Katie Saganitso remembering the past on her sheep camp

This photo is posted as part of Travel Photo Thursday, and you can see more photos at Budget Travel Sandbox. Vera and Charnell traveled to Tuba City in search of the history of Navajo artist Quincy Tahoma, and with the help of Mark Rosaker located the Saganitso family. Charnell Havens caught Katie Saganitso, younger “sister” of Quincy Tahoma in the family that adopted him, as she looked at long-gone hogans on the family sheep camp.

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Are you planning your summer vacation travel? Maybe Quincy can give you some ideas for travel in his own Navajo Land.

While he was still in school, he went to Chinle, near Canyon de Chelly one year, and spent some summers in California.

Canyon de Chelly, Photograph by Charnell Havens

We know that Quincy Tahoma did not stay in one place for very long.  He had a trader friend in Scottsdale who took him on a couple of long trips. One time Quincy wrote about going to several states with the trader. Jon Bonnell of Scottsdale told us that the pair once drove all the way to the mid-west.

We know that the Navajo artist rode along with photographer T. Harmon Parkhurst as Parkhurst photographed people and they went together to see some buffalo at a ranch near the Grand Canyon.

We know that Quincy Tahoma also traveled with photographer Elliott Porter. They went hunting, and Porter photographed nature while Quincy stored up ideas for paintings of places like Monument Valley.

Rider in Monument Valley, Photo by Sam Lowe, Arizona

We know from Harrison Begay that the two of them once took two women on a “vacation” all the way to the Grand Canyon from Santa Fe. And we know that Tahoma went to Flagstaff in Arizona and to Tuba City, on the opposite side of the reservation from his usual home in Santa Fe.

So it was only natural that we also traveled a lot of those roads as we did research for the book.  And recently I’ve been writing about trips on the Navajo Reservation, encouraging people to follow in Tahoma’s footsteps.

Navajo code talker and family, Photo by Sam Lowe, Arizona

You can read about a family trip to the Navajo Reservation at Mother of All Trips. Dinosaurs! Secret Codes! Making Movies!

For adults looking for some not too drastically extreme adventure travel, there are many things to do besides just gaze at the beautiful scenery. I gave five suggestions at My Itchy Travel Feet: where to go hiking, horseback riding, fishing, driving and camping on the rez.

Woman watching her sheep at Canyon de Chelly, Photo by Charnell Havens

When I did an interview with a travel writer in New Zealand, I was reminded that some people are not even sure what an Indian reservation is and whether they are welcome to travel there, so I wrote Ten Tips for Travel on the Navajo Reservation for the web site, BootsnAll. When do you need a permit? Where can you get a drink? What should you expect to eat? Where can you sleep?

If YOU are planning a vacation in Navajo land this summer, I hope one of these articles will help you. And if you are not personally going to northern Arizona and New Mexico this summer, maybe you can pass the information on to a friend.

Thanks to Charnell Havens and to my friend Sam Lowe for the photographs used here and in the articles about travel on the Navajo Reservation.

What is your favorite place to go on the Navajo Reservation?

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Quincy Tahoma painting on a mousepad

As part of our effort to let people know about the biography of Quincy Tahoma, we are traveling around the Internet on a “blog tour” to supplement our real life appearances on a book tour. We’ll be talking about a variety of topics that spun off from our research and writing of Quincy Tahoma: The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Artist. So start mousing around the web and see what people have to say.

• Feast of Books, an Internet magazine, did a preview of Quincy Tahoma in their quarterly publication.
• Vera wrote about the Tuba City Swap Meet at Wandering Educators. In Tuba City we found some very important information that allowed us to complete Tahoma’s life story.
• Because Tahoma loved to go to the movies, Vera wrote about the way that Hollywood treats American Indians at Reel Life With Jane. Who is getting it right? What movies are on the Don’t See list? A lively discussion follows the post about how we perceive people by what we have seen in the movies.
• We wrote about co-writing a book at the Urban Muse Writer. The nitty gritty of two people doing what is usually a solo job.
• Adobe Gallery ran a blog post on Quincy Tahoma, and welcomes your comments.

In the coming days and weeks, you’ll see us answering questionnaires about our work, bloggers will be reviewing the book, and you can read about a family tour of the Navajo reservation, a cultural experience in Canyon de Chelly, a baby-boomer trip to northern Arizona, and much more. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, we need to re-order books from the publisher because they are selling faster than we expected. And we are thrilled with the wonderful feedback we are getting from early readers.

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Back in 2005, I received an envelope in the mail that contained possibly the most important documents of all the research that we have done on Navajo artist Quincy Tahoma. A librarian at the National Archives, Rocky Mountain Region Archival Office in Denver mailed us copies of the entire file entitled:

Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs

Santa Fe Indian School

Student Case Files 1937-1970

8NN-75-90-003, Box #71

Translated, the numbers indicate any records in the archive that mentioned Quincy Tahoma from the time he entered school through years afterward when people tried to contact him through the school. Therefore the file shed light not only on his size and physical condiiton (medical reports), studies and aptitudes (grade cards), finances (letters regarding money), but told us something about his post-school activities as well.

The first thing I did was arrange the stack of papers in chronological order.  At first I was disappointed that there did not seem to be paperwork from  Tahoma’s registration when he transferred from Albuquerque to Santa Indian School, but the first report in the file mentioned that he entered 4th grade at SFIS on October 10, 1930. (Ironically, the same date that his obituary would run in the Santa Fe paper just 26 years later.)

On the school form, date of birth is given as 1918, although census records later told us it was actually 1917.  So he was 12 or 13 years old, depending on what month he was born, and he weighed only 85 pounds at the beginning of the school year and 90 at the end.

The next record gives his grades for that first year, and the information that he failed 4th grade because of “lack of English”  and was held back. This record shows a birth date of May 24, 1918–although he was later to claim he was born on Christmas day. The form lists

• Mother: Dead
• Father: Dead
• Guardian: Manual Siganitzo, brother
• church preference: Catholic
• Home post office: Tuba City, Ariz.

We would later learn that his mother was not dead, and although the Siganitzo (Saganitso) name led us to an adopted family, Manual, younger than Tahoma, almost certainly should not have been listed as guardian. The Saganitso family was not Catholic and the people we talked to have no idea why the school records would list Tahoma as Catholic. The first and last facts listed here were correct.

1935 Navajo Country, Courtesy of Charlotte G. Mittler

As would be the case throughout school, Tahoma got his best grades in art, and high grades in deportment.  His examination scores were abominable. He seemed to be one of those nice, well-behaved kids, who struggled in class and  panicked at test taking. We found it interesting to see what he was studying: Arithmetic, Drawing, English, Geography, Penmanship, Spelling, Physical Education, Reading, History and General Education.

The second time that he took 4th grade, Music was substituted for General, and the grading system changed from a 100-point scale to 1 through 4. Straight “1′s” in drawing and a solid 2 in English, along with deportment that still rated high, meant he was promoted to 5th grade at the end of his second year at SFIS.

He continued as a solid C student, with the exception of art and music classes where he won B’s. Unlike the schools that you and I attended, starting in junior high school, teachers gave grades in such things as Farm, Laundry, Kitchen and Dining Room.

All students at the Indian Boarding Schools were assigned work periods, with the stated aim of teaching them valuable work habits and skills, but with the side benefit to the school of providing unpaid labor for the self-sufficient schools.

A good reference for the development of boarding schools, and particularly Santa Fe Indian school, is History of Indian Arts Education in Santa Fe by Wanda Garmhausen. Sally Hyer’s story based on oral history from Santa Fe Indian School students, One House, One Voice, One Heart, provides invaluable insights into how attendees at the school viewed their own experience. In addition, we interviewed a dozen or more of Tahoma’s friends from school days to learn about their own reactions to the school and their memories of Tahoma the school boy.

I’ll be sharing more about Tahoma’s school days in the days to come.

Were you surprised to learn that students at the boarding school did most of the work that kept the institution in operation?

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Christmas card, drawn and hand lettered by Quincy Tahoma, courtesy of Jean Wallace McSwain

A character in a novel starts as a blank page. The author creates a name, a birthplace, a locale, a personality and talents.

Meet Quincy Tahoma, the author of Quincy Tahoma.  In many ways, this creative Navajo artist made himself his greatest work of imagination.  True, someone else contributed the name, Quincy Tahoma, to a young boy who was known to the family who raised him as Bi-Gaani (his arm).

But it appears from school records and friends’ stories that Tahoma created his own family history and particularly invented his birth date. Birth records from the early 20th century are practically non existent for the Diné who lived on the reservation.  The school records are missing from Tuba City and from his one year at the Albuquerque Indian School, but a few years after he started school in Santa Fe Indian Schol, an official record lists his birthdate and year. We know that he shaved a few years off of his age about the time that he started playing sports in junior high school. It might be coincidence, but it also might be so that he would be eligible to play on the seventh grade basketball team.

And the record lists his birth date as December 25th.  Since most of the people he grew up with did not pay much attention to birth dates–saying instead as one man told us, “I was born when the apricot trees blossom”– it is highly likely that date was chosen by Tahoma. We know that he enjoyed non Navajo holidays like Christmas and New Year’s Day, and probably reveled in the attention he got by having a Christmas birthday.

He drew the card shown here for his girlfriend, Jean Wallace (McSwain),  in the early 1940′s, and we share its gentle holiday wishes with you.  Happy Holidays from Charnell and Vera Marie.

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Perhaps the most controversial part of our book will be our treatment of American Indian boarding schools.

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.)

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

One key resource came when we asked Mark Bahti to see if he could find out from his friend Harrison Begay if Begay knew anything about Tahoma. Bahti is the 2nd generation owner of Bahti Indian Arts in Tuson, and Harrison Begay used to stay with the Bahti family for a time each year. We knew Tahoma and Begay had both gone to school at Santa Fe Indian School. Since Navajos were a minority in the predominantly Pueblo Indian school, we figured Navajos might have stuck together.  Bahti wrote to Begay, and Begay sent a lengthy, hand-written letter back with all he could remember and find out about

Vera Marie with Harrison Begay in Santa Fe 2006

Tahoma.  Unfortunately, he said, “I found out I didn’t know very much about Quincy Tahoma.”  We knew the feeling. Among the things he wrote to Bahti, was his recollection that Quincy was born not far from Tuba City in a place  near Elephant Feet. This was marginally helpful, since there are at least two Elephant Feet locations in Arizona on the Navajo Reservation, but one is near Tuba City.

We had a false lead when someone suggested that Tahoma was born at Shonto. I drove there and talked to people at the trading post, which is in the bottom of a pretty little canyon, but this was a dead end as far as information was concerned. We contacted Dr. William Adams, who grew up at Shonto and wrote about it, and he had no recollection of Tahoma being from there.

Our second big break came when Mark Rosacker of New Mexico found out about our work, and volunteered to help with research into Tahoma’s family.  Our third major source of information, which dove-tailed with Mark’s work, came from the United States National Archives in the Denver office, where they keep at least some of the school records from Santa Fe Indian School.  More about Mark and the archives in the another post.

Posted by Vera Marie Badertscher

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.