He’s ranged from the Navajo Nation to Mars

Aaron Yazzie’s life juggles the old and the new.
We’re talking very old. He grew up in the Navajo Nation, which his ancestors may have reached six centuries ago.
And very new. He designed key elements of the rover that grabs samples on Mars.
“Mars looks exactly like the Navajo Nation,” Yazzie (shown here) said. “When I was growing up, just playing in those mesas with my cousins and my brothers, I … was sort of creating this muscle memory for when I eventually got to NASA.”
Now he’s featured in the opener (9 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 24) of the second season of PBS’ “Native America.” The four episodes feature:
— Oct. 24: Innovators. Yazzie is an engineer, Henry Red Cloud creates unique. affordable homes and Halluci Nation (featured Oct. 20 on PBS’ “Next at the Kennedy Center”) does electronic music.
— Oct. 31: Athletes. They include an ultrarunner and two youths – a female boxer and a guy learning the difficult skill of horse relay races.
— Oct. 7: Women. They include an activist, a politician, a fashion designer and Arigon Starr, a zestful singer-songwriter. “You’re going to meet a lot of dynamic people who … are culturally active, politically active,” she said in a video press conference with Yazzie and Manny Wheeler.
— Oct. 14: Language. Efforts to preserve the past range from studying cave paintings to Wheeler’s project – dubbing films (“Star Wars,” “Finding Nemo,” “A Fistful of Dollars”) into Navajo. “Hundreds of Native languages contributed to the development of this country,” Wheeler said. “Now many of those languages are extinct and Navajo language itself is at a tipping point.”
And changing things isn’t easy, he said. The “Star Wars” dubbing came after “more than 10 years of knocking on Lucasfilm’s doors.” Fortunately, patience “is a cultural trait of Native people.”
Yazzie agreed. “Patience is something that I learned growing up and I think it’s a culture of … maybe a lot of Native nations. We are very respectful of our elders and the knowledge that they can have. So when they talk, as slow as they may explain things, we sit there and listen.”
He’s admired the slow, steady approach of weavers, including his grandmother. “I compare it to engineering, because of the way they had to sort of plan a giant project.”
But don’t expect everyone to fit into a stony, stoic stereotype. Starr grew up hearing Native storytellers, but was also a fan of the Beatles. They “let me take you on a journey for two minutes and 50 seconds.”
Now her music is quick, upbeat and sometimes funny. Emerging from pain, she said, Native people often show a dry sense of humor.
“It’s almost like Jewish humor,” she said. “My mother was funny, my father was funny, my aunts, my uncles. We grew up with this humor and it was nonstop.”