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The cemetery at Rehoboth, New Mexico, is hardly a tourist stop, even though thousands of travelers pass it daily, thousands more each summer. Just a few miles east of Gallup, New Mexico, a city sometimes dubbed "the Indian capital of the world," the village of Rehoboth sits quietly off legendary Route 66 and its hurried descendent, I-40. Beneath the hogbacks a mile south rests the town's century-old cemetery.
Should travelers happen to glance out their windows when they pass by the village, they would see a circle of homes and school buildings, two churches (one brand new, the other abandoned), a spacious, new athletic field, and, all around, fairly significant ongoing construction. A century ago, Rehoboth, New Mexico, was a dedicated mission compound, the very first significant outreach of a young North American denomination composed almost exclusively of immigrant Dutch, the Christian Reformed Church—my church, my people. By 1920, the place would have resembled any of a dozen other mission compounds on or adjacent to Native reservations throughout the West: school and hospital, dormitormies and staff housing. But even today you have to make a point of seeing the place. It's not hard to miss Rehoboth.
The hospital is gone now, moved west a few miles into the city, where in the early 1980s it was merged with McKinley County Hospital. Today, the new system's centerpiece facility is a 69-bed acute care campus that stands proudly atop the city, the home of Rehoboth McKinley Christian Health Care Systems.
The oldest stories that rise, even unbidden, from the beguiling cemetery are those intimately connected to the hospital that stood for years on the north end of the mission. According to Rehoboth's own historians, the idea for some kind of medical care facility on Rehoboth's campus grew from an early commitment to holistic ministry. In fact, Cocia Hartog, the first full-time teacher at the school way back in 1910, took courses in nursing, in all likelihood to prepare for work once a hospital was up and running.
The need for good medical care on the Navajo Reservation, the nation's largest, had to have been obvious. The traditional medical care that Native people sought—via the tribal medicine men—struck the missionaries as terribly inadequate, if not downright demonic. A hospital with a Christian staff didn't need to find ways to preach the gospel to patients; simply by their coming in for Anglo medical care, Native people from the vast reaches of the reservation were signaling at least some aversion to their own tradition of folk medicine. Medical care was itself mission work.
In those early years, Rehoboth Mission, like all mission endeavors, was an undeniable threat to the Native cultures of the Navajo and Zuni. It may well be that those avenues of holistic outreach, like health care and education, perpetuated the most significant changes.
The story of the hospital, of the mission itself, of the boarding school and the entire outreach of the mission is, I believe, somehow best told by an early morning walk in that old cemetery. It may not be a tourist stop, but for white Christians especially, it should be.
Most people where I live would say the Rehoboth cemetery is not well-kept. Yet, even months after Memorial Day, more fresh adornments festoon the burial sites, per capita, than at almost any graveyard off the reservation: a miniature basketball and hoop on the grave of a young woman who only a year before her death had helped her Gallup team to a state championship; half-empty bottles of Coke half-buried in the dirt; stuffed animals galore, ceramic angels, all kinds of toys; rosary beads hung from a homemade wooden cross jammed in the ground beside a miniature Mary in a Navajo blanket; hundreds—maybe thousands—of plastic flowers.
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