It was a message of characteristic terseness on the reservations -- many of the informational "brochures" you get are really a series of interdictions -- but it put me immediately in mind of the ten "rules" posted at Tuol Sleng: 5. When receiving lashes or electrification you must not cry at all. 6. Do not speak to me with your jaw of traitor.

There was no one around, and even had there been, I didn't want to "observe" the village like it was a zoo, staring at the wildlife, i.e. Indians, inhabiting it. So I did what any American is expected to do: I went shopping. In the middle of the quiet village was a small shop -- the only building that appeared to be occupied -- where two women were talking to each other in Hopi. I looked at the baskets and kachina dolls and silverwork. It was all shockingly expensive -- $450 for a small plate, $150 for a kachina doll the size of my finger -- pointedly priced not to sell. I pretended to look at the handiwork on display while I listened to the women.

I would spend a lot of time listening to the Indians speak over the next few days, adjusting to the halting rhythms and clashy sounds of their languages. All those apostrophes in phonetically printed Indian languages (like the Navajo word for ghost/spirit, ch'inde) denote something like gaps in time, the lacunae of a culture whose presence in America has been reduced down to its sheer, almost metaphysical longevity. Although we've ceded part of the high desert back to the Indians, the US government will surely contrive to reclaim every square foot if the land becomes politically or economically utile. (Perhaps we leave it to them because we've found nothing on it we want: most coal and oil explorations have come up empty.) Time is the only thing they've got on us. They were here long before we were, and they may well endure long after we're gone, perched on the mesas and huddled in the canyons. Their language announces an acceptance of the long passage of time; eternity seems to sunder in the hollow lapses in their speech. Slow, simple, loose but phonetically crowded, skeined like a patternless strand of beads: the Indians speak languages so alien to the world's ears that one tribe was employed by the US military during World War II to transmit sensitive information. The Japanese could not decipher their speech, and the Navajo Codetalkers, as they came to be known, played an important role in the war.

We have robbed them of their land, their livestock, and their sovereignty -- and now we come to them seeking to mine their supposed spiritual wealth so as to feed our starving spirits. But the one thing we've left unmolested is their idiom. In the many visitors' centers and trading posts and reservation shops I've visited over the last few years, I've found an abundance of books and pamphlets on the rugs, the history, the landscape, and the food; but there are very few guides to the language. It's as if Indian dialects confound even our first attempts to learn them. All those aspirated kh sounds, the sibilant shs and glottal a'a hitches: The Indians go on talking in America and no one understands, nor wants to bother trying, and our willed, bewildered ignorance keeps us from having to listen.

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