Most of the students at Santa Fe Indian School came from the Rio Grande pueblos near Santa Fe, and so  families rode into town on wagons to visit their children on weekends. However, Quincy Tahoma’s adoptive family was far away in Tuba City, Arizona on the Navajo reservation. They never came all the way to Santa Fe to see him, and he began telling people that he did not have a family. While he had not been raised by his own mother and his father was dead, that story was partially true, like many of the life details that Tahoma invented over the years.

However, when he was a young boy, he missed the Navajo ways. At the end of fourth grade, Tahoma asked to go home for the summer.  We found official correspondence in the National Archives with all of his school records and the heart-breaking exchange between the principal at SFIS and the Superintendent of the Western Navajo Indian Agency, discussing Tahoma (whose name they weren’t even sure of). The bottom line was that he had not been away from home long enough–he had been at SFIS a year, after a year in Albuquerque–to get a government-paid trip home, although he could make the trip on his own money if he wished. Of course he had no money.

That summer probably began his withdrawal from life on the reservation and his immersion in non-Indian culture…and the story that he did not have a family.

If this is your first visit to Tahoma Blog, you might want to take a look at the post that explains the publication of our book about Quincy Tahoma. Other articles about SFIS: Tahoma the Jock, the National Archives records,

Did you know that children in government boarding schools were not given money to get home, even when they did not have their own? Anything else that you know about boarding schools that we might not know?

We pursued the leads from the January 2005 copies of National Archives Santa Fe Indian School records. David Brugge explained that the closest he could come to the name Sigantizo that we found on the school record as a guardian, would be the Navajo word Teghanitso, which could have been distorted by an English speaker who did not understand Navajo. That name sounds more like Siganitso, which is a name that David recognized.

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.

I would like to introduce David Brugge, because he became one of the most important resources that we had as we tried to answer our many questions about Quincy Tahoma.

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.

When Dorothy Stevenson met the artist Quincy Tahoma, she was a young woman and he made a big impression on her. Later, as an adult, she became a teacher at St. Michael’s High School in Santa Fe and eventually wrote a musical play based loosely on Tahoma’s life.

Entitled Navajo Night Song, the musical was performed at the Greer Garson Theater at St. Michael’s school for three nights in 1977. In the play, the Tahoma-like central character was married and lost a baby son. Yet, in more than 12 years of research into Tahoma’s life, we never found evidence that he had married or had a child.

Can you shed any light on this perplexing subject? Do you know anything about the production of Navajo Night Song in 1977 in Santa Fe?

January 10, 2005

Who are you?

The questions come right after an exchange of names. Where did you come from? What do you do for a living? Do you have children? We tend to quickly try to categorize the people we meet. People think of the questions as friendly exchanges, not prying, and the information exchange helps oil the way to understanding between strangers.

If you come from Ohio, Charnell and I will follow up with, “Where in Ohio?”, because we both came from there. We’ll probably recognize the name of the county and know if you were close to Columbus, Cincinnati or Cleveland. We’ll likely wind up talking about the Ohio State Buckeyes. Likewise, we’ll bond if you’re from Arizona or Texas or Virginia or from Santa Fe. If you have children, we may whip out our PDAs and show you pictures of our families. Of course if you mention Navajo Art as an interest, we’ll talk your ear off.

In the Navajo culture, clan comes first. According to the Saganitso family that took Quincy in as a small child, Quincy was born to EdgeWater and born for Many Goats. (more…)