Crevice: A Life Between Worlds

Anna Redsand

Choeofpleirn Press

May 2, 2025

223 pages

From childhood, I heard about Christian Reformed domestic mission sites in New Mexico. Starting in the 1890s, Dutch American missionaries established mission churches, schools, and a hospital to “bring the gospel” to the Zuni and Navajo.

Anna Redsand’s essay collection, Crevice: A Life Between Worlds, reflects the author’s unique perspective of bridging two worlds: that of her Dutch Reformed missionary family and the Diné (Navajo) people on whose reservation land she lived. This collection is Redsand’s attempt to “know her own mind, her own experience” rather than be “an untethered astronaut, adrift in the cosmos” (p.111).

Playing with her Diné friends and attending a majority Diné school, Redsand learned a lot about this indigenous culture (the largest in the U.S.), but not as much as she could have due to government and mission language policies. Though she learned some Diné bizaad (Navajo language) from her father and her playmates, the White-controlled schools she attended did not allow Diné to speak their home language. She writes, “When my Diné friends were denied their language, it was denied me, too. Government and mission policies made it so I couldn’t learn the language from my peers. When we take something from one group of people, everyone loses” (p.127).

Though as a child she considered Teec Nos Pos and other Diné communities her home, Redsand came to understand that she was really only a long-term guest. She also gradually recognized the privilege of being White. At times, her connections to money and power granted her advantages not available to Diné children—including the privilege of using her home language wherever and whenever she wanted, attending a boarding school by parental choice (not by government dictate), and living in a house with running water rather than driving miles to fill water barrels.

However, her race didn’t spare her the bullying she experienced at the hands of White students at what was then Rehoboth Mission School. It was there that she also experienced shame and punishment for a relationship begun with a Diné boy.

It’s important to note that certain assumptions, beliefs, and practices of mission efforts among the Navajo have been regretted and lamented by mission organizations. For example, Rehoboth Christian School’s 100^th anniversary (2003) included “reflection, confession, and testimony.” Excerpts of remarks made then can be found here. Now, students at all grade levels can receive instruction in the Navajo language at Rehoboth. Whether such efforts are enough is a matter of debate. 

One way Redsand has tried to atone for damage inflicted by her people is to help develop Diné/English bilingual education. Her biggest project was serving on a team that created a “full-day curriculum that integrated Diné tradition, language, and learning modalities as vehicles for teaching customary school subjects” (p. 141). She writes that on some level, she was trying to compensate for the sins of her parents.

Even so, I appreciate the way Redsand tries to write in balanced ways about her parents. Whereas she mourns the way her parents tried to detach Diné from their own culture in their attempt to Christianize, she appreciated the way her parents welcomed Diné into their home (unlike many other White missionaries in the area) and assisted people with basic life needs. 

Still, Redsand references the crevice between her and her parents. Upon her father’s death, Redsand returned home and viewed the body. She thanked her father for his gifts to her, like teaching her to read the Diné language and to believe in a life of the spirit. But seeing his lips sewn shut by the mortician, as a lesbian woman she reflects, “He couldn’t yell at me anymore to tell me that on Judgment Day I would pray for the rocks and the mountains to fall on me” (p. 50). And whereas Redsand’s mother used her medical knowledge to assist Navajo people when needed, she voiced many negative stereotypes and clearly considered herself and her ways superior.

My favorite essay is “Some Things Were True,” where Redsand compares Diné and Bilagáana (White) beliefs and traditions surrounding the dead. Her parents often prepared Diné bodies for burial, as most Diné preferred not to be around the dead or places where they died. Redsand feels as if Whites frequently simplified and generalized what they saw as Diné’s fear of the dead. This sentence seemed particularly insightful: “Maybe missionaries had a need to see Diné beliefs and customs around death as fearful, requiring the comfort of salvation, in order to make their task essential” (p.48). 

Redsand, who has read widely and traveled broadly, arrives at broad-minded conclusions, like this one: “I find it easiest to trust people who admit they have known both—the fear and the naturalness of death” (p. 49).

At times, as a child, Redsand felt guilty when she appreciated a Diné ceremony. Based on her upbringing, it felt like a betrayal of Christianity to have an “inkling that there could be more than one pathway to the Infinite” (p. 108). However, as an adult, she has explored several other religions. To her Jewish friends, she is considered a ger toshav, a “good stranger,” someone who supports Judaism without converting (p.123).

Beyond the sociological insights, I appreciated the sensory details that accompany Redsand’s accounts—descriptions of the mesas, hogans, drumbeats, ululations, and Bluebird flour. Though growing up in the crevice between two worlds, she is clearly a product of both of them. As readers, the thought-provoking journey of Crevice: A Life Between Worlds offers us much to consider.