Garnett Yazzie tried to blend Navajo tradition with modern know-how when she built a hogan behind her house. The result killed her.
She gave the one-story, one-room building six sides, a low conical roof with a smoke hole at the center and a single door facing east, toward the rising sun.Instead of logs and mud, though, the hogan was built of wooden siding, with a concrete floor, composition shingle roof and tight-fitting doors and windows that look as if they came from a home improvement store.
Earlier this month, inside the nearly airtight structure, the 51-year-old Navajo woman and two friends died of carbon monoxide poisoning from embers used in a healing ceremony.
The April 7 deaths prompted the Indian Health Service to step up warnings about the dangers of open flame in closed buildings.
The case has also illuminated the uneasy balancing act in the Navajo Nation, where tradition and progress often collide on the nation's largest Indian reservation, which spills across parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
The Navajo wrestle constantly with American culture, embracing some aspects and rejecting others as inconsistent with their society.
Navajo voters rejected a proposal to build casinos last year. Many worried that gambling would bring crime and other problems.
Elders and schoolteachers are fighting to preserve the Navajo language against the onslaught of television and young people's desire to fit into the working world off the reservation.
The Navajo also are fighting street gangs, blamed for an increase in violence and graffiti in Window Rock and other reservation towns.
Hogans traditionally have log walls whose gaps are filled with mud and a domed roof of logs sealed on the outside with mud. But it's common now to see plywood, clapboard and even stucco, with framed windows and doors and asphalt roofing.
With the growing use of modern materials, buildings get less ventilation.
Neither traditional ceremonies nor hogans are inherently dangerous, said Indian Health Service spokeswoman Jenny Notah. The deadly combination is use of a wood or coal fire, either on an open hearth or in a stove, without adequate ventilation through the roof and without opening a window, she said.
The IHS has mailed out brochures on the causes and symptoms of carbon monoxide poi-son-ing and steps to prevent it.
Cases are fairly common on the reservation, both in hogans and Anglo-style homes, though most involve the use of open fires or stoves for cooking or heating, not religious ceremonies.
While similar deaths occur in a variety of structures across the country, the risks are especially high on the reservation, where federal officials estimate 60 percent to 80 percent of the 160,000 residents use coal or wood as primary energy sources.
Many Navajos live in hogans, especially on remote parts of the reservation where life revolves around sheep herding. Others occupy the buildings part time or use them for storage, as the Yazzies did.
Bernard, a 54-year-old gift-shop clerk who refused to give his last name, learned from his great-grandparents that the hogan's six sides correspond to various stages in life.
"This is more like a cycle of life," he said, drawing a diagram on a yellow note pad. "Navajo people always place the door facing east, because without that sun, there would be no life in the first place."
Officials and relatives were reluctant to speak in detail about the case because of Navajo traditions concerning death. One doesn't speak the dead person's name for four days, and avoids references thereafter.
Police said the ceremony behind Yazzie's home began about 9 p.m. April 6 and lasted several hours.
Yazzie's niece left about 2 a.m., complaining of a headache and dizziness. She returned a few hours later and found three people dead: Yazzie, Christine Tolth, 62, of Mentmore, N.M.; and Grace Whitney, 62, of Nazlini. Three others were hospitalized and recovered.