Profile of My People

Edward Carl, Navajo boy, died in his nineteenth year, the victim of tuberculosis. His oil painting, "Shiprock," on opposite page, won the Martin Leisser Memorial Award in the Scholastic Magazine contest in 1944. His grammar school teacher, Dona Van Hooser Corwin, now with the Indian Service at San Carlos, plans to include his material in her book: "The Path to the Blue Skies." Watercolors on this and other pages are by a talented Navajo boy, Yel Ha Yah, who completed his high school studies at Santa Fe.

Fingers. To look at the thick coils of black hair tied with strands of white wool, and to feel a longing to touch the thin brown cheeks. It means to watch the father hammer his dreams into silver rings; to believe in the Good Medicine of the People to keep your feet straight on the beautiful trail.

It means old men with bent down shoulders and wrinkled copper faces. Old men with thin gray hair and watery eyes, who sit in the shadow of gone-away days, in the long hours when the past becomes the future. Old men whose feet followed the trails of yesterday and know not the paths of new ways. Old men together talking, talking of the Other Days, painting pictures with words, while their cold blood runs warm with the tales theytell. It means this thinking of the young who hear: "The old days were good, but they can never come backagain. We must not look the backward way with the old men. To live in the past is a tired thing."

It means being surrounded by a White World of White Men, and trying to see the good in the White World.

It means the shock of learning that Today is not an Indian World. It means the Indian tearing himself from the past of today, to enter the tomorrow of many days of new things. It means to leave through the door opened by the White Men for a government school of red brick houses and strange people. To see that from these schools new thinking ways and new acting ways reach out to the People, to make a nest in the hearts of the young. To see the old and the new meet to bring a change in the old ways. It means to find, in this world of red brickhouses, an understanding face, and to learn that deeper there beats an understanding heart. It means to paint the stored treasure thoughts with oil, crayons and water colors, not on the rocks and sands of the desert.

This is what it means to be a Navajo Indian, son of the Dineh. I am a part of the picture of my people.

This picture has given me a dream that will live. A dream that causes me to shake inside with a burning to paint the beauty whispers and hope whispers of my people. To paint for the world to see.

The Canyons

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the West.

This is our wish for you from the land where the mountains are purple draperies on the horizon and the canyons are deep and wide and full of bright, shifting colors.

May there be peace on earth for all of us!

Here in the deep canyons of the West, where the stillness and whiteness of winter merely enhance the colors of the canyons, there is peace as if the canyons had clothed themselves in white, fleecy blankets and settled down to quiet repose.From the West, from the land of the deep and color-drenched canyons we, therefore, send canyon portraits to extend to you our Season's Greetings... R. C.