Sen. Albert Hale lives in two distinct worlds.

On weekdays, he uses his skills as an attorney to represent the Navajo people and other Native American tribes at the state Capitol. He’s one of only two Native Americans in the Anglo-dominated Arizona Legislature.

On weekends, he goes back to his homeland and to his people, where traffic jams are non-existent and the landscape stretches without being broken by the contour of tall buildings.

Hale grew up in a hogan with no running water, and where life revolved around the livestock trade. Now, as a lawmaker who spends much of his time in Phoenix, he often reminds his colleagues that they will be judged by how they take care of the vulnerable members of their communities.

Hale was appointed to the Senate in 2004 and has won three elections since then. He now faces term limits and is mulling running for the House.

You are termed out this year. What will you do after leaving the Capitol?
Well, my options are varied. Of course, you know that I’m an attorney so that’s always a place to go back to full time. While I have been in the Senate, I have been continuing to do my law practice.

There are (other) options, and one of them is to run for the House.

And another one that I have been asked to do is to run for president of the Navajo Nation, which is something that I have done before. I was elected president and served for about four years.

At the moment, I’m leaning toward continuing in the legislative realm.

So that means running for the House?
I’m leaning toward that because that gives me flexibility to do my first love, which is to be an attorney, and then to do public service, which is my second love, I would say.

And if you were to become president again of the Navajo Nation, you couldn’t practice?
No. Your time gets so consumed doing that work. When I was president, I was leaving my house about 4 o’clock in the morning and not getting back until 12 or close to 12 at midnight. That is the type of work it is – a lot of traveling. It doesn’t lend itself to practicing law. So at the time I did the presidency, I had to put my career on hold.

Did you grow up on the reservation?
Yeah, I did.

Tell me about it.
Well, I was actually born in Ganado, which is about 15 miles north of where I grew up. I grew up in Klagetoh.

I was born in 1950. Back in those days, access to medical service and a medical facility was very limited. And back in those days also… my grandfather was very traditional. He was an herbalist and medicine man. And my grandmother was the same way – very traditional. (She had) traditional beliefs, and that carried to my mother. So she believed, and they believed, that the hospital was not a place to go to get well.

Is that right?
Yeah – they believed because of the information that they were getting that people who go there, go there to die. That particular belief almost cost me my life.

Tell me about how it almost cost your life.
When I was about eight or nine years old, I contracted tuberculosis.

Around that time period, tuberculosis was very prevalent on the Navajo Nation. A lot of kids were getting tuberculosis so, evidently, I caught it.

I grew up in a hogan, a dirt-floor hogan structure with no running water, no indoor facility, and fire wood would have to be cut and hauled. So I can empathize with the people out there who are caught in a snowstorm.

In that type of environment, I guess I contracted TB and my family, being traditional as they were, they didn’t want to take me to the hospital. So they kept bringing medicine men over, and they diagnosed me and said, “This is what’s afflicting you. It can be taken care of by this type of ceremony.” I was young, so I don’t really recall the number of ceremonies that were done for me.

I remember one time, when they were performing another ceremony for me, and I was laying there on my mother’s lap, totally weak. My feet were off the edge. Another night probably I would have been gone. But they were performing a ceremony on me, where they would (use) charcoal to blacken my entire body, and they were going through that process.

And I guess my mom couldn’t take it anymore so she took off and walked down about a mile, a mile-and-a-half to the trading post, and found somebody with a vehicle. Back in those days, vehicles were very limited. Most people traveled by horseback or by wagon. So that person came back with my mother and they loaded me up and took me to Ganado Hospital.

I don’t remember how long I spent there – maybe three months, four months, six months. And that’s how I almost died.

I was wondering where you stand on those beliefs. You’ve seen the effects of some those beliefs when you were young, when you almost died.
Like I said, it didn’t hinder my beliefs. I just continue to listen to the stories, go to ceremonies, and continue to take part in ceremonies. That near-death experience didn’t cause my grandparents or my mother to limit that type of teaching. It didn’t impact me in a negative way. So I continued to learn about ceremonies. I continue to live in a traditional way. And to this day, I think the foundation that I have in traditional ways and the ability to speak Navajo very fluently and be knowledgeable in ceremonies and traditions in a very elevated extent, I think, gives me that ability to go, shall we say, into the white man’s world and go back.

I’m here. I’m exposed to all these amenities that you have out here and all the traffic and all the things that are attached to what is called civilization. And then I go back to Navajo and I see the openness and the vastness, and you don’t see traffic congestion. And the things that you see down here are not there.

Did you grow up with Navajo as your first language?
Yes. When I got to – I guess it would have been kindergarten or maybe first grade – Ganado. We were being bused 15 miles over there, and 15 miles back, so it took about two hours because the bus had to stop and unload and load kids. It was one hour going up there or more and one hour coming back. That took a lot of days and a lot of time and I had no exposure to English by the time I got to school.

It was my brother who enrolled me. Not my mother because my mother didn’t have any vehicle, so she couldn’t take me there. She just told my older brother, who was already in school – he was the one who passed away in September. Anyway, he took charge of me and was put in charge to take me to school and enroll me, and he did.

I was really anxious to go to school because my idea of school, not being exposed to it, and then what my older brother would tell me was, “This is the day where we go out and play all day together.” And I was going to be with my brother all day playing. And that was my idea of school.

And when I got there, I was put into a classroom, and I couldn’t find my brother. I guess that scared me, and I bolted out the door and started yelling and crying for my brother up and down the hallways and disturbing all the classes. So that was my first day in school.

How old were you then?
I must have been about six years old.

That’s when you first learned to speak English.

I got into the classroom and the teacher was not able to speak Navajo, and she would be up there talking in English, and I had no idea what she was talking about.

Miraculously, I became fluent in English, and that was like a full submersion in English. When you go to the school, the kids spoke Navajo, but the people who were teaching didn’t have any Navajo.

Before we went to bed, my grandfather or grandmother or even my mother, they would take turns talking or telling stories, stories that are known as the coyote stories – how the coyote was a shyster. The stories are related to all kinds of things that happened back then that laid the foundation for what’s going on now.

For instance, in one of the stories, (there was a) coyote, the one who committed adultery, the first one to do so, and, as a result, you have that. And all these stories, even the creation stories, they have how those types of things began, and that’s what we have to this day.

That’s the Navajo way of educating children?
Educating about yourself, educating about your relations with other people outside your doorway and beyond, and how you relate not only to your self, your mother, your father, your siblings, your extended family members and then people out in the communities and beyond. And then all the environment and how you relate to the trees, to the rocks and the mountains, and how those have been put in place and how you relate to them is part of all that teaching.

What is the Navajo way of life?
It is hard to describe it in just a few sentences because it is so complicated. Through the years because of, for lack of better term, assimilation, it is much more difficult to define the Navajo way of life today than it was back in 1950, for example, or even 10 years ago.

The way of life also cannot really be defined unless you say, “How is the way of life in this area?”

For example, back in 1950 and into the 1970s, most of the way of life was livestock-based. While I was growing up, I helped to take care of the sheep and goats and horses, and my family had lots of sheep, lots of goats and lots of horses. And it wasn’t only my mother I’m talking about, it was the extended family. So in one herd, sometimes you’d have 500 heads of sheep. But it belonged to different relatives. My aunt would have maybe 100, my mom would have 200, and my grandfather would have 200. But they were all together. So it was a family effort to take care of the herd.

How is that different today?
Today, all of that is gone. The sheep are no longer the center of Navajo life. What it has become is more wage-centered. So now people are looking for jobs. They’re educating themselves in terms of what skills they can use to make money, so it’s no longer livestock-based.

That’s a different way of life (than the one) that I grew up in.

UPCLOSER…

Who is your favorite lawmaker to work with?
Whoever gets me what I want.

If you could go back in time, who would you have coffee with?
The deities of my tribe.

What is your favorite Navajo phrase and what does it mean?
Ya’a’teh, which has come to mean or be interpreted as “hello.” But it actually is a word of greeting that means, “It is good.” So when I meet you, and I say ‘ya’a’teh’ to you, I am saying, “It is good. It is good to see you. It is good that we meet again on this day.”