Museum Hill, Lab of Anthropology on right.

One day Charnell and I visited the library of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology on Museum Hill in Santa Fe.  The Lab has been in existence since 1931 (later merged with the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture), and has both an extensive archival collection and a library where we  browsed.

We were returning to the welcoming adobe building where the building designed by John Gaw Meem, and funded by John D. Rockefeller, copies Pueblo style. The thick walls of mud topped with heavy log rafters favored by Meem (Spanish Pueblo Revival) transformed Santa Fe in the early 1930′s.

We had previously discovered magazine articles that mentioned Tahoma’s art and books and newspapers that carried brief mentions of Taoma when we browsed the library. The slim bio file of Tahoma at the Lab’s library did not yield much information, much to the dismay of the librarian.

So when we made this return visit, the librarian was very happy to tell us about a new acquisition. Somebody had donated school newspapers from the Santa Fe Indian School, and librarians were beginning to catalogue them, but we were welcome to take a look.  Of course they were not a complete collection, but we were ecstatic to discover the Teguayo student newspaper covered the years that Tahoma went to school at SFIS.

When we went to look at the records available at the Lab of Anthropology, we had a long list of questions. One of those questions was, “What grade was Quincy in when he went to Santa Fe Indian School?” We were also curious to know what other interests he might have had besides art.

We knew that he had been sent to Albuquerque Indian School from Tuba City and had transferred to Santa Fe by the time he was in high school.  But suddenly, we found a sports article in the Teguayo that told us that he was playing basketball for SFIS’s 7th grade team in December 1934. Another member of that team, Herbert Manygoats, would surface later in our research as the friend who drove the adult Tahoma around New Mexico.

Tahoma in football uniform

As we continued our search, we learned that Tahoma continued his interest in sports, as despite his crippled arm, he could throw a football a long, long way, according to Harrison Begay. And he set a track record that lasted for decades, and even taught some younger kids to play tennis. But those are stories for another day. Sports helped young men adjust and survive at boarding schools, we learned. And we’ll talk about that conversation later, too.

The photo at the top of the page was taken by Vera Marie Badertscher, all rights reserved. The photo of Quincy Tahoma in football uniform is used with the kind permission of the Roberta Anglen, daughter of Kee Yazzie who was a friend of Tahoma.

Back to you….What’s your guess as to the role of sports in government-run Indian boarding schools?

Here is one example.  When we found a copy of Quincy Tahoma’s obituary clipping in a bio file at the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, it confirmed what Charnell had heard from Feliz Tixier whose family knew Tahoma — that he had served a short term in the state penitentiary.  While the article answered many questions for us about the date and place of his death, and circumstances of his burial, it opened up a new set of questions.

Prison? When? For what? For how long?

I took my questions to the New Mexico Library and Archives. When I asked an archivist where I might look for prison records, she pointed me to books containing the records of prisoners.  As I flipped through the pages, I got excited because the records included mug shots, and at the time we had not found a photos of Tahoma. They also included details about the conviction, dates of incarceration and release, etc.

However, I noticed that all the criminals in the book were accused of very serious crimes–multiple murders, acts of violence. That did not sound like our boy, Tahoma, and sure enough, there was no record of a Quincy Tahoma.  Another mystery.

But the archivist pointed me to another set of records, the Governor’s inmate records. Here I found a brief note that Quincy Tahoma had been pardoned in March 1, 1948, after serving part of a sentence that began on New Year’s Day, 1947.

I took the prisoner number on the record and went to the U. S.  District Court building in Santa Fe to see if they had records that went back to the 1940′s. The very helpful person I talked to assured me that they did have microfiche records going back that far, but it might take a while to find them. I left my phone number and went on to other explorations.  She called me later to tell me that the number I gave her did not correspond with their numbering system, and my hopes sank. Then she said that she had continued to search, and had found the records of his trial. Amazing! Surely she had more pressing matters than digging up a fifty-plus-year old trial.

I went to the court house and saw the short record of Quincy Tahoma’s trial–what he was accused of, who accused him, who the judge and prosecutor were, and most amazing of all–discovered that he apparently had no defense attorney. The trial apparently lasted no longer than a traffic court trial, Quincy pled guilty to a lesser offense and was taken immediately to prison.

Now I am going to leave you with a bit of mystery, so that you will want to buy Quincy Tahoma: The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Painter when it is released next spring.

But if it has not been for the persistence of a clerk at the Federal District Court records office, we would never have been able to tell this part of Tahoma’s story.

We suspect that Quincy was railroaded by a system that assumed American Indians to be guilty when accused by non-Indians.  But we have no proof that is the way the courts ran. Do you know of other cases in the mid-twentieth century where an American Indian seemed to be railroaded by the courts?

By 2004, we had received encouragement from people like Bruce Bernstein (then at the American Museum and now at SWAIA-Santa Fe Indian Market); Peter Iverson, professor and author of several books on the Navajo; Jim Bialac, leading collector of Indian art; Mark Bahti in Tucson and Ray Dewey in Santa Fe, both leading Indian traders….and the list kept growing.

But more important than encouragement, we had begun to assemble solid facts. Harrison Begay gave Mark Bahti information. Charnell had discovered Jean McSwain, who had been a girlfriend of Tahoma. Charnell discovered the connection between Tahoma and the Christian Brothers of Santa Fe. And the contacts continued to pile up as we filled in the timeline of his life.

We knew we had to publish, when in 2003, out of the blue, a local publisher’s acquisition editor asked if I had any book ideas. Then I met a university press editor and she was very interested in the book and early in 2004, offered us a contract. Soon after, I had the opportunity to talk to another regional publisher who had some interest, and also sent a proposal to a national publisher.  All of these fell through, but with favorable reviews from university reviewers, we could see that there was going to be interest in the book, so we kept filling in the blanks and started actually writing chapters.

We wrote an article that was published in American Indian Art magazine, wrote an article for the Santa Fe newspaper, and were interviewed by the Gallup Trader newspaper and the Navajo Times. And the web site for Tahoma drew more contacts and more information.

Ultimately we tried another private publisher and two more university presses–one of whom took nearly two years to make a final decision– before we found the right match.

But finally, we have found the perfect home for the Tahoma biography, Schiffer Books in Atglen Pennsylvania. Stay tuned as we prepare the manuscript, double check all the photographs of Tahoma’s paintings, and bring you a copy of Quincy Tahoma: The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Artist — a title which may change–another reason to stay tuned.

Please use the comment space to tell us what YOU would like to know about our research and writing of the Tahoma biography.  What do you find most interesting?  Or do you have something to add to our knowledge base? Join in the discussion. We would love to have you be a partner.

The good news.

Quincy Tahoma’s biography will be published by Schiffer Books. The book is due to appear in their Spring 2011 catalog.

A little history.

When Charnell Havens inherited some Tahoma paintings from a relative, she started looking for information about Tahoma’s life and art.  After a few years, she asked Vera Marie Badertscher if she would like to join the effort to uncover Tahoma’s biography and perhaps write a jointly authored book about the painter.

That was in the year 2000. Since then, the two of us have covered a lot of territory and talked to a lot of people, both separately and together.  Among the more than fifty people we interviewed, we have written about three of them here, Ramos and Gerdie Sanchez and Jean McSwain.

Next, we will share the road to publication so far. And we intend to take you along on this journey, so please come back often, and please tell us what you would like to know.

In order to be sure you do not miss anything, we encourage you to sign up for a subscription (see the box on the right) so that we can e-mail you each new post as it is written.

I love the country north of Santa Fe. The land here is punctuated by unexpected mesas and vistas of green-clad mountains in the background. In between wide sweeps of flat dusty land provide scarce vegetation for wandering cows and horses.

It is easy to see why the pueblo people have settled there for hundreds, if not a thousand years.  When the Spanish conquistadors came through the Puebloans were here, and they are still here. Most of their legends say they came down from the area of Mesa Verde in Colorado and split into the many villages that exist today, most along the Rio Grand River that runs south from the mountains in northern New Mexico, past Santa Fe and Albuquerque on its way to Texas.

The directions that Gerdie gave me went something like this. Take the highway north from Santa Fe and follow the branch toward Alamos. Go across the river and when you see the black mesa, look for a trailer house and then we are the next road.  It sounded pretty clear until I got there. But then, I wasn’t very clear on a lot of things. I thought Gerdie’s name was Gertie (like my husband’s aunt Gertrude) until I had visited with Gerdie a couple of times, and saw her name in print.

I missed the turn-off to Alamos which is pretty simple to see when you are familiar with it–and pulled into an orchard where a guy loading crates of fruit explained to me how to get to San Ildefonse.

I saw an entrance to San Ildefonse, but I had not yet crossed a river. Soon I saw another sign for San Ildefonse, and I got worried because I assumed I need to go into the village.  I pulled off the road, and called Gertie on my cell phone. No, she explained, I did NOT need to go into San Ildefonse.  I went on a ways and the road dipped and curved over a bridge across the Rio Grande River. (Duh, I said to myself–”the river” is the Rio Grande.)

Ahead was a large black mesa on the right hand side of the road. Of course there were mesas of varying degrees of darkness all over the place, but this one seemed more dramatic than the rest, and likely to be the landmark.  Good. The bad news, however, lay ahead–a ribbon of road bordered by barbed wire fence, and here and there a cluster of houses or trailers off to the right beneath trees.

Thoroughly confused, I called Gerdie once again. By now I’m sure she had me pegged as an idiot and was wondering why she and Ramos were wasting their time on me.  “Do you see a man painting by the road?” She asked. YES! There he was, easel set up for painting the Black Mesa.  That was a landmark that got me in to their house. Heaven knows how I would have found it if he had packed up his paints before I got there.

This expedition was just another example of communications between the native dwellers of the Southwest who know every natural landmark and notice every change made by man–and the urbanized (even from small towns) non-Indians who rely on roads, named geological features, numbers on houses and signs to get around.

Last weekend I had a phone call from Ramos Sanchez from San Ildefonso pueblo.  Ramos had read the manuscript of Quincy Tahoma: The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Artist and wanted to make two small corrections.  “Is that all?” I asked. “Yep. You two sure did a lot of research,” Ramos said.

Yes we did, and Ramos was a very large part of the research Charnell and I did. Way back at the beginning of Charnell’s quest, before I was involved, her first questions were put to Indian art dealers. I’ll let her tell you the details, but one of the Santa Fe Indian traders she talked to in 2001 suggested several names for us to contact.  One of those names was Rex Arrowsmith, who used to have a store in Santa Fe. Turned out that he now lives in Tucson, so it would be very easy for me to see him.  Well, of course, because he lived so close, I kept thinking I’d get around to it one of these days.

Finally in 2004 I reached him on the telephone just as he was getting ready to go to Santa Fe for the Indian Market. We agreed to talk when he got back to Tucson.  As it turned out, Rex had never met Tahoma personally, but as we talked in his home, he showed me the wonderful art collection he had assembled during his years in the business.  He has several Tahoma paintings, and also showed me some by Ramos Sanchez, who paints as Oqwa Owin, and told me that Sanchez’ father was the famous Pueblo painter, Owi Pi (Abel Sanchez.)

Rex said that Abel definitely knew him and it was possible that Ramos might remember him, too. It was probably a long shot. Well, in fact, when I called Ramos, I learned that he had known Quincy in school, and that Quincy spent a lot of time with his family when they were young. But even better, when I sat down in January 2005 to talk to Ramos and Gerdy, I learned that Tahoma had spent a lot of time with Gerdy Montoya Sanchez’ family before she married Ramos. Quincy and her brother Sonny were best friends, she said. It got better. Gerdy’s mother was a Navajo, and Quincy liked to visit because he liked having someone to speak Navajo with.

Then after Gerdy and Ramos married, Quincy continued to visit the families at San Ildefonso. Except for the time that Ramos Sanchez was in the Navy during World War II and until Ramos and Gerdy moved out of state in the 1950′s, they had spent a lot of time together.

The January 2005 conversation was the first of several long conversations I had with Ramos and Gerdy in the following years, as we talked about Quincy Tahoma. They knew details about his life that nobody else had a record of. Eventually, we would be contacted by their neice who had a collection of snapshots of Quincy, with her father Kee Yazzie, another school boy friend of Tahoma’s.

                                                                                                                          

I am pleased to say that I count Ramos and Gerdy as  friends, and I have twice visited San Ildefonso Pueblo in January on their most important feast day.  We truly could not have put together this book without the help of people like Ramos and Gerdy Sanchez who shared their memories, and helped us understand Native American culture, and people like Rex Arrowsmith, who scoured their memory for someone who might be able to help.

Of course we never stop looking for more information, so if you know someone who knows someone who might have a snapshot or a memory, please let us know.

Please tell us your story about how strangers may have helped you complete a task some time in your life. We would like to know.

A letter in the school files refers to Quincy as Tahome (or Tohannie). Harrison Begay had suggested that the name Tahoma came from a clan name for Edge Water. David Brugge now suggested that Tohannie is nearer the clan name for Near Water, To’ahanie. So we felt we were closer to finding out his clan name which might help lead us to any family.

By August of 2005, we had talked to Elmer Jenkins, a Hopi who knew Tahoma in school. He recalled having heard that Tahoma returned to the reservation some time, probably in the 50′s to visit family named Spencer. Elmer had given us a great deal of helpful information about Tahoma and his school years, and his memory was sharp as a tack, so we did not question this recollection, but it presented us with another mystery. If Tahoma had relatives named Spencer, why had we not heard about them?

Now we had another family name to seek out. We hoped to get some information from St. Michael’s on the Navajo reservation, which we have heard has the best birth, death and census records. But when we talked to them, they said they could only give information to a family member. For all we know, Quincy has no living family members.  Catch Twenty-Two. Mark continued to comb through census records and wander down paths with dead ends. He found a boy named Quincy who lived near Leupp in the 1930 census. But the information did not quite match up, so he went back to combing through sometimes almost-unreadable records, looking for “our” Quincy.

Do you know the Spencers that lived near Tuba City early in the 20th century? If so, have you heard of any connection to Quincy Tahoma, or someone in the to’ahanie clan?

Posted by Vera Marie Badertscher May 27, 2009.

Several people recommended that we talk to David Brugge, who, they said, knew more about Navajo genealogy than anybody. David lives in Albuquerque, and although he is retired, he still continues his scholarly study and makes presentations to professional bodies. I was going to Albuquerque, so I contacted David and we got together for lunch. We sat on a bench waiting to be seated at a crowded Mexican restaurant, and I wondered where to start on my long list of questions about Navajo relationships and genealogy.

David casually said, “When I knew Tahoma…” and I did not hear the rest of the sentence. He personally knew Tahoma. At that point, the only person we had talked to who personally knew Tahoma was Harrison Begay. Our reliance on David quickly grew from mining his academic knowledge to drinking in the personal recollections that he could add to our story.

Throughout the process of researching the book, I consulted frequently with David, visiting him every time I went to Albuquerque. We sampled the best East Indian restaurant, the best Mexican, Pueblo Indian at the Pueblo Cultural Center and the neighborhood Chinese along the way. He corrected our errors in explaining Navajo culture and Navajo history, and he told us the story of two young men who tried to help the artist as they were starting a gallery in Albuquerque’s Old Town, a story which I will return to later.