NEWCOMB, N.M. — The wind rolled off the Chuska Mountains and along the desert floor, whipping red dust and tumbleweed across the pavement of the Two Grey Hills Skatepark. It was a pale Sunday morning in May, and Amy Denet Deal stood on a ledge, tying a crimson bandanna around her silver braids and smiling as she watched the children swerve down ramps in the middle of the storm.

“Amy!” a young boy yelled, excited to greet the woman who helped bring the skatepark to this remote northwest corner of the Navajo Nation.

“Hi, honey, how you doing?” she replied. “You’ve grown a foot since I last saw you!”

Denet Deal, 59, considered herself younger than the boy in Diné (Navajo) years. She had only reconnected with the tribe five years earlier after a lifetime of displacement, giving up most of her belongings and a high-paying salary as a corporate sports fashion executive in Los Angeles to move to New Mexico.

The pandemic had opened her eyes to the inequities children on the reservation face, including high rates of diabetes, mental health issues and suicide. Navajo Nation is roughly the size of West Virginia — 16 million acres of land stretching across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah — yet there are few opportunities for kids to play sports, with many remote areas lacking outdoor recreation and athletic facilities.

She searched for solutions to give back and finally landed on one: Why not a skatepark?

It took years of fundraising, with plenty of setbacks, but more than a year after it opened, she could still point to the benefits the park was bringing to her community. The kids from a nearby housing project came for free clinics held every weekend. Parents and grandparents parked their trucks near the concrete to watch, sharing food with one another in their camping chairs as the breeze stung their faces.

“If I talk to any skateboarder, the first thing they’ll always tell me is, ‘Skateboarding saved my life,’” Denet Deal said. “… It doesn’t matter if it helps 100 kids or one — it’s enough.”

And so here she was again, making the four-hour drive from Sante Fe to her ancestral homeland, because visits were also helping her with the trauma of her past.

“The plus side of this is, I come from displacement and a strange start in the world,” Denet Deal said. “It’s really helping me heal through that work.”

‘No connection to the tribe’

Denet Deal didn’t visit the Navajo Nation until she was in her late 30s. Her mother, Joanne, had been forced into a boarding school in Farmington, N.M., in the early 1950s. Joanne’s family had no horse or car to visit for years. “She suffered all kinds of abuse and forced assimilation,” Denet Deal said.

Through the government’s American Indian Relocation Act, Joanne left the reservation with a one-way bus ticket to Cleveland in her late teens. She got pregnant with Amy. Like thousands of other Native children in the 1960s, Amy was placed into adoption and taken in by a Catholic charity. When she was three weeks old in September 1964, a county court in Indiana processed her as “Infant Girl Deal.”

“I was put up for adoption without anybody contacting my birth family, no connection to the tribe,” Denet Deal said. “I grew up completely displaced from my community. I was the only Brown person in rural Indiana. I was very much suffering from impostor syndrome from a young age, just not quite understanding where I fit in the world.”

She found something to hold on to when she learned how to use a sewing machine as a child. She started making all of her own clothes and threw herself into fashion. Denet Deal developed into a rising star in the active sportswear space in the early 1990s; at 26, she was creating apparel at Reebok and by 30 took over as design director at Puma. She lived across the world, from New York to Nuremberg, Germany, to San Diego.

For years, she searched for her mother. She hired a private investigator and scoured the internet. She numbed the emptiness with alcohol and work.

In April 1998, she had a breakthrough. Denet Deal convinced the Indiana Department of Health to release her record of adoption and was given Joanne’s address and phone number. She wrote Joanne a letter and received a letter back. Denet Deal visited her mother for the first time in Ohio, and together they eventually traveled to the Navajo Nation to meet other family.

“It wasn’t warm and fuzzy,” she said. “… It brought back a lot of things for my mom that were hard.”

Denet Deal quit her career in corporate fashion in 2019 and donated most of her belongings. “It was just time for me to step back and figure out who I was as a Native person,” she said. But by the time she arrived in New Mexico in a small U-Haul, she knew few people and little about her culture.

She opened a fashion boutique, 4Kinship, which eventually became one of the few Indigenous-owned storefronts in Sante Fe. Inside, she displayed blue skirts made from 1950s military parachutes, hand-dyed vintage rodeo shirts and custom-painted skateboards. The brand and Denet Deal’s shop quickly became an incubator for young Indigenous creatives.

But some locals rejected her because she didn’t grow up on the Navajo Nation. She was still getting to know many of her family members, and her presence could trigger reminders of a painful history for them.

“No one knew about me for a reason,” Denet Deal said. “It’s kind of like buried. No one knew I existed. And so for family to find out I did exist, it created a lot of trauma.”

‘All kids need attention’

The pandemic offered Denet Deal a chance to give back what she had learned in another life. She used her past skills as a wealth generator for major corporations to help raise more than $1 million in medical supplies, food and support for a domestic violence shelter.

But she wanted to do more, having seen up close the problems for children on the reservation.

“I just thought a skatepark was a really great thing to have for them, you know?” Denet Deal said. “It’s probably one of the most amazing long-term solutions for the mental health and wellness of our kids. And it’s something that’s there for a long time and has a low cost. It allows these kids to be active — not just in the colonized kind of school system idea but year-round.”

Denet Deal leveraged her contacts in the active sportswear and fashion world, which included support from legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk and singer Jewel, and raised more than $100,000 to bring the skatepark to the Two Grey Hills region. But in early 2022, she still needed help to convince the local tribal chapter to sign off on the plan to build it.

The chapter approved it only after a 28-year-old Diné woman named Di’Orr Greenwood explained how skateboarding had changed her life. She had learned how to skate growing up on the reservation in Sawmill, Ariz., and used it to get around the streets of Phoenix when she moved there as a young adult. It had helped her express herself as an artist; she customized her own boards and signed a contract to design Indigenous-branded skating shoes for Nike.

Unlike Amy, she also spoke the tribe’s language. Sitting next to Denet Deal at a chapter meeting in July 2022, Greenwood introduced herself and made an impassioned pitch. She explained that she understood the community’s need for water and that elders were grappling with spending money on a skatepark instead of water resources; she also knew the sport was dangerous and there were potential liability issues.

“It’s new, it’s scary; yes, it’s dangerous. But it’s far less dangerous than drugs and a lot of other things that our kids can get into,” Greenwood told them, according to a transcript from the meeting. “Choosing to help these kids learn how to skate, you’re choosing to invest into them because skateboarding allows you to skate for fun but also it allowed me to get away from situations I didn’t want to be in.”

The meeting eventually concluded for dinner. Di’Orr heard some elders laughing in the kitchen of the chapter house while cooking. As the youngest person at the meeting, she decided she needed to go back and help. Some of the elders noticed and acknowledged her afterward. Less than a month later, Denet Deal received a call that the project had been approved.

“There would be no skatepark without Di’Orr,” Denet Deal said.

It immediately changed the community. Many of the kids had learned how to skate on dirt trails or potholed roads. Now they were skating along smooth concrete planted on the moonlike surface of the desert, in the shadow of Shiprock, the eroded sandstone throat of a prehistoric volcano.

“All kids need attention,” said Shawn Shine Harrison, a Diné skater who teaches the clinics for free every Sunday morning. “It’s cool to see the kids use their freedom of expression. They all have a different idea of what skating means to them. It’s really profound.”

‘Her life would have been so different’

As Denet Deal greeted the kids and families at the park on the first Sunday morning in May, Harrison used a leaf blower to get rid of the red dirt and weeds on the pavement. The wind howled. He sprayed grease on skateboard wheels for kids and held their hands as they tried to learn basic tricks. Soon the clouds parted and the sun glowed on distant mesas of the red flats.

“Have you learned to drop in yet?” he asked one kid who had shown up alone and was sizing up a ramp. “Want to work on it?” Across the concrete, Di’Orr helped a 14-year-old girl, Shania, learn how to ollie as a stray yellow dog circled.

“If it don’t feel right, there’s always tomorrow,” Di’Orr told her. “Don’t feel like you have to get it today.”

Shania’s father, Razzley Charley, watched the lesson while perched on his own donated board. The Charleys live about 30 miles away and have had problems finding activities as a family, but after buying a car during the winter they began driving down to the park every weekend to learn how to skate. “It takes away anxiety,” Charley said. “It changes everything. We have something now.”

Some of the kids tried to impress Denet Deal. One skater took off his shoes to show her he could ride barefoot. “You need shoes!” Amy yelled with a worried grin, knowing the nearest hospital was nearly two hours away. There was a school, a trading post and a gas station nearby, but everything else seemed distant. Denet Deal was still trying to convince investors to donate for running water and bathrooms nearby. Maybe one day she could raise enough to build a visitor center and coffee shop.

She has been sober from alcohol for nearly two years and no longer numbs herself the way she did when she was looking for her mother. Joanne died in 2021, just as Denet Deal was pushing to build the skatepark. She is still learning about her mother’s past, and every time she visited Two Grey Hills, she could see Joanne in the kids’ faces.

“If my mom had had a skatepark, if she had someone consistently showing up for her, her life would have been so different,” Denet Deal said, tears welling in her eyes.

One day, she says, she plans to move here to live in a pink hogan, a traditional Navajo dwelling, with a solar panel attached. She would be near where her mother and ancestors are buried and close to the skate park.

“I just want to be there,” she said, “to watch the kids skate.”