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?

While we acknowledge that the boarding schools were disruptive and damaging to American Indian youth when they were created, the administration of those schools had changed by the time Tahoma was in fifth grade.

We based our description of life in the Santa Fe Indian School on the testimony of people who had attended school there about the same time that Tahoma did.  When Tahoma was whisked away from his native Tuba City first to Albuquerque Indian School and then quickly to Santa Fe Indian School, the system was despicable. Children were not permitted to speak their native language. Long hair was cut against the wishes of the children. They were marched from place to place in military style. And generally, the objective was to remove any “Indian” from them and turn them into non-Indians.

By the 1930s, a progressive movement in the federal government, pushed along by reformers in Santa Fe, began to mold a system that showed more respect for the individual student. That all happened just after the impressionable young Quincy Tahoma was shifted from Albuquerque to Santa Fe Indian School.The rules were softening, and as he grew up at SFIS, he was able to speak Navajo outside of class and the school had regular events with dances and feasts for the various Pueblo, Navajo and other cultures represented.

So although the beginning of his life in boarding school was tough, his schoolmates looked back fondly on their experiences, particularly in high school. Tahoma was weaned away form the reservation, but he had already been separated from his birth mother and claimed not to have any family at all. And he certainly would not have been able to develop his talent in painting had he stayed on the sheep camp where he grew up. The paintings also gave him some financial freedom, as he was allowed to sell them in the school store that teacher Dorothy Dunn set up.

We believe that it is incorrect to assume that boarding school was always a bad experience. The testimony of students at SFIS during the 1930s contradicts that assumption. (See the First One Hundred Years Project at the University of New Mexico, Center for Southwest Research.)

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?

But Charnell and I visited Tuba City to look back to the 1920′s when Quincy Tahoma was a boy. It was during the enrollment process that he got the name the Navajo artist would put on his paintings for the rest of his life (sorry, you’ll have to read the book to find out about that). It was there that he may have first had the thrill of drawing and coloring a picture on paper. You could say that Quincy Tahoma was born at that school.

Not all Navajo children went to school back then. Some were needed at home to continue herding the sheep or helping with household chores. Like many children, Tahoma started school late, although the school records never seemed to get his age right, and there were no birth certificates to validate his age. But the family that raised him believed in education, at least for the boys in the family, so off to school he went.

In what is a researcher nightmare, we learned that all of the school records from the 1920′s when he attended school had burned.  Being optimists, we wangled our way into the big BIA offices in Tuba City and talked to the keeper of the records. The clerk looked at us stoically and repeated what we had already been told. No records.

Fortunately, while wandering around the Tuba City Swap Meet with us on a Friday morning, Mark Rosacker found a Navajo man willing to chat (but not to let us use his name).  He gave us directions to his home, a modernized hogan, with electricity, but still the traditional form.  While his wife, black hair pulled back in traditional knot, her colorful, full skirts spread around her on a bench,sat silently by, the man pulled out scrapbooks and unfolded his life.

He had been in the first grade at the same time as Quincy Tahoma. He related what it was like to escape into the bright sunlight for recess, the only time the children could speak in their own language. And how the children loved to draw and paint!  The teacher, like so many of that period, believed that art came naturally to the Navajo–in fact to all American Indians. While that sounds like stereotyping today, it was fortunate for the students like the man talking to us and for Quincy Tahoma. Both of them became artists and gained fame for their talent, a harvest that grew from the seeds planted when they were small boys at Tuba City Boarding School.

Back of 1953 Navajo Scout painting - Courtesy of Mark Rosacker

1953 The Navajo Scout – Courtesy of Mark Rosacker

During our research we were constantly being surprised by people who came up with information that either confirmed our guesses, or totally disproved our assumptions and set us out on a new trail of clues.

Take for instance the unusual picture of a Navajo man who painted beautiful pictures while he was in the hospital.

One clue that confirmed what we had been hearing,was an e-mail from a woman who said that her father had been a doctor at the Indian Hospital at Santa Fe and had treated Quincy Tahoma.  When I contacted the retired doctor by phone, he told me about Tahoma’s problems with alcohol and the kind of treatment that patients got at that time. The time was the mid 1950′s.

He liked Tahoma, but knew that he had a tendency to spend any money he had on alcohol. Nevertheless, when Tahoma said that he would like to have a radio (we had been told that he liked music) the doctor gave him one, thinking that was not cash, and since Tahoma really wanted it, he would not sell it. Wrong.  As soon as he left the hospital, he sold the radio and used the cash to go “partying” as he and his friends called their drinking binges. The doctor was disappointed. Not only in Tahoma, but also in himself for being mislead.

This doctor told me what the hospital was like and how well-liked Tahoma was by the staff and the other patients.  Tahoma could never be long without his paints, and as soon as he was able to, he would start painting–even in the hospital.  Although most of the alcoholic patients that showed up were suffering from secondary problems–injuries from fights and falls–Quincy Tahoma never had the broken bones and bruises. He was a gentle soul, the doctor said, and apparently avoided fights.

And information about the hospital stays came in two other unexpected ways, as well. When I was visiting the school librarian at the Santa Fe Indian School, a man who worked as a custodian there overheard our conversation and said “I knew Quincy Tahoma.”  It was almost spooky that in this school, nearly 70 years after Tahoma was a student there, I would hear someone say that.

It turned out that the man was hospitalized as a child, and remembered the adult Quincy Tahoma painting pictures in the hospital. Quincy made quite an impression on everybody he met.

The final piece of information that confirmed the hospital stay and using the hospital as an art studio, came when Mark Rosacker turned over one of the Tahoma paintings he had bought, There he saw that beside the signature on the back it said “Santa Fe Indian Hospital.”

Do you look at the back of paintings you own to see if you can find clues to the artist’s life?

Portrait of Tahoma

WHEW! Haven’t been here for ten whole days but we have a good excuse.  We sent the completed manuscript to the printer yesterday.

Charnell had the task of getting permissions to reproduce pictures, then formatting them to fit, deciding which ones went where (with some input from Vera), making color prints, checking the color, and lot of other technical stuff. Vera wrote and formatted the captions.

In the end, we had more than 260 illustrations!  When you get the Tahoma book, (working title Quincy Tahoma: The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Artist,) you will be seeing over 100 paintings that have never been seen before in public.  So many private donors shared their paintings with us that we have paintings from every year of his painting life, starting when he was a teenager.

We also have photographs that were given to us by girlfriends, school friends, and descendents of friends who knew him during his lifetime.

This collection of photographs of Tahoma seems amazing when you realize that it took years of research before we saw what he looked like in a photograph.  When the Circle of Light tribute to outstanding Navajos was created in the Tanner Trading Post in Gallup New Mexico, we were told they searched for a very long time and finally found ONE picture of Quincy Tahoma.

More about the manuscript in future posts, and why not subscribe by e-mail, so that you can learn all the secrets of writing a biography?

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?

We know we will never find them all. There will be somebody who has a Tahoma in the closet and does not use the Internet and has not found us.

There will be a museum somewhere that we did not realize might have a collection of American Indian art.

But in the meantime, Charnell is re-contacting all the private owners we talked to in the past ten years to be sure they have not sold their paintings or bought new ones, and to be sure that we have their permission to use a photograph of their paintings in our book.

And she is contacting all the museums that we know have Tahomas in their collections and trying to get their permission to reproduce their paintings.  Museums have to get money to operate from somewhere, and one of the places that they get it is by charging a fee for the use of their photos. Sometimes that fee is beyond our ability to pay. Sometimes they will give us a break because this book will be THE book of record about Tahoma and his paintings, and it would be a shame if their particular collection, chosen with such great care, was not included.

You know how it is. Museums always have way more paintings than they can display.  So some of these absolutely top notch Tahoma paintings have never (or rarely) been seen by the public.  Our book will be an opportunity for thousands of interested people to finally see what good taste those museums have, and what a great painter Tahoma was.

All of this is to let you know that if you have a Tahoma painting, or if you know the whereabouts of one–it is not too late to be considered for our book.  Please leave a comment below or let us know by e-mail and we will talk to you. We want to be sure that his very best is represented. Have you seen Tahoma’s paintings in museums outside of Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma that we should be aware of? Do you know someone with one in his or her private collection? Let us know.

Here is a list of the museums that we are in contact with:

Arizona

The Heard Museum

Amerind

Arizona State Musem

California

California Academy of Sciences (Ruth and Charles Elkus

Collection)

Connecticut

Yale Beinecke Library

New Mexico

Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico

New Mexico Museum of Indian Arts and Culture

Wheelwright Museum

School of American Research

Milicent Rogers Museum

Oklahoma

Fred Rogers Jr. Museum

National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum

Gilcrease Museum

Philbrook Museum

Washington D.C.

National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institute)