A relay of love reaches a Diné cemetery

This is the story of how a group of New England volunteers spent their summer honoring the Spirits of a dilapidated cemetery on the Navajo Nation.

At The Tipi Raisers, we are lucky to meet so many people willing to go above and beyond the call for service, compassion, and action in the Native communities we serve.
 
One such group of people are our friends from Unlimited Possibilities (UP):
 
Back in May, 20 volunteers from Unlimited Possibilities, a New England-based nonprofit who work across the world to eliminate social injustices, joined us for a week of service on the Hopi & Navajo Nations.
 
During their trip, the group repaired a fence protecting a cemetery on the Navajo Nation in which hundreds of Diné people are buried. Children, grandmothers, veterans and even a Navajo Codetalker rest beneath the desert earth in this sacred space at a 100-year-old church.
 
Spiritual beliefs vary across the Native communities we serve, and even amidst an often difficult history between Christian churches and Indigenous peoples, many families in the local area have long-standing connections to this church and have chosen to lay their loved ones to rest in the stunning high-desert cemetery on site.
 
This project was conducted by our crew at the request of local Diné community leaders and families.

​Many from the UP volunteer crew developed a special connection to the site, sitting in meditation and reverence at the rocks which line the area, and feeling the Spirit of the place wash over them. The crew, who dubbed themselves "The Graveyard Shift," noticed that dozens of gravemarkers at the site had been damaged in the years before the fence was reconstructed. They then took it upon themselves to create an inventory of damaged graves and names of the deceased.
 
And so began a cross-country relay of love to make sure that those who rest in this Diné cemetery were remembered, honored, given the dignity their gravesites deserve.
 
Throughout the summer, this always kind, always joyful crew met up in New Hampshire to lovingly construct new gravemarkers for the site.

Early last week, a volunteer from Unlimited Possibilities landed at the Denver Airport with all 50 crosses in tow. He flew across the country just to deliver the gravemarkers! The volunteer headed back home to the East Coast only a few hours after handing off the packaged gravemarkers to local volunteer Bruce, ahead of our Labor Day weekend trip back south.

​On Labor Day weekend, with the new crosses, volunteers from Washington D.C. got to work beautifying the cemetery. As the gravemarkers were installed, a calm washed over the group. The cemetery had become, for them, a place not of sadness nor despair, but one of peace, celebration of life, and beauty - a word often uttered by our Diné friends as "Hózhó ."
 
What a gift to watch helping hands reach across the country to ensure that those who find their rest in this sacred site are honored.
 
Thank you to UP and to all who go above and beyond for the Native communities we serve, to all who participate in the relay of love that keeps this work in motion.
 
 
In gratitude,
 
Mackenzie and The Tipi Raisers Team