Their traditional turquoise and magenta silk dresses, the proudly displayed hand-woven tapestries, the way each Navajo woman's face communicated a slightly different self confidence, could have told the story by themselves.Four generations of women from a Navajo tribe in Arizona visited Brandeis last Wednesday to speak about a traumatic history of being forcibly relocated from their homes in the 1970s, and how they managed to find their way back to their cultural heritage.

Grandmother Dorothy Walker-a great-grandmother- represented the oldest generation of the women and spoke only in Navajo-or Diné bizaad-while her daughter Mae Peshlakai translated. Walker recalled painful memories of her family's "forced relocation to a desert area" by the federal government in the 1970s.

"My children were abruptly taken away from me," she said.

Calmly, yet seeming to omit little from the horrors they encountered, Walker's daughters Peshlakai and Angie Maloney revealed to the audience what it was like to be taken from their home when they were just 10 and eight years old, respectively, and forced to attend a boarding school in Arizona.

"They shipped me out, and I didn't see my homeland for 14 years," Peshlakai said.

"Navajo Nation," which covers over 27,000 square miles and comprises parts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, is currently the greatest land area of largely American Indian jurisdiction in the United States. The 1974 Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act called for the forced relocation of over 10,000 Navajo and 100 Hopi Indians from their reservations in the Navajo-Hopi Joint Use Area.

Once at the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Tolani Lake, Ariz., the sisters underwent a series of traumatizing experiences, including having their heads shaved before being herded into shower stalls to be deloused.

Holding her hands to her head as if to remember how vulnerable she felt 40 years ago, Maloney said: "I came out, [my sister] saw me with my short hair and my ears sticking out, and we cried. She said, 'What happened to you?'"

Maloney and Peshlakai were stripped immediately of their ties to their Navajo roots. "We weren't supposed to talk until we learned to speak English," Peshlakai said, adding that at that point they still "didn't know one word [of English]."

Maloney's memories of the years she spent at the boarding school are filled with pain and anguish. The Navajo children were treated harshly, punished for even the smallest transgression.

"If we did something wrong, we would stand on small blocks for hours," she said.

Maloney said it was the intimate bond she shared with her sister Mae that allowed her to prevail in the face of so much strife.

"I remember having my sister by me," she said. "We would take long walks and hold hands, and this was the only time we would whisper and talk words in Navajo." Her voice grew softer, and she said, "Other people didn't have a sister to put their arms around and cry."

Then, at 12 years old, Maloney's attachment to her sister was severed, when she was forced to transfer to a school in Oklahoma City, Okla., without even knowing why.

Throughout the three years she spent there, "I didn't hear from my parents or sister," Maloney said.

Despite forced abandonment of their native culture and language as a child at the boarding school, Maloney and Peshlakai were able to reclaim their Navajo tradition and history upon returning to their families.

"When we went back, we did everything that we were told not to do," Maloney said. As if speaking directly to the American government that forced her to leave the Navajo community as a young child, Maloney said gravely, "I'll never leave [my heritage] behind because someone is telling me to."

Even in high school, Maloney persevered through a constant struggle between Navajo and American concepts. She was constantly made to feel less competent than her male academic counterparts, which was especially difficult for Maloney, coming from a matrilineal society.

"The woman in our culture is very valued," she explained. "We want her to be valued, respected, a leader."

The teachers in her American high school, however, seemed to believe differently. "All those years I was told, 'You can't do this or that.' If I ever see my [high school] counselor today, I'd have a few choice words for her!" she said with a triumphant chuckle.

All through her college career at Northern Arizona Univeristy in Flagstaff, Ariz., Maloney supported herself by weaving rugs and making jewelry and selling her products.

Initially, Maloney planned to study nursing. Yet she had difficulty dealing with the American notion of death.

"I stopped [studying nursing] when I saw a cadaver," she said. "The subject of death and negative things-that's taboo in our culture."

Instead, Maloney went on to study environmental science and allied health services. The study of science was in sharp contrast to the Navajo concepts of health and medicine to which she had been accustomed.

Tina Mae Peshlakai, Peshalakai's daughter, was unable to attend the event Wednesday, so the audience watched a prerecorded video of Peshlakai speaking.

Wrapped in a hand-woven blanket, strands of hair blowing as she stood surrounded by mountainous desert terrain, Tina described the binary between Navajo and American cultures and how she bridges the gap between these two distinct lifestyles.

"I have two totally separate lives," she said, citing her "fast-paced" American life in northern Arizona as opposed to the "quieter" life on the Navajo reservation where she grew up.

Tina, a part-time business owner, as well as the marketing director for the Peshlakai Cultural Foundation, characterizes herself as a "successful career lady. I've tackled the world," she said proudly.

Still, she recognizes the importance of Navajo culture in her current lifestyle. "This is something much much greater than I-carrying on the sacred duties of Navajo lady, mother, grandmother."

For this reason, Tina returns to the reservation for special ceremonies and for "family time," she said.

The mother of two girls, Shelby and Jamie Peshlakai, Tina fears that the next generation of Navajos will be less inclined to practice Navajo tradition.

"We're losing young people to influences that are not native," she said.

With this struggle in mind, Maloney spoke to the importance of teaching today's Navajo youth about the struggles their parents' and grandparents' endured.

"I think young people today are very pampered," she said, glancing over at her niece Shelby, who sat beside her, looking less than enthralled by a history she'd probably heard more than once before.

Unlike her own education, which emphasized only Western ideas, the schools that Navajo children attend today focus on Navajo and American cultures, Maloney explained.

"The first thing [students] are taught is [their] role in Navajo society," she said.

Maloney added that in settings such as Headstart programs and child care facilities, students learn to speak Navajo.

Yet, Maloney claims that because today's Navajo students have always had the opportunity to study Navajo language and culture, they cannot appreciate their significance.

"Today, when all this is available, the kids don't want to take advantage of it," she lamented.

Mae's 14-year-old daughter, Shelby Tamara Nez, however, described a lifetime of her own struggles to balance Navajo tradition with modern American customs.

Soft-spoken yet surprisingly precocious, Nez introduced herself first in Navajo so that her grandmother could understand her.

Nez said her paternal grandmother taught her to weave at age eight, after which Nez became the youngest member of the Black Mesa Weavers Association.

For the generations of Navajo women on stage, Nez represented hope for the future of their culture. With the young girl nearby, Maloney explained that, no matter how immersed in modern American society a Navajo becomes, she can never completely remove herself from Navajo history and culture.

Whether it is returning to the reservation "when they're ill and need to be healed" or learning the Navajo language and, consequently, about the Navajo culture, Maloney said, "In the end, they'll come back.