Brendan Basham is a Diné author, teacher and artist who lives in New Mexico, near the Navajo and Zuni Reservations. He first stayed at the Ucross Foundation's ranch in Sheridan County in 2020, as the organization’s first Native American writing fellow. During that time, he worked on his debut novel, “Swim Home to the Vanished,” which tells the story of a small-town Diné line cook and uses magical realism to explore themes of grief and redemption.
Basham returned this year as the foundation’s first culinary resident after working as a chef for years and co-owning two restaurants in Puerto Rico. He spent six weeks at the ranch with uninterrupted time to create in and out of the kitchen. He’s currently working on a new novel about twins dealing with mysterious deaths in their family, connected to unremediated uranium mines.
Basham spoke with Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann.
Hannah Habermann: You currently live in the mountains in Western New Mexico. How does that place fuel your creativity?
Brendan Basham: During the residency, I was thinking about the novel that I'm currently working on. I've been working on it for a couple years now.
Among other things, it's about how these twins are dealing with these mysterious deaths in their family and the community on the reservation that's tied to the nearly 500 uncleaned-up mines, uranium mines, you know, from the ‘40s until the ‘80s. The Church Rock processing mill outside of Gallup, that tailing dam that holds millions of gallons of radioactive waters and toxic heavy metals, that dam broke.
And all that radioactive material flowed into the Rio Puerco, which goes through Gallup, which goes through Sanders, which goes to the Little Colorado River, which goes to the Big Colorado River, which helps millions of people survive in a place where they shouldn't be surviving.
In order to finish that book, I feel like I had to come home and interview some of my family members and do my own research, driving up through the rez and finding some of these spots.
And just being closer to home, whatever home is. I say in my new book that if there is a home, the closest thing to home I have is the smell of the pine trees and the rain coming into Flagstaff in summer.
HH: Many places in the US and on tribal lands seemingly are just becoming more and more food insecure, harder to access food. What do you think are some ways to push against that issue and the health issues that come with that?
BB: It's one of the most tragic things that's happening on reservations around the country, and not just reservations, but in poor communities across the country.
I don't know how one would fight against that other than proper education about nutrition and whatnot. Let's say you do know all about nutrition, you know that sugar and salt and all those are poisonous to your body. What access do you have? What is sold in the local grocery store and in the local Bashas’? You walk into the aisles of a Walmart and you just see a mile-high stack of corn syrup, right? Sodas and packaged goods, processed foods.
Sure, in one sense, the high deserts, you can't really grow much, so you have to import everything. But on the other hand, it doesn't have to be poison. I don't think that it's an accident that the U.S. government in the 1800s drove tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples onto lands that are un-farmable and are already food deserts where you can't really grow much more than beans, corn and squash, which are the three sisters.
And that’s what we need in addition to sheep—for 500 years that’s been one of our main sources of life and income and wheat and wool. So how do you get a group of people to become self-sustainable when they have been marginalized and brutally put into this way of life on purpose?
HH: Are there people or groups that you see sort of working towards self-sufficiency or in support of food sovereignty that you feel inspired by, or that you want to uplift?
BB: I want to mention a Diné activist. He's really well known on the reservation. His name's Klee Benally, he died a few years ago.
He and his brother and sister were part of a band called Black Fire. They're this punk rock band in the nineties. And actually I got to see them a few times, but the best time I saw them was when they opened for Fugazi at a high school in Tuba City where my mom taught.
So Klee and some other natives in the area started a nonprofit that helped pass out goods and supplies to. So the nonprofit was based in Flagstaff, but they would collect and raise money and stuff and donate it to elders and families in need on the reservation.
They're still doing it, but he was a huge advocate and a public face and a leader, and I think we need more of that. We need a public face. We need leadership.
Not necessarily in office, though. I actually think that could be detrimental. If we had someone in an office who can advocate on behalf of nonprofits that do the kind of work that Klee Benally and our Diné people in Flagstaff do, that would be great. That would be wonderful.