March 28, 2024

Going home for Native Americans

Holidays, am I right? They are about family and home, where you feel warm and enjoy festive meals together. Several students cannot make it home for the holidays and it’s fine, and tough at the same time. Even so, most students go back to huge houses with three or more rooms and are comfortable with their family’s choices. I also go home to the reservation like numerous Indigenous scholars. 

For many of us, we have two-bedroom houses and find comfort with food from family unity. Others have a tough time because they may not have running water, hot or cold, no electricity, having a wood stove that is manually used, and living in a one-room house for Navajos called a Hogan. 

With its eight sides, a couple of windows, one door and everything you see in a house from living room to kitchen in a short walk. Even a warm night out during the summer holidays would be sleeping in tents. During the winter holidays, having the wood stove in the middle of the house for heat and cooking is needed. It is hard to envision this with a house full of members of your family in one place; it is tough and no privacy for anyone, but an open concept. 

Even so, parents and siblings get cramp, and the luxury of having a room by yourself in college is heaven with A/C, running water and electricity. At home, almost everything one owns are in a single place, a basket or two, including several pair of clothes and a power bank to charge phones for Internet, communication and entertainment. 

Yeah, it’s tough, but we get stuff done while we get on each other’s nerve for being too cramped and having to deal with each other for peace and quiet. This is why some students do not want to go home and just work until their education career is completed. 

For me it is about the same, no wait, it is the same for work and school, also with hopes of obtaining funds to complete my education. I also think that other people have it worse, so I do not complain to ones who have it all.

Laugh out loud.