Of course things have changed since the scrawny little boy was ushered over to Tuba City Boarding School to start his education. Tuba City has paved streets and tourists come to the shiny motel run by the Navajo Nation.

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.