1956 Indian Love Call, Courtesy of Ed Fowler

Poets, songwriters, lovers and just plain folks have long been fascinated by the moon which, among other things, sets the tides and drives sundry emotions from lunacy to thoughts of romance.

Without the moon, think of all the wonderful songs we would have missed! Songs like By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Moonlight Bay, In the Evening by the Moonlight, Moon River and, of course, Shine on Harvest Moon would never have seen the light of day.  Worse still,  Quincy Tahoma’s  Indian Love Call would not have been painted!

And for the Navajo artist, a harvest moon casting its magic over water conjured up visions of the magnificent wildlife it attracted.

1955 untitled deer in the moonlight, Courtesy of Mark Rosacker

His renderings of deer in the moonlight are quite majestic.  The one shown here is of a stag with head cocked toward the moon, and it almost looks as if he is watching the bird flying across the circle of gold.

Tahoma also painted a spectacular mallard winging its way along the surface of the water.

1955 Mallard, Courtesy of Barbara Ingram, the Lawrence B. Ingram Collection

The artist’s first painting of flying ducks, drawn while he was in grade school, is owned by the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe.  It shows wavy lines stretching across the bottom of the page denoting water and plant life. Plants reduced to an art-deco-like design frame the bottom corners.  In sharp contrast to this 1955 moonlit painting, the early one has no background. You can see these three and more in the newly released book, Quincy Tahoma: The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Artist.

All of Tahoma’s moonlight paintings that I’ve seen have a harvest moon with birds flying in front of it.  Have you ever seen a different kind of moon in a Tahoma painting?

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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?

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.