The Wind That Talks

by Cormac Antram, O.F.M.

It was a sudden inspiration that hit me like a bolt out of the blue. I remember exactly where it happened. It was while waiting for a long freight train to pass as I was coming in to Gallup, New Mexico from the north on old highway 666.

    I had been listening to a Protestant radio program in the Navajo language, one of several in existence at that time. It was then that it hit me. The message I heard was— “You Catholics have been on the Reservation longer than any of these. Where is your program?”

    I was a young priest back in those days of the late 1950’s. The following Sunday I approached a Navajo couple at my small mission about “my” idea of starting a program. Their surprising answer was—”We had been thinking about the same thing!” It wasn’t long after this that this couple and I were riding the air waves ourselves with “The Padre’s Hour.”

    We were undeterred by the scarcity of funds then. Lorenzo and Helen Yazzie made the trip voluntarily down to our mission headquarters at St. Michael’s, Arizona every week, over miserable roads and all kinds of trying weather conditions, to tape record their part for our fledgling program.

    Before we go any further, let me introduce you to the Navajo Tribe. It is the largest tribe in continental USA, numbering more than 167,000 which is not including off-reservation Navajos. Their reservation is the largest such, encompassing 25,000 square miles—about the size of West Virginia.

    The Navajo language is very much in use even today. The Navajo Tribe has its own 50,000 watt station in Window Rock, Arizona which does much broadcasting in the Navajo language. Also, the main radio station in nearby Gallup, New Mexico broadcasts totally in Navajo, as does its sister-station in Farmington, New Mexico.

    You can see therefore that the Navajos are not like too many other tribes in the USA which have lost their language and their customs.

    Their term for “radio” itself is interesting. It translates into “the wind that talks.” Their term for us friars is “the long robed ones” and they use the same term for members of our Church. Protestants are “the short robed ones.”

    The radio program’s effectiveness as an evangelistic tool became especially evident to me one day. I was visiting a hogan (the traditional, octagonal Navajo dwelling) at an outlying mission station. Before leaving I offered a prayer as I usually do. To my surprise, a young woman kept up with me word by word as I said the Lord’s Prayer in Navajo. When I inquired where she had learned it she replied that she listens to “the wind that talks” every Sunday.

    At one time we were broadcasting over six radio stations every Sunday, all of these towns bordering our sprawling reservation. But in the mid-1980’s the Navajo Tribe started its own station, as I mentioned earlier. This station could be heard all over the Southwest and beyond. It was then that I decided to switch from six stations to one and still cover our huge reservation and at a lesser cost.

    The huge coverage we now had was brought home to me one day when the door bell at my mission rang. Opening the door I faced a huge man who extended his frying pan-sized hand to me. This Navajo introduced himself as an ex-con just out of the Montana State Prison and on his way home at last. He told me that he was hitch-hiking and just wanted to stop by and let me know how much he enjoyed our radio program! He said that the group of Navajo prisoners up there in Montana would gather around a radio set every Sunday to listen to “The Padre’s Hour.” Needless to say, he made my day!

    After all these years on the radio, I’m more convinced than ever of its great usefulness. It multiplies the missionaries’ presence, it carried him into the most distant hogan, to people who never come to church, to people who yearn to know more about the Catholic Church to which they already boast their allegiance, to people who never really knew Christ but now desire to come to Him.

Father Cormac Antram, O.F.M. is a Franciscan priest who works among the Navajos.

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