Young royalty hold traditional stirring sticks known as ’ádístiin over a bowl while making blue corn mush during a community gathering at Tooh Haltsooi Community Center. Courtesy/Yee Ha’ólníi Doo

Yee Ha’ólníi Doo News:

Roberta Roberts knew the talent was there. She just needed to figure out how to bring it out.

When the Tooh Haltsooi Community Center opened its doors in Sheep Springs, New Mexico, in January 2023, Roberts and her team had a plan. They would offer workshops in culture and tradition, food sovereignty, youth leadership and small business development. What she didn’t expect was how much the community itself would shape what those workshops became.

Roberts, the director for the Tooh Haltsooi Community Center, said the knowledge and skills already existed in the community.

“The knowledge and the skill sets are here, but to share that and to teach that was something that lacked support,” she said. “So we began to let them know that we’d like to have them share their entrepreneurship journey with the people.”

The center held its first workshop on sand painting, a local art that had begun fading from daily life. Tó Hałtsooí, the Diné name for Sheep Springs, is known for the practice, and Roberts wanted to spotlight what made the area distinct.

“It felt good to be home. The talent has always been here. The people have always been creative and resilient,” she said. “How do we showcase that? That was my challenge here at the center.”

But getting people through the door took time. The concept of a community center was unfamiliar to many residents, who were used to gathering at the chapter house for meetings and events.

“The whole community center was foreign to everybody because the community center that exists in most communities are the chapter house,” Roberts said. “So when we came in and opened, we had to rebuild the trust. And it’s just connecting with the people and tapping into their knowledge.”

Once word spread that all services were free, participation grew quickly.

“One of the things that was really eye-opening for the people was that all our services were free,” Roberts said. “They felt like there was a catch, like, ‘OK, what do I got to do?’ and it’s like there’s none. You can just show up.”

Stirring sticks, personal meaning

The exchange started to work in both directions. A community member walked in one day with a gift: a set of ‘ádístiin, traditional stirring sticks used in Diné culture to prepare food and for spiritual purposes.

“He said, ‘You were talking about this one time, so I made a set for you,’” Roberts said.

Roberts gathered youth workers, and the elder began teaching them how to find and prepare díwózhii, or greasewood. Students shaved bark, asked questions and recorded each step. By the end of the session, they had made their own stirring sticks.

One young woman asked for a smaller set to take back to college in Los Angeles.

“She said, ‘It’s really hard in college. You have to really budget. I want to take a set back with me and put it in my dorm so that I don’t go hungry,’” Roberts said.

In Diné culture, the ‘ádístiin is believed to shield against hunger and poverty. The stirring stick workshop became so popular that it turned into a regular offering.

“We’re full-fledged known for making stirring sticks now,” Roberts said. “People are requesting it.”

The center has used the same model for other projects, from restoring a dormant cornfield to teaching small-scale food processing and budgeting. Roberts sees the work as a continuation of traditional ways of living, adapted to present circumstances.

“That’s the way of life we’ve always known,” she said. “It just looks different.”

Hub for culture, connection 

At Monument Valley, Samantha Holiday runs the Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii Community Center with a focus on cultural preservation and community access. The center, which held a virtual soft opening in August 2021, has become known for its cultural workshops and serves as a gathering place in an area with high tourism.

“The community center overall serves as a hub,” Holiday said. “We provide computer access. A lot of people come in to use the computer, to use the internet, to get on the internet, to check their emails.”

Small business owners in the tourism industry use the center’s business resources regularly. Tour operators and caterers come in for help with technology and annual business license renewals.

“We do have a conference room as well. And a lot of the times the local officials from the chapter house use the rooms for conferences and meetings,” Holiday said. “We do have a food court space that’s a little larger and so they hold a lot of their chapter meetings there.”

The Oljato-Monument Valley Chapter does not have a dedicated meeting place and instead operates out of an administration building that is not large enough to host chapter meetings. Holiday said the Tsé Bii’Ndzisgaii Community Center has partnered with the chapter to provide a space where those meetings can be held.

The center includes a public library and study spaces that attract college students from the nearby Utah State University extension site. But it’s the cultural classroom where Holiday sees the strongest engagement.

“We call it cultural classrooms because we’ve done a lot of cultural workshops in the past, like basketmaking, sheepskin tanning, jewelry making, beading classes, sewing classes. And a lot of it is culturally related,” she said. “That is the significant part of our programming is the cultural aspect of it. A lot of people attend those types of workshops.”

The center also offers agricultural workshops in partnership with Diné College and the Diné Land Grant, covering topics like horseshoe care, horse handling and sheep shearing. Holiday said the programming comes directly from community input through conversations, surveys and feedback after workshops.

“We get a lot of interest in our cultural workshops. So anything that’s culturally related, we have them come by. We have the highest attendance,” Holiday said.

One of the center’s most memorable projects involved building a garden and hogan. As the infrastructure went up, fencing, a hoop house, garden boxes and the hogan’s foundational structures, community members stopped by to check on progress.

“I was just really surprised that people did care and want to come by and they are interested in gardening. They’re interested in seeing live plants and surrounding the community,” Holiday said.

The center held a community service workshop where volunteers planted trees donated by Utah State University’s nursery garden.

“So we had quite a few people show up just to volunteer because they wanted to see plants rather than rocks,” she said.

The hogan project drew particular interest. Community members came to help with the first step: shaving logs to remove the outer layer.

“A lot of people showed up,” Holiday said. “They were interested in the consultant and his knowledge of traditional practices. And so that was probably the most memorable moment,” Holiday said.

Getting neighbors to see each other

At Standing Rock, New Mexico, program coordinator Thalia Garmendez runs a similar operation with a smaller team and tighter budget. The Tse’ii’ahi’ Community Center opened in August 2023, and Garmendez has focused on something simple but difficult: getting neighbors to see each other again.

“I want to try and bring the community together,” she said. “Hold events or workshops where the elderly, the youth and the parents are all interacting with one another. Have people who haven’t seen one another in a while.”

The isolation surprised her at first. Families live close to each other but can go years without crossing paths.

“People just live right there,” she said. “They won’t see somebody for five years, and I find that so interesting.”

She measures success by watching new faces come through the door and hearing from people who recommend the center to others. But funding remains a constant challenge, limiting what programs she can offer and how often.

“A lot of what’s restricting the center is funding,” Garmendez said. “I’m very restricted on what I can do if I don’t receive grant money or if the organization can’t receive grant money. It’s what makes things happen.”

Some repairs and improvements require approval through Navajo Nation processes that can take months. Chapter support helps, but the bureaucracy slows things down.

“It’s a lot that doesn’t make it easy, but obviously I make it work because I want to keep providing for people,” she said.

Despite the constraints, Garmendez sees signs of growth in unexpected places. The local flea market has become a hub for small-scale entrepreneurs, many of them women, selling food and handmade goods.

“Their flea market always has food vendors, and a lot of them are women, but some of them are also men. It’s really nice to see that, just to see them trying to support themselves,” she said.

She pointed to one vendor, a younger woman she knew from school, who started by selling baked goods and tea and now runs a small business out of her food trailer.

“Her name is so well known now,” Garmendez said. “It’d be nice for them to get bigger and make something out of it.”

The market reflects a larger reality in Tsé’íí’áhí, the Diné name for Standing Rock, where formal employment is scarce and the population continues to grow without corresponding infrastructure.

“It’s very hard to find employment over here,” Garmendez said. “The town is so small. No new buildings or infrastructure are going up, but the population is getting bigger. These entrepreneurs are trying to just keep providing the services that they do to sustain themselves.”

Women leading through the pandemic and beyond

Mary Jean Francis, the interim executive director of Yee Ha’ólníi Doo, the organization that operates the centers, said the network grew out of the early months of the pandemic in 2020. Most of the founding voices were women, and that leadership has continued.

“The women-led organization started out at the inception of the pandemic back in 2020,” Francis said.

The organization now runs three centers across the region. In addition to Sheep Springs and Standing Rock, the third center in Monument Valley operates with the same approach: listen first, respond directly and connect local knowledge to opportunity.

Francis said Yee Ha’ólníi Doo this year will focus on maintaining consistent programming, continuing wood deliveries for elders and keeping youth engaged. All of that depends on steady fundraising.

“We’re constantly looking for grants and financial support from donors and foundations to help us along with our programming,” she said.

She often has to explain to community members what the organization does. Many people have heard of Yee Ha’ólníi Doo but don’t understand its work.

“They’re still not too familiar with what we’re doing in the communities,” Francis said. “But when the conversation progresses, we explain the programs – Covid relief, food and water, medication supplies and the elderly heating program. Then that’s when it clicks.”

Those conversations push her to improve how the organization tells its story, both in English and in Diné.

“It motivates me to tell our story more,” she said. “To improve our storytelling traditionally in Navajo, perhaps explaining what a nonprofit means – and the flexibility and services it can bring to the community.”

Connecting youth to elders

Francis also encourages young people to seek out traditional knowledge from elders, to learn who they are and where they come from.

“They should continue seeking knowledge from the elders,” Francis said. “Learn about who you are and where you come from and what your purpose is.”

That guidance ties back to the organization’s mission. Yee Ha’ólníi Doo translates to “may our people have fortitude in times of adversity.”

“One day families will always come home,” Francis said. “The sacred mountains are always protecting us, and that is always home.”

Support for the centers comes in different forms. Francis said, “We’re inviting you to invest in our mission, not just financially but as a part of a growing community committed to strengthening our identities as Diné and adapting to the environment around us with meaning change for the future.” 

She added, “Share our work with your network to help spread the word. Donate to directly support our programs and expand our reach. Participate in our upcoming fundraising events and workshops.”