, we were in the middle of a civil war at

the time, they didn't have the resources to take care

of these people.  They were dyin' like flies with all

kinds of disease.  Venereal disease was rampant at

Basque Redondo.  These are all things that…  It

wasn't the Navajos that brought those things to the

camp, it was the scalawag military guys.  And so the

Navajos had sunk to their very lowest point in their

history.  But had it not been for the Civil War, they

probably would have been taken care of a least well

enough to keep 'em alive, and then transported to

Oklahoma.  So we came close to havin' this conversation

in Oklahoma, had it not been for the Civil War.

   To see the Navajo people catch onto that, and get

that mindset is really somethin'.  But then, you see,

after they were turned loose and they came back home,

that left such a scar in their mind of how bad things

could be, that they never raided or made war again

against the United States government or the

territories.  So these people that were forced to

relocate from the Navajo-Hopi land dispute, or the FJUA

is what we call it now, the Former Joint Use Area--when

they were forced to relocate from there, they started

sendin' 'em to Phoenix and Flagstaff and Durango and

Farmington, and all these towns all around.  They were

buyin' 'em homes there.  It wasn't workin' out.  So

they got this idea of buying all this ranch land that

adjoins the reservation here, and turning it over for

relocation.  And it's been, I would say, the most

successful phase of relocation in the history of the

dispute.  But it was forced on them, so for that reason

they do kind of feel like they've been forcibly

relocated, so they identify with the Long Walk.  This,

in their terms, is the second Long Walk.  The irony of

it was just, you know, I'd never even thought of that,

until that lady brought that up.  She said, "Well, you

know, here you are.  Here you have the people on the

second Long Walk doing a Germantown reproduction."  And

this is the first Germantown renaissance to happen

since 1900.  Since it died out, this is the first

renaissance period we've had in that Germantown

weaving.

   I could sit here and talk to you all afternoon about

Navajo history.  It was my wife's great-great-

grandfather that really caused the Long Walk to happen--

the original Long Walk.  He was the chief of a band of

Indians over around Mt. Taylor, and it was him that

kept going out and raiding on these raiding parties in

retaliation for the fact that the government wouldn't

enforce the treaty to protect the Navajos--they only

enforced it to protect the people from the Navajos.  So

the Spanish people, the Mexicans, would herd their

sheep and livestock onto the Navajo Reservation.  So in

retaliation for that, my wife's great-great-grandfather

would go and steal some of their kids and sell 'em as

slaves, and stuff like that.

   In doing this Germantown period, I did a lot of

research:  research for the type of yarn, research for

the all the colors and everything, and researched the

history of Germantown.  In doing that, I uncovered all

this history about my wife's great-great-grandfather, a

man that was known to the military as Antonio Sandoval.

His Navajo name is Hosteen Kishkoli [phonetic

spelling].  It means "the man with the club foot."

That's such a strong, revered name among the Navajos,

that her family, about half of 'em, still carry that

name Kishkoli.  It was really gratifying to me to find

this bit of history about her side of the family.

Since then we've come to suspect that she's also

related to Lorenzo Hubbell.  So it's interesting.  I

was always quick to brag about being a fourth-

generation Indian trader.  Well, in fact, my wife is

also.  And another thing that intrigued me was the fact

that my great-grandfather and her great-great-

grandfather may have traded together, because that was

the route that my great-grandfather traded on, was that

route down by the west slopes of Mt. Taylor, down to

Chaco Canyon.  And that was where his people lived, was

right in there.  So it's highly likely that our great-

grandfathers traded together.

   

   Cole:  Were you married in a traditional ceremony?

   Burnham:  Yes, we were.

   

   Cole:  What was that like?

   

   Burnham:  Now, there's some pictures that I would

like to dub into this tape, and we've probably got 'em

here.  Yeah, it was great.  It was the most meaningful

thing that ever happened to me in my lifetime.  In a

Navajo wedding, the total focus is on the man, not the

woman.  The woman is coached and everything by her

mother and aunts beforehand.  The man is brought to the

wedding, and then the entire focus of that wedding is

on the man, understanding what he's getting himself

into.  Because she doesn't become part of your family.

Your parents don't acquire a daughter-in-law, they only

lose a son.  Her family gains a son-in-law that is like

a worker ant.  He becomes obligated to serve that

family, because his children will be part of her

family, not part of his family.  Your children are a

part of your wife's family.  And so they want to make

sure that you understand what your responsibilities

are.  And probably for me, even more so than most,

because they weren't leaving anything to chance in

explaining it to me.

   And it was all done in Navajo, and I thought it was

beautiful.  Right at the beginning of the ceremony, the

medicine man asked--and he was fluent in English--he

says, "Should we do this in English, or in Navajo?"

And this Navajo, his name was Bruce Arthur, he was

there, and he jumped up and he said, "Hey, do it in

Navajo.  He's just a white Navajo."  (laughter)  And I

thought that was a compliment.  So they did the entire

wedding ceremony in Navajo.  I think being done in

Navajo gave it more meaning, because of the language.

The language is so much more beautiful.  The Navajo

language is a very prayerful, beautiful language.  And

so I think that I was lucky to have had that ceremonial

wedding.  And Lij hired a photographer from Cortez to

come down and take pictures at that wedding.

   Well, anything else?

   

   Cole:  What do you see as the future of Indian

trading?

   

   Burnham:  The future of Indian trading, I think, is

going to swing more and more in line with rug weaving

and arts and crafts.  The traders are no longer going

to be general merchandise Indian traders as we've known

'em, but they're going to become specialized traders of

dealing in arts and crafts.  The trading posts, as a

trading post, is doomed, and we're on the last legs of

it now.

   Someone referred to me as a mustang the other day,

and I said, "Well, what do you mean?"  And he said,

"Well, you're a dying breed."  We truly are.  And we're

just one of many, many businesses in the United States

that have made the crossover into the computer age and

not survived it.  It was more pronounced for us,

because we went from seeing our customers riding in a

wagon to data processing, in forty years.  That's a

tremendous change.  It hasn't been that long since I've

seen Navajos coming into the store in a wagon.

   And just the other day my wife and I were driving

across the reservation, it was about ten o'clock at

night, and we were driving along and feeling a little

melancholy, I guess, and we were thinking about what it

was like to look out there and see a street light at a

hogan, with three pickups parked there--no wagon in the

yard, and a bright light inside the hogan window.  When

you interview my wife, you ought to ask her about,

mention about what she felt like when she realized that

that was an era that was gone.  She became quite

melancholy about it, and reminiscent of days when she

would come in from herding sheep all day, and come over

the hill and come into view of the hogan and see a wisp

of smoke coming up through the smoke hole at the top of

the hogan, and see the warm glow of a kerosene lamp in

the window, and just smelling that smoke.  She could

also, in her mind, smell some ribs cooking over the

coals inside the hogan, and the coffee boiling over,

and the smell of the fry bread being made.

   That's one of the real warm moments I have to

remember about my wife, is that recollection of what

life was like.  Just that simple thing of how she felt

when she saw a hogan, and how alarmed she was now to

realize when we're driving across the reservation to

see all these street lights and satellite dishes.

(laughs)  That's in a short space of time that they've

gone [from] a battery-operated radio that took a

battery--a big square battery like that, to operate.

Not a car battery, but a regular, we call 'em waterless

batteries now, and waterless radios.  You had to string

a big antennae for it and everything.  But they went

from that to a satellite dish in such a short period of

time, in a thirty-year time, twenty-year time, for a

lot of 'em.  And to think of how that has affected

their lifestyle, being caught between those two.  The

availability of our world, and still caught in the

cultural identity of their world.  So it's been quite a

switch.

   

   Cole:  What kind of an impact do you see this having

on their culture?

   

   Burnham:  I see the young Navajos today as really

being between a rock and a hard spot, so to speak.

They've shed their traditional ways, and they're not

quite able to fit into this idealistic picture that

they've been shown on TV or in school.  They've seen

that carrot dangling out at the end of the stick.

Well, they can't quite get their hand on it.  And in

order to get their hand on it, they're going to have to

sever ties with the reservation and the culture that

they were raised in, in order to compete in that

dominant society that has all those candied apples and

cotton candy and all the glitz and glamour of modern

technology.

   So I see the reservation as being two generations

away from losing the language right now.  When that

language is lost, the Navajo people are going to become

a generic tribe of Indians.  They're going to be part

of the "Powwow Indian Group," of just Indians that want

to maintain Indian identity.  They can't get it from

their cultural background anymore, so they're going to

get it in the urban areas from other Indians from just

wherever, but they're still going to be Indian, they're

going to be a generic Indian, because when they lose

their language, that's when they're going to lose their

cultural identity.

   When they lose that--I think that when they lose

that cultural identity, that's when we're going to be

threatened with the fact that rug weaving is a dying

art, because it's the cultural identity that keeps the

weaving alive today.  It's not a matter of economics.

So if it dies, it's gonna die from within.  From

without, it's a healthy trade, and a healthy interest

of people knowing what Navajo rugs are, and

appreciating them for what they are.  So it will become

a dying art when it ceases to be a part of their

cultural identity.

   My wife remembers going to bed at night to the sound

of that (tapping) tap of packing the wool in a loom,

and waking up in the morning to that same sound of her

mother getting up early and weaving a little bit before

her day starts.  So those are sounds that make an

impact on a child.  When that child grows up then, and

their earliest memories are that of being strapped in

the cradleboard and leaning up against the wall of the

hogan and listening to the mother weave, that rhythm of

that weave become so ingrained in 'em that it gives 'em

an aptitude or inclination to be a weaver when they

grow up.  When that ceases to exist, they will cease to

become weavers.  So we could very well be in the last

stages of Navajo weaving as we know it today.  And it's

not because of any other thing than that of the loss of

the…  It's not the loss of sheep that's gonna bring

it to an end--it'll be the loss of a way of life and a

cultural identity that does us in.      Well, the

statement was made that as a language goes, so goes the

culture.  I've been on a soap box, kinda preachin' for

the last couple of years, because I feel that we're not

just talking about the demise of the trading post, or

the trading post ceasing to exist--we're talking about

a whole group of people ceasing to exist as a culture.

And what we've got here is we've got 250,000 Navajos

that because of the Indian Self-determination Act, they

have the ability to control all the curriculum in their

schools.  And the reservation is a large enough land

mass, and there are enough schools and enough people,

that they could really have an impact on the

survivability of the Navajo people as a unit of people

if they would require Navajo language, history, and

culture as a required subject from "K" through twelve.

They could do it in one class a day from kindergarten

through the twelfth grade.  They could teach the

language--that's reading and writing the language--plus

the history and the culture of the Navajo people, all

in teaching the language.

   All while they're teaching the language, they could

also be teaching the…  All they'd have to have is

the curriculum about their history of the Navajo

people, and their culture, and they could graduate

students that were totally fluent in two languages,

with no effort whatsoever.  The only effort required

would be the initial upstart of creating the

curriculum.  They've got Navajo teachers that speak

Navajo now in every school on the reservation.  Just

think of the impact that could have on 250,000 Navajo

people, when they're just this close--that's one

generation--they're that close to losing the language

now.

   If they lose the language, they lose their cultural

identity.  They've already lost a great deal of it, but

nothing like they'll lose in the next twenty years, if

they don't get a handle on the problem right now.  So I

see that as being the end of trading, the end of Navajo

people as they exist today as Navajos.  Sure, they'll

still be Navajo people, but they'll be just another

ethnic group of people, they won't really have the

strength of being a different people.  And it's already

happening.  You see it more and more every day.  When

you go to Los Angeles, there's a huge population of

Navajo people that live in Los Angeles, and when you

see 'em, you don't see 'em talking Navajo, you don't

see 'em speaking Navajo, you don't see 'em interacting

as Navajos.  You see 'em at powwows interacting with

other Indians, just with the sole purpose of being

Indian.  And that's where it's headed.  And we're going

to end up with this huge generic tribe of Indians, and

they're going to call it the Powwow Tribe.

   I already have a brother-in-law that says that he

wants his kids to be traditional.  That's why he

encourages them to go to powwows and stuff.  Powwow is

the most unoriginal thing to ever have, the most

untraditional.  It's just a modern adaptation to

something that the Navajos never did believe, they

never did participate in it.  It just came along at a

convenient time.  So there are some things that play

right now on the reservation that are going to play out

regardless of the trader's position, and it's going to

be sad to see a whole era and way of life come to an

end for so many people.  And for a trader that spent

thirty years in an area, you develop a kinship to the

people, and that's what you hate to see happen, is the

end of that culture that you've been adopted into.

   You know, in making a closing statement here, I

would tell you that traders, in my opinion, deal by

decades.  The first ten years of your career you spend

learning how to be a trader and learning how to turn a

maximum profit on every deal you make.  The second ten

years you're on the reservation or in the area, you

begin to lighten up a little and see the broader

picture.  You're not quite as motivated by profit as

you used to be.  You're getting to where you're a

little bit more concerned with the community and the

members of the community.  Well, by the third [decade],

you've got a lot of kids that are calling you grandpa

and you're a respected member of the community.  And so

more and more of the liability of that falls on your

shoulders.  It becomes a liability at a certain point.

And so you even begin to pay less attention to the

bottom line, and more into just what's good for all of

us.

   The fourth decade--that's forty years--by then,

you're locked into it, you're at home, you're right

where you feel at home.  Most of your customers you've

helped raise, everybody refers to you as being

Grandfather or Grandpa--you're the community's grandpa.

By then you're starting to give back some of the

treasure that you amassed, you're starting to feed it

back into the community, just as a humanitarian

interest you have in those people that you've become

such a part of.  And then there's the trader that stays

five decades.  In that fifth decade he gives it all

back, he dies broke, but he's happy because he had a

great life where he was at, enjoyed his affiliation

with all those people, and had no qualms about feeding

it all right back into the community again.

   That might be quite a bit exaggerated, but I think

you could apply that to almost every trader.  And you

could find the trader, like old Jim McJunkins [phonetic

spelling] that spent fifty-some years on the

reservation.  Very successful trader, but at different

levels.  His success was measured differently.  And

when he finally left, he didn't have anything.  He

didn't leave, he died while he was there.  I tried to

buy his store one time.  We got down to the bank to

close the deal, and he got up, nervous, and walked

around, and came back and he said, "Bruce, I can't sell

it to you.  I've got no place to go.  There's no other

place for me to go.  I've been there fifty years and

I've got no place to go.  That's home to me.  I'm

sorry.  If I owe you something for your discomfort or

for the trouble you went to, I'll pay you, but I can't

leave."  And his wife had Parkinson's disease, and they

had no desire to be anywhere else.  So that's when I

came to realize…  And he'd spent all of his career

at that one place.  So you can imagine what a part he

was of that community.

   And it's kind of a sobering thought, to think of it

in those terms, but basically, that's what it is.  If

you see a trader that was in an area twenty years, he

was pretty successful and left with a pocketful of

money.  One that was thirty years, he was real

successful and he still had a pocketful of money.  But

when you start seeing the traders that stayed in an

area forty and fifty years, you started seeing traders

like Jim McJunkins or the Smouses out at Borrego Pass.

They just end up staying so long that it all just

finally just turned in on itself and funnelled right

back to whence it came.  And that's always intrigued me

about traders, of how some of 'em got out there and got

caught up in what they were doing, and unbeknownst to

them, they just really became Navajos in every aspect

of the word.

   

   [END TAPE 2, SIDE A; BEGIN SIDE B]

   

   Cole:  This is Brad Cole from Northern Arizona

University.  We're in Sanders, Arizona, at the R. B.

Burnham Company Trading Post with Bruce Burnham, and

we're interviewing him about his days as an Indian

trader.  Also in the room is Lew Steiger, who's running

the camera equipment.  It's July 17, 1998, and this is

tape [side] number four.

   Burnham:  Well, in summing up my interview, I would

like to tell you a story about my grandfather.  My

grandfather's name was Roy B. Burnham.  As you probably

have figured out by now, I'm Roy B. Burnham, III.  My

father was also Roy B. Burnham.  So what happened was,

there was one instance where a lady came into the

trading post at Burnham and she asked my grandfather if

he would take her husband to town with him on Saturday

when he went in to get his weekly supplies, and take

him in to the Mission Hospital that was on the south

side of the river in Farmington, for treatment, that he

was pretty sick.  So my grandfather said, "Yeah, I'll

do it."

   The main reason that my grandfather agreed to do it

was because he understood where the lady was coming

from.  They had a new hogan and her husband was about

to die, and if he died in that hogan, they would have

to knock a hole in the back side of it and vacate the

hogan and build a new hogan.  So as a matter of

economics for his customer, he decided he'd take the

man to Farmington, so he could die at the Mission

Hospital instead of at home.  Well, the long and the

short of it was that my grandfather took him to town

and took him over to the Mission Hospital, whereupon

they examined him and figured that he wasn't so far

gone that maybe he wouldn't respond to treatment.  So

they sent him away to a sanitarium and cured his

tuberculosis.

   Two or three years later, the man came home, and

soon after that, his wife came in with a rug and she

told my grandfather, "Here, this rug is for you," and

unrolled it on the counter, and he took a look at it

and had a fit because it had a picture of the trading

post and his name written across the bottom of the rug.

And he said, "Are you crazy?  Who do you think is ever

going to want to buy a rug with my name on it like

that?!  You should never do something like that!" and

just went on and on.  Finally she told him, "I didn't

do this rug to sell to you.  I did it because of what

you did for my family."  In essence, what she wanted to

do was to show her gratitude for him taking her husband

to town, and then the fact that he was cured and came

home.  So she was just full of gratitude towards my

grandfather about what he'd done for their family.  So

at that point my grandfather started negotiating,

trying to get the rug, and she said, "No, you don't

like the rug, so I'm going to take it home and I'm

going to unravel it, and I'm going to reweave it into a

rug that you will like, because I want to give it to

you as a form of appreciation, of gratitude."  Well, he

went on and on and on, finally ended up buying the rug,

and even gave more than the going price of rugs to get

it.  (laughs)  So that rug has a lot of meaning in our

family.  Not only did he end up paying more for the

rug, but he also learned a lesson in dealing with

people.

   Before he died, I saw a journal entry in a diary--

either his diary or ledger, or else something that my

grandmother wrote about him--and he said that at that

point he began to realize that the only difference

between the Navajo and us--or "between them and us" is

how he put it--was purely circumstance--that they had

all the same feelings of gratitude and thanks and love

and everything that we do, and that the only difference

is just circumstances, that they are not as well

educated, we don't speak the same language and

everything, and yet we still have those same human

feelings, no matter what culture we identify with.  And

so that really did have an effect on my grandfather's

trading days and how he traded with the Navajo people.

He had much more respect for them after that.  That's

why that rug means so much to our family.

   It's important that we understand that that's what

the differences are, is only that we're from two

different cultures, and not … we're not, you know,

the same, you know, made from the same mold.  That's

it.

   

   [END OF INTERVIEW]