By Annemarie Mannion, Tribune reporter
8:15 p.m. CDT, June 6, 2014
A rusted, leaky 37-year-old trailer with no running water is hardly a place to call home.
At the age of 65, Catherine Plummer, is looking forward to leaving the decrepit trailer where she's lived since 1977 on a Navajo reservation in Utah. She will move into a new home designed by a Hinsdale resident in the traditional style of a Navajo hogan and built by volunteers from a suburban church.
Grace Episcopal Church of Hinsdale is behind the effort to provide a new home for Plummer, who is Navajo and an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church. Her husband, Steven, who passed away in 2005, was the first Navajo bishop in the Episcopal church.
Plummer's new home will have eight sides, doors facing the east so inhabitants can greet the rising sun and a fireplace in the center. The three-bedroom home will be made of stone and stucco and have a galvanized metal roof to reflect the sun.
The 1,200-square-foot building and an adjacent guest house were designed by Bruce George, a church member and president of Charles Vincent George Architects in Naperville. It will used as living space and for worship.
A group of 25 young people from the Hinsdale church plan to be in Utah from June 7 to June 15 to build the hogan.
Chris Pierce, rector at Grace Episcopal, said Plummer's current living conditions "are deplorable. It's a broken-down trailer. It's been condemned."
Plummer raised her two children in the trailer. Her adult son is suffering from lymphoma, the same disease that killed his father, and will live with her.
Describing the trailer, Plummer, too, said it has become unsafe.
"The floor is giving out in the master bedroom and in the dining room, the roof is caving in," she said.
Pierce said rundown housing is not an unusual sight in the Navajo Nation that covers 27,000 square miles, is larger than 10 states, and extends into Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. The nation, which is known as the Navajo Land Area Mission Jurisdiction by the Episcopalian church, has a population of about 180,000.
Pierce started visiting the reservation two years ago to do service at St. Christopher's Mission, which was established by the Episcopal church in 1943 in Bluff, Utah. The church also has missions in Arizona and New Mexico.
Pierce said the reservation has unemployment of over 50 percent, rampant poverty and many dwellings that are ramshackle and do not have running water or electricity.
"To see it is remarkable," he said. "You say to yourself 'How can this be? Why haven't we done a better job of helping them?'"
George said the opportunity to design the structure prompted him to become acquainted with what the Navajo hold as sacred.
"I had a lot of help from the people in Navajo Land that were letting me know what was important to the building -- its overall shape, the direction it faces and what was in the interior," he said.
He also wanted the buildings to be rugged and easy to build by the youth group.
"One of the biggest challenges was to design something that could be built by unskilled labor," he said.
George created the design and then handed it over to a company that makes kits for hogans. The company made the framing for the custom structures "that can be put together like Tinker Toys," he said.
The hogans may be replicated at other sites on the Navajo Nation. One might, for instance, be used as a health clinic.
Pierce said the church is not looking to convert the Navajos to the Episcopal church. He said the goal is for the church and Navajo people to work together to address practical needs and improve living conditions.
"There are hundreds and hundreds of projects that need to be done to restore the spirit of the Navajo people," he said.
David Bailey, Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Navajo Land, said building a hogan, rather than a buying another trailer, is a sign of respect for the Navajo people.
"Having that hogan says to them this is who we are. It expresses their culture," he said.
Plummer said one of her first goals when she moves into her new home will be to reach out to elders in the community to learn what their needs are. She said many Navajo have moved back on to the reservation in recent years, and her new home will be closer to them than is her current trailer on the church mission site.
The hogan also will be special for her because it will stand on land by the San Juan River that has been in her family for generations.
"I will have my own home and it will be on my grandfather's land," she said.http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/suburbs/hinsdale_clarendon_hills_oak_brook/ct-hinsdale-navajo-hogan-tl-0605-20140606,0,5622595.story