Diné under the U.S. Capitol

 

You'll be happy to know the three Diné serving Congressional internships through the Morris K. Udall Foundation are adjusting well to the fast-paced life on Capitol Hill.

Just please do not mention mutton and fry bread in their presence.

"Don't even talk about that!" snapped Kristina Manymules of Fort Defiance, who is interning with Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., and is in obvious need of a rez food fix.

So why not just walk down the street to the Museum of the American Indian and grab some fry bread in the Native foods cafeteria?

"Oh please!" moaned Manymules, 22. "Their fry bread tastes like sopapillas. Hello, Smithsonian! Sopapillas and fry bread are two different things!"

Of course, spending 10 weeks in the nation's capital provides plenty of perks to make up for the dearth of decent fry bread.

Prestene Garnenez, an intern in Rep. Raul Grijalva's (D-Ariz.) office, relaxes on her off-hours with Jazz in the Park or a spin around the Tidal Basin in a paddleboat.

Manymules and her counterpart in Sen. Tom Udall's (D-N.M.) office, Eugenia Charles-Newton, get up early on the weekends to comb the city's many museums.

(A fourth Navajo Udall intern, Mica Gilmore of Kayenta, is working for the Defense Department and wasn't available for an interview last week.)

But during work hours, the women are all business.

"Life is very fast-paced here, compared to on the rez," mused Charles-Newton. "Everybody is work, work, work. And there are rules for everything."

"'Stand to the right of the escalator, walk to the left,'" said Manymules, parroting a recording in the Metro. "We're all left-walkers now."

Left-walkers and maze-scamperers.

One thing about being a Washington insider - you really are inside. Like senators and representatives, interns are allowed to use the network of underground tunnels that connect the U.S. Capitol with the surrounding office buildings.

"We're like hamsters," Charles-Newton said. "We never see daylight. It could be raining or snowing out there, we wouldn't know."

"When you do get above ground," added Manymules, "you're like, 'Where am I?'"

You're often lost below ground, too. For security reasons, no maps of the tunnel system exist, and the interns are expected to learn their way around by trial and error.

"It's kind of funny," Garnenez said. "You'll tell someone, 'I got lost on the way over here!' and they'll be like, 'Oh really? What did you discover?'"

As of June 17, when they were interviewed by the Navajo Times, the women had been at their posts two weeks and looked poised and confident in their pressed business clothes, with just a flash of turquoise to remind them where they're from.

"On the rez, you'll never find me in anything but jeans and cotton shirts," confessed Manymules. "I had to learn how to dress like a girl."

Charles-Newton, who has a law degree, was used to coming to work in a suit, but her first week on the job she was at a fancy reception and looked down at her feet to discover to her horror that she had forgotten to change out of the tennis shoes she uses to walk between buildings.

"I thought, 'There's a lot of people here, no one will look down at my shoes,'" she recalled. "Then Mark (Udall) says out loud, 'Oh, that's very practical!'"

One thing you learn about congressmen as an intern: they're more or less like everyone else.

"When you first get here, you're kind of star-struck," Charles-Newton said. "We were expecting to meet these very high-end, influential, powerful men. It surprised me to find out they're just ordinary people."

"I think of them as mentors," added Manymules. "When we first got here, we had this introductory event and we were supposed to introduce ourselves and say something in front of all these people.

"I get really nervous doing public speaking, and I messed up," she said. "I felt really bad, but then Tom (Udall) came by and says, 'Don't worry about it. You were speaking in front of 125 people. That's a lot more than I usually have to deal with.'"

If the Navajos were a bit awestruck at meeting congressmen, it should be noted there are a fair number of bilagáanas in Washington who are star-struck by Native Americans.

"People say, 'Wow, I've never met a real Indian before!'" Charles-Newton said. "I don't even know what they mean by that, a 'real Indian.' They say things like, 'So you know how to walk in high heels?'

"It's amazing they live in this city with so many different cultures, and they're so ignorant about Native Americans," she said.

But Garnenez pointed out she didn't know much about different tribes before she took the internship.

"One thing that's been interesting for me is to meet the other 12 Native interns," she said. "My roommate (the interns live in student apartments at George Washington University) is Cherokee, and I've really enjoyed learning about her culture."

So what exactly do congressional interns do? A lot more than fetch coffee.

"It's a very self-motivated program," Garnenez said. "You kind of have to create your own experience."

For Garnenez, who is pursuing a master's in urban planning at the University of California-Los Angeles, it means taking every opportunity to learn about fair housing and the like.

Garnenez also worked with Grijalva on a bill, introduced last Friday, that would help tribes partner with private entities on renewable energy projects.

Charles-Newton's legal expertise was immediately tapped, and she's doing a lot of legislative research.

Manymules, an Arizona State University student working on a double major in justice and American Indian studies, is doing a lot of what the interns call "meet-and-greet" - talking with constituents who drop by Udall's office and passing their concerns on to the senator.

All the interns are charged with giving constituents tours of the Capitol, a responsibility Charles-Newton enjoys - particularly when she discovered one of New Mexico's two statues in Statuary Hall is of a Native American: the Ohkay Owingeh chieftain Po'Pay, who led the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680.

The women, each the sole Native in her respective office, are sometimes tapped for a Native American perspective.

Charles-Newton was called upon to write a memo on her thoughts on creating a commemorative Long Walk trail. Although she personally would like to see such a thing, she was mindful that she was representing all the Navajos in Tom Udall's district.

"I tried to play the devil's advocate," she said. "I tried to portray the other side as well, which is that a lot of Navajos don't want to memorialize a tragedy."

While the women are working on issues important to their bosses, Garnenez hopes to find time to address a pet peeve of her own: the film that is shown in the new Capitol Visitors' Center.

"The movie makes it sound like Native Americans were given the right to vote in the 1800s," she said. "In fact, we weren't even made citizens until 1924. And in a lot of states, voting rights didn't come until long after that."

Charles-Newton, who hopes to land a job and stay in D.C., is trying to work in some mom time. She has a 10-year-old son, Jaycob, and a husband, Leroy, whom she misses terribly.

"Thank God for cell phones!" she said.

Meanwhile, Manymules, the youngest of the trio, is the beneficiary of Charles-Newton's maternal instincts.

"I'm her surrogate child," she said. "In the morning she's like, 'Do you have your badge? What shoes are you wearing?'"

Information on the Morris K. Udall Native American Congressional Internship Program: http://www.udall.gov/OurPrograms/NACInternship/NACInternship.aspx.

Back to top ^