The Keeper of the Post

Twelve miles west of the staggering red sandstone monoliths known as Monument Valley, on the southern Utah border, stands a quiet piece of history that is no less an icon than its neighboring stone slab brothers—the Oljato Trading Post, an 80-year-old rustic outpost of local commerce and barter. It remains one of the last original institutions of its kind in the Navajo Nation.

Working inside a veritable museum-cum-general store alongside her 8-year-old granddaughter, Kiersten, is Evelyn Yazzie Jensen, the trader/proprietor of Oljato. Warm smiles from both greet an entering customer, who scans a store stocked with an array of merchandise, from food perishables to auto parts. Lively dialogue in their collective native tongue is exchanged between the trader and the man. A double hamburger and a cola to go soon have him on his way.

For Jensen, 47, born in Black Mesa, Ariz., life at Oljato is living out a dream, one she has carried since childhood when she first visited the Tsegi (pronounced say-yee) Trading Post armed with her first-ever hand-woven rug.

“I think the trader felt sorry for me,” she laughs. “The rug wasn’t really very fancy and it probably had crooked edges. I don’t remember if it was $8 or $12 he gave me for my rug, but I never saw so much money! I folded it up and put it in a baking powder jar. Every once in a while I would look in it to make sure it was still there. One day my mother asked me, ‘What are you saving your money for?’ I said, ‘Well, maybe the next time we run out of groceries, it’ll help buy us some food.’”

Jensen’s comment to her mother that day long ago wasn’t patronizing. A vivid and indelible impression had been etched on the youngster when, growing up, the family now and then would run out of food. She recalls how at those times her mother would gather up a rug she had just woven, jump on a horse, then ride 12 miles to the highway, where she would catch a ride to town. At the trading post she would sell her rug, buy groceries, then hitchhike back to where she had left the horse tied up by the highway, before riding the final 12 miles on horseback to the family hogan (a usually earth-covered Navajo dwelling).

“Even to this day, sometimes I will be riding my horse and I will think of those days,” says Jensen, shaking her head. “I will think what had to be in my mother’s mind when she knew we were out of food and would say, ‘Well, (I’ve) got to saddle up the horse and go.’”

Carrying on custom

A daughter of the trading post’s former proprietors approached Jensen in the early 1990s about leasing the little store. (Owned by the Navajo Nation, the trading post can never be purchased outright by any prospective “buyer.”) At the time, Jensen was working in a bank in nearby Kayenta and was open to a lifestyle change. But before officially taking over, she had to appear before a council that had to give consent. Finally, on Dec. 1, 1991, Jensen was named its new manager, keeping alive a longstanding line of traders dating back to 1921. Back then, the site was considered desirable in this vastly remote region for its proximity to water.

“Oljato (pronounced Ole-jay-toe),” she explains, “is Navajo for ‘place of the moonlight spring.’”

Besides transacting the post’s regular daily business, Jensen carries on a lengthy trader custom as letter reader, form filler (mostly insurance), and message taker for the Oljato Chapter, one of 110 local units that comprise the Navajo Nation. In addition to seasonal tourists, the trading post services about 300 people in the Oljato community, where patrons occasionally ride up on horseback and bartering still is an acceptable form of exchange.

“Rugs, pottery, baskets, fancy beadwork …” Jensen recites. “Yes, we’ll trade.”

Locals contribute about 80 percent of the on-premise crafts at the post. On this particular day, artisan Garry P. Holiday Jr. is displaying his baked clay sculptures and bow-and-arrow art. Holiday’s creations surface from “the sum that’s in me,” and he credits his grandparents with instilling his artistic sense and skills.

“We didn’t have toys like other kids,” he explains, “so we used to make our little cars out of clay, our animals and people; our bows and arrows out of wood we found—those were our toys, and that’s when I began (sculpting, crafting).”

Jensen’s friend, Dean Lewis, assists her, taking on additional but necessary services like tire repair. The two swap out the 11-hour-day, seven-day-a-week demands of the post. To make ends meet, Jensen also offers horseback and trail rides, her favorite pastime, as an auxiliary operation. She’s also planning a bed & breakfast, which would carry on yet another longstanding tradition at Oljato.

“In the early years,” she says, “the Navajo people would come such long distances in their wagon or on horseback. They would stay in the hogan out front and were provided water by the trader. They were welcome to stay as long as they wanted or needed to.”

An unplanned but humane extra provided by Jensen is that of acting local animal shelter. Kiersten looks up from her place atop a stool of three stacked milk cases behind the cash register, where she counts out customers’ change, and says that “30 horses, one cow, 14 dogs, and 12 cats” are on the grounds.

Maintaining the old ways

The one-story adobe and log structure that has served as home to the trading post is brightened by the presence, inside and out, of timeless antiques and artifacts. Welcoming patrons at the entrance to the outside courtyard is a vintage red gravity-flow gasoline pump in use through the 1940s and early ’50s. Though no longer operative—“it’s just there for looks”—the pump hints of a time when business was busy but life was simpler in Tse Bii Ndzigaii, the “plain among the rocks.” Running for 2,600 feet adjacent to the post is a once-active timeworn asphalt airstrip where about one plane a month now lands.

With so much of the past inherent at the Oljato post, as well as within her native Navajo heritage, maintaining the “old ways” is of singular importance to Jensen.

“One of the traditions that must be carried on is the Navajo language,” she says. “It’s up to us, the generation who still knows the language fluently, to teach the younger ones. Even my two adult children do not speak Navajo fluently, so they cannot communicate with my mother—their grandmother—because she never went to school and, as a traditional Navajo lady, does not understand the English.”

As to the future of the Oljato Trading Post after she is gone, Jensen is unsure.

“Maybe my son, Gunnar, will continue. He has expressed an interest in it,” she says. “For sure, we’ll have to build around it—the bed & breakfast, cabins, maybe an RV park. If one of my kids doesn’t take over, then I don’t know.” Indeed, the building has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980.

In the meantime, life goes on unhurried at the core of commerce in Oljato, a piece of living art within a setting of some of the deity Yeibechei’s best natural masterpieces. With a noteworthy calendar event coming up later this year, Jensen whimsically ponders her 10th anniversary as keeper of the post.

“I’m not really into celebrating it, but who knows,” she says with a laugh. “I just might decide to harness up my horses to the wagon and hike it out there and serve up some free hotdogs.”

Alan Ross is a freelance writer living in Monteagle, Tenn.

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