The inside of Ani Begay Auld’s home in Columbia, Maryland, is decorated like any other home on the rez. There are Navajo rugs and artwork on the wall. She even has her children’s old cradleboards hanging near the front windows of her home. She has a sign next to her door that reads “Hogan Sweet Hogan.”
Begay Auld and her husband Kiros Auld, are raising their three sons on the east coast but want them to have a strong Navajo identity. “I want them to feel comfortable knowing that they’re Navajo,” Begay Auld, who is from Two Grey Hill, New Mexico, said. “I don’t want them to ever go home and like they don’t belong.
So far Begay Auld has done a great job of family raising, and people have been asking her to start about blog about how she raises her kids with a strong sense of Native identity. It took her a while to make a decision but she finally decided to launch her blog on March 27. In one post she talked about a trip she took home to bury her son’s placenta on her homelands.
“Our culture, we have a language,” Begay Auld said. “We have ceremonies. We have all this stuff that’s here. And why would you not take hold on that and preserve it as much as you could?”
“I don’t want our traditions to be lost,” she said.
Begay Auld also does cultural presentations to her sons’ schools every November for Native American Heritage Month. This will be her fifth year of doing this. She brings with her a cradleboard, a rug, and a Navajo basket.
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