100 Homes
In the face of a third of a billion dollars in documented
basic needs, Congress has appropriated $1.45 million through the
BIA Home Improvement Program (HIP) for construction materials for
housing the former freeze area. We have been building houses there
for the last two plus years, five, ten at a time. Any time we can
scrape together a little money we build a few more. It takes about
$16,000 to build a plain, rectangular 2-bedroom house TO CODE,
about $19,000 for three bedrooms. These are good homes, with 6
inch studwalls and thick insulation. We sometimes do hogans,
although most people would rather have a dirt floor, no plumbing or
wiring, etc. in a hogan so it will be right for ceremonies.
We figured we can do 85 to 100 homes with the $1.45 million,
depending on how many replacements and how many repairs we do. We
are going to start out with absolutely the neediest families. If
a home presents a hazard to the life and/or health of it occupants;
if it is severely overcrowded, meaning more than one family per
bedroom; if there are elderly, disabled, young children or veterans
involved; and if the family hasn't got the income to provide their
own housing; that's how we decide who gets these pitifully few
houses.
The HIP program has its own criteria, but based on them
EVERYONE would get a house. The federal standard for crowding,
more than four persons in a two-bedroom, more than 7 in a three-
bedroom, more than 2 in a 1-bedroom house ... well, that's about
everybody in the whole Freeze area. And how many is crowded in a
no-bedroom House?
I went out last week to visit some of the families we are
working with. One of them was Alfred Mann's family, out by Tonalea.
There are three different families living in a 20-foot hogan. The
emergency comes from the hogan collapsing on the south side. So
there are eight people living in one room, including two, sometime
three couples. The kitchen cabinet not only holds the china, it
holds the roof logs up. I don't know how long it will last.
Millie Benallie's hogan DID collapse. All her worldly goods
are in plastic wrap, piled in front of her relative's hogan, where
she's staying. She has medical problems, her hospital bed is
sitting out rusting in the desert near the still-standing walls of
her hogan. Where she stays is an old-style fork-stick hogan, with
Billy Shorty and his wife and their cat. The Hogan is about 8 feet
by 14 feet, and gets real narrow toward the top. There is a circle
about 2 feet by four feet where you can stand up, except where the
stove is. It sounds grim, but really it is warm and cozy. A small
place like that, made with juniper logs and then covered with red
dirt, once it gets warm it doesn't cool out at all. So even if the
fire goes out in the night, there's nothing to worry about. Also
just a small fire keeps things nice and warm. The Shortys actually
have a house, we built it when the "Freeze" was still on, but they
live in the hogan in the winter anyway.
The Manns' place brought it back to me real sharp: Navajo
homes tend to be REAL clean. This hogan was whitewashed inside,
except for the cribbed juniper roof-logs. The dirt floor had
linoleum over it, like the rest of the place it was spotless. For
a sink they have some dishpans, buckets for clean and dirty water,
and a towel rack. The dishes were all done and clean. Three
different families had their possessions piled up neatly against
the walls. The windows were clear. It smelled good inside.
They were not expecting visitors at all, that was just the
every-day look of their place. You go to Dine' homes, a lot of
them have asphalt tile over cement floors, and typically the floor
tiles are all worn through from being scrubbed so much. A lot of
people will clean a floor by throwing boiling water over it, then
scrubbing with a brush or even a rag and sand. Needless to say,
you don't want to build a house with carpet, or even tile over
particle board sub-flooring.
One family we located included a woman in her forties, a teen-
aged girl and two children, about three and two years old. They
were living in a one-room shack made out of 2 by 4's and scrap
plywood, cardboard, sheet metal, and so on. It had only an outside
wall, no insulation or windows, no ceiling, just a dirt floor with
a blue plastic tarp spread over it. I was out with larry Nez,
Dickerson Smith and Betty Tso, when we visited this family they
were sitting on the tarp eating some commodity food they had cooked
up on their heat stove. This family has a really nice, if small
hogan, but it was locked up. Betty is trying to find out what the
situation is. Maybe there is a cruel in-law or relative who will
take the home away if we give it to the women. These things
happen.
Why Don't You Build Domes?
I got an inquiry about whether we were building anything but
standard homes. That's about it. The labor we use, our own
carpenters and Chapter public employment workers, know stick-built
construction. Most of them are pretty conservative, as are the
clients. One family did get a straw-bale house, it took a month to
build, but I hear it is pretty nice. Another family is interested
in a metal-framed structure (snakes HATE metal studs, and Dine'
HATE snakes). Hazel James was trying to put together a self-help
housing group in Tuba City and they were looking at adobe.
Well, to all of you with ideas, skills and time on your hands,
come on out. There's plenty of work to go around.
jon norstog