Under ordinary circumstances Sally would not have been attracted to someone like Spencer Lonetree. Whereas she was bashful, he was brash, and they were worlds apart in their thinking. A revealing moment for her had been the weekend afternoon they sat together under a tree along Lake Michigan and she tried to tell him about Navajo mythology, and how the Dineh came from an underworld and at one time could communicate with the animals. Having left the Red Path for the White Way, Spencer saw Indian beliefs as quaint notions of little value in the modern world, and commented, “You sound like somebody out of a cartoon.”
But there was an independent streak in Sally. After a sheltered upbringing and a strict education, it was fun to let go of all the don’ts. For a girl who had grown up riding a donkey to the nearest trading post, it also felt like royalty to be escorted around the Windy City in Spencer’s two-tone pink-and-white Cadillac. And after all, these were the sixties….
Just seventeen, Sally was sexually naive and did not know the ways of making love without making a baby. She and Spencer were living together when she discovered she was pregnant, but she did not want to get married because their relationship was stormy, and she moved in with a girlfriend to have her baby in peace.
It was a difficult birth. She was in labor for two days before Clayton John Lonetree weighed in, on the morning of November 6, 1961, at six pounds, thirteen ounces. But for Sally it was the most joyous occasion of her life.
Remembering it now, however, filled her with sadness. Her lament was the same as every parent whose child ended up in trouble: Maybe if she had been a better mother, none of this would have happened.
This sentiment led her, in turn, to another memory. Shortly after Clayton was born, she and Spencer argued over how they should raise their son. The Winnebago being patrilineal and the Navajo matrilineal, their views naturally differed. By the time Spencer left, Sally was in tears, and their raised voices had upset Clayton enough that he too was crying. As they wept together, it had seemed to Sally that somehow her son sensed her unhappiness and was crying for her sake, and cuddling him in her arms, she had whispered a promise against his tiny wet cheek that should the day ever come that he needed her, she would be there for him.
The remembrance of that vow became the grain of sand around which a plan of action formed, as Sally recognized that this was her son’s hour of need. She had no idea where he was being held and thought he might still be in Russia until a relative called the Los Angeles Times and discovered that he was being kept in the brig at Quantico, Virginia. She tried to reach him by phone but was unable to talk directly to him, so she left the message that she was coming. Her current husband—she had long ago separated from Spencer—drove her to Albuquerque, where she caught a flight to Washington, D.C. Once she arrived at National Airport, she didn’t know how to get to Quantico, so she took a subway into the city and walked to the Navajo Nation office. From there she was directed to Union Station, where she bought a ticket and boarded a train headed south.
“How far is it?” she kept asking the conductor restlessly.
“I’ll tell you when we get there,” he assured her.
Passengers stared. She was certain it was because they knew whose mother she was and why she had come.
It was dark when she arrived at the right stop. Anticipating her arrival, several military men came up and told her they would escort her to the guest house.
“That’s not where I want to go,” she told them.
“Are you hungry? There’s a restaurant—”
“No. I want to see Clayton before I eat or sleep.”
So they took her to the brig. It was the first time she had seen him in over three years, and her tears flowed uncontrollably. She said she had been praying for him, and she would stand behind him through everything that happened.
To her surprise, he seemed almost nonchalant. Grinning at her, he said, “Mom, it’s no big thing. This will all be put behind me soon.”
At first she couldn’t comprehend why he was so casually dismissing the charges against him. But as soon as she started telling him what was being said about him in the press, by his amazed reaction it became clear: He’d had no access to newspapers, radio, or TV, so he was in the dark as to what was going on on the outside.
“They are blowing it out of proportion. That’s not how it is,” he protested.
Sally looked into his eyes and she believed him. But she also believed that he did not realize the gravity of the situation.
After a sleepless night at the guest house, she met with Clayton’s military attorney, Major Henderson. She had many questions about Clayton’s case, but when she asked them he answered her circumspectly. Much of what she was asking involved classified information, he told her. She became frustrated and angry. She was convinced that her son had been telling her the truth when he said what he’d done wasn’t that bad, just as she now became certain that the reason Major Henderson was so evasive was that he was part of a military conspiracy against her son.
Throughout the long journey back to Tuba City, Sally Tsosie thought about what was happening, and by the time she arrived home she had drawn a straight line from the conquest of the Navajo tribe in 1864 by federal troops commanded by Kit Carson to the imprisonment of her son by the military in 1987. She saw the United States government as not only the enemy of her people but her family’s personal enemy as well. The way she figured it, they were part of the same system: the U.S. Cavalry who had boxed the Navajo people on a reservation and the Marine Corps who had incarcerated her son. In her eyes, they were all Bluecoats.
Thirty-seven years of age, sporting wire-rimmed spectacles and a mustache, his stocky frame perennially balanced on a pair of western boots, Michael Stuhff had yet to establish a prominent name for himself in the city where he currently practiced law—Las Vegas—but he was well known on the Navajo Reservation. After graduating from the University of Utah Law School in 1973, fired with the idealism of the times, Stuhff had decided to devote a year helping the hard-pressed Navajos. He stayed thirteen years and was involved in everything from defending Navajo Tribal Chairman Peter MacDonald on corruption charges to investigating allegations of a connection between the car-bombing murder of reporter Don Bolles in Phoenix and a scheme to get a new tribal chairman elected who would cut a uranium-mining deal favorable to corporations. He had also represented Navajos arrested by tribal police for protesting the boundaries drawn by the court in the Navajo-Hopi land dispute. The ownership of Big Mountain was part of that controversy, and when the Hopis had undertaken a fence-building project in the ancestral lands of the Navajo, many traditional people in the area had opposed the action and were arrested for interfering. Sally Tsosie had been one of those jailed, and Michael Stuhff had defended her.
It had been several years since he’d spoken with Sally Tsosie, and when his secretary told him she was on the line, he had no idea why she was calling. But at the top of the conversation she came to the point. “Mr. Stuhff, you’ve got to help me,” she pleaded.
“Why? What is it?” he asked.
Sally let the words tumble out, telling all she knew, up to the fact that she didn’t think Clayton understood what he faced and including her distrust of the military’s intention to give her son a fair trial.
She finished by saying, “I try to picture it like they say, but I can’t believe it, Mr. Stuhff. I know my child. I know when I look into his eyes that he is telling the truth. It’s not like they are saying it is.”