The researcher never knows where her questions will lead. Here is part of a story recently posted at Your Life Is a Trip by Vera Marie Badertscher about insights into Native American culture that she got while gathering information about Quincy Tahoma’s life as a Navajo artist. You can click on the link at the end to find the entire story.
Discover the Exotic on a Road Trip
From Your Life Is a Trip.com
By Vera Marie Badertscher
“None of your business,” she said. The short, curly, white hair bounced as she shook her head, but the brown eyes smiled in her beautiful, tanned and weathered face. Half Navajo, Suzie (not her real name) has lived in Rio Grand pueblos in New Mexico all her life. We were sitting in a rambling adobe house near the village where she lives with her husband. Grandchildren and daughters dropped in from time to time as we talked. The smell of cedar wood smoke curled around us, and tin-framed pictures of saints glinted on the walls.
I travel to find new ways of seeing the world. Although all humans deal with some basic questions, various cultures find different answers. How do we show respect to others? Where did we come from? Who created us? How do we ensure good fortune, food, and shelter? What do we need to know? The more the answers differ from our own, the more exotic the culture seems.
The curt reply, “None of your business,” came from Suzie, a lively Pueblo elder who fervently believes in the Catholic religion, but just as devotedly follows ancient ways. People come to her for counsel and healing. Although Suzie inherited an outgoing personality and sense of humor from her Navajo mother, she got her sense of propriety from living in her father’s Pueblo culture for all of her 80 years.
I visited Suzie’s husband Joe (not his real name) while writing a book about Navajo artist, Quincy Tahoma. Finding this couple turned out to be a grand slam for a biographer. Tahoma, a little older than Joe, had been a mentor to Joe when they both attended Santa Fe Indian School. Joe’s father gained fame as one of the first Pueblo painters to sell his work, and, now in his eighties, Joe has returned to painting that he had abandoned after his school days.
Tahoma visited Joe’s family often as a student and also as an adult. As a bonus, I learned that Suzie’s brother had been one of Tahoma’s best friends, so he spent much time with her family as well. “He liked talking Navajo with my mother,” Suzie says.
During that first visit, I clicked on the tape recorder, pulled out my notebook, and ran down the long list of questions my co-author and I had been wondering about. Because neither of us is Navajo, we wanted to ensure that we captured the artist’s cultural background correctly, and Suzie and Joe could fill in the gaps in my understanding.
Did he truly not know his clan as he claimed, and what would that mean to a Navajo? Suzie and Joe said it would leave a huge gap in his life if he did not know.
Was he a Catholic? And if not, why is he buried in a Catholic cemetery? The couple had never known him to go to church.
People have told us that Tahoma carried a Navajo medicine pouch. What would have been in it?
“None of your business.”
Read the rest of the account (at Your Life Is a Trip) of my visit and learning experiences in a Rio Grande Pueblo.
Have you traveled to American Indian pueblos? What have you learned?
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