Captured Ghosts in Glass

PORTRAITS IN GLASS THE HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHY OF BROTHER SIMEON SCHWEMBERGER

HANDS BALLED IN THE BOTTOMS OF MY COAT POCKETS AGAINST THE MORNING CHILL, I STAMPED MY FEET AND WAITED FOR THE SUN TO CLEAR THE RIDGE BEYOND THE GROVE OF COTTON WOODS BEHIND THE 100-YEAR-OLD FRANCISCAN MISSION. HERE, IN THE HEART OF THE NAVAJO NATION, Now I'd spent the long night in the somber St. Michael's Mission, sifting through a huge collection of glassplate photographs of the Navajos and their land at the turn of the century.

As the horizon over toward Window Rock turned molten, I wondered suddenly whether Brother Simeon Schwemberger ever stood on this knoll overlooking this grove of trees, waiting out the dawn. He came to this wild and inaccessible place from Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1901 at age 34. Helearned Navajo, spread the gospel, and spent every spare moment of the next seven years with his over-size camera. Then he left the order after a falling-out with his superior and headed east into a life of aimless wandering, finally settling on a farm in Florida. And though he had every reason to remain there in comfort, he instead returned to the reservation, living much of his life on this windswept world of sculpted canyons, endless views to the horizon, and ancient cultures. The mystery of his motivation nagged at me.

The sun topped the crest of a distant ridge, spilling light across the fluted sandstone canyons of Window Rock, governmental seat of the Navajo Nation. The first light hit the tops of the cottonwoods. This grove of trees would have looked quite different nearly a century ago when BrotherSimeon arrived at the fledgling Franciscan mission in a lonely land peopled by a few white traders and ranchers and a scattering of Navajo families. As a member of the Franciscan Order, he played a bit part in Father Anselm Weber's ambitious, arduous, and frustrating effort to spread the Christian faith throughout the ancient cultures of the Navajos, Hopis, and Pueblos along the Rio Grande. The ever-adaptable Navajos generally greeted the missionaries with bland hospitality. But not many converted, and some of those who did smilingly blended the Navajo Way with the Christian sacraments. In the end, the missionaries contributed most by helping protect the Indian lands from white encroachment with endless legal surveys, and by running an on-reservation school. Meanwhile, Brother Simeon quietly indulged his passion for photography. He roamed the Navajo reservation, recorded historic scenes on the nearby Hopi mesas, and journeyed to the ancient pueblos of New Mexico. He produced nearly 2,000 images, ranging from school class pictures to landscapes and stirring portraits. The Navajos in his pictures often stare somberly at the camera, many haunting in their intensity. The legendary headman Chee Dodge seems rumpled and unprepossessing, standing awkwardly before an adobe wall. A great war chief of the Navajos posed with a bow and a blanket, regarding the photographer with intense dignity. Brother Simeon's best pictures blend art and snapshot. They lack the sophisticated staging and prop-placing of some of the later professional photographers. "His people pictures are marvelous," said University of Arizona ethnologist Paul Long, who spent the 1970s and '80s chasing the will-o'-thewisp meaning of Brother Simeon's life after the Franciscan missionaries asked him to sort through the massive collection of glass plates. Long ultimately published more than a hundred of the best photographs in his book Big Eyes (University of New Mexico Press, 1992), which also presents his account of Brother Simeon's uneven life and style. "He wasn't a polished, set-up-the-shot photographer. He was more a recorder of events. He established a certain rapport with people, and he was simply consumed by doing this photography." Perhaps Brother Simeon's greatest coup lay in a series of photographs that captured a Navajo Nightway Ceremony, one of the few photographic records of this days-long ritual intended to heal and restore harmony. A friend of his paid for the ceremony on the condition Brother Simeon be allowed to take pictures. And he produced a remarkable photographic record of the ritual: the building of the sacred lodge, the elaborate sand paintings, the group dances, the ministrations of the healer over the head-bowed patient, the gathering of people and clans from across the reservation, and the masked, painted dancers representing various spirits. However, Brother Simeon never really meshed with the mission's devout, austere world. He clashed with the priests who ran the mission and ultimately fell in love with the niece of one of them. This impassioned but never consummated affair apparently led to his departure from the religious order. Brother Simeon knocked around for several years, then moved to Florida in 1911 to run a farm with his brother. He found successes, but he seemed haunted by memories of the bleak grandeur of the reservation. Unable to resist, he moved back to the land of the Navajos after a year, for a time running isolated reservation trading posts, then setting up a photographic studio in Gallup. He married, divorced, and remarried. Nothing ever seemed to pull together for the earnest, hardworking, stubborn man. "Why go out to Florida and then come back when he had nothing to come back to is a mystery," conceded Paul Long. "He just seemed drawn to the Southwest like all of us, I guess." In 1931 Brother Simeon

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Continued from page 13 died at age 64, lonely and frustrated, never having achieved recognition as a photographer, material wealth, or a secure place in the world. He wound up buried in an unmarked grave in Gallup. But he left a precious legacy in the basement of an old mission.

The current missionaries at St. Michael's began laboring to salvage this legacy some years ago, cataloging the images, calling on Long to evaluate their importance, starting the lengthy and potentially expensive process of stabilizing the images, and repairing the ravages of time and poor storage.

Thanks to these efforts and Long's book, the photographs have already found new uses. Copies have been placed in museum collections, including the University of Northern Arizona. Teachers have used the photographs to design a curriculum on Navajo history for use in public schools on the reservation. Navajo families have used the collection to unearth roots of their fam-ily tree. And the photographs have illustrated sev-eral books on the history of the Franciscans on the reservation. The Brothers hope use of the photos will expand as word of them spreads.

Certainly many of the scenic views on the plates provided a wonderful excuse for a little photo-archaeology on my part, locating exactly the same views to document ecological and landscape changes over time. I enlisted the expert assistance of Brother Francis, 82, an energetic elf of a man who has served the Lord and tended his flock for nearly half a century. He happily dragged me from one vista to another, armed with copies of Brother Simeon's photographs of the same spots.

We found a secluded Indian ruin near the mission, virtually unchanged save for the absence of a huge log below and the addition of a telephone line above. We found a natural bridge, now obscured by imported Russian olive trees and marred by spray-painted symbols favored by devil worship-

ers, a discovery that stirred

We saved Window Rock for last, an astonishing hole in solid sandstone just behind the Navajo administrative buildings. Brother Simeon left a remarkable picture taken from the back side of Window Rock, with a horseman posed in the foreground and several men perched nonchalantly but precariously atop the soaring arch.

We found a trail that led around to the right of the frequently photographed front view to a sloping rock face, complete with smooth sandfilled hand and footholds that could have been abraded out of the yielding sandstone anytime in the past thousand years. I scrambled up the rock face and inched up the handhold section. I gained the top of the ridge behind Window Rock and began wandering about on the sloping mesa, trying to find the view from the century-old photo. Suddenly, I saw it. I recognized the stone oval, the contour of the top where the men stood, and the layout of the foreground where the rider posed. Time and distance dissolved. I felt as expansive as the horizon, as billowed as the clouds, as winged as the raven that glided into the sandstone window. And at that moment, I knew why Brother Simeon left Florida. I understood why he couldn't escape the stone labyrinths. I grasped how difficult it can be to define success, or reduce the Navajo Way to words.

But I can't explain it to you even now. I can only urge you to one day watch the dawn as it touches a cottonwood tree, or the shadow of a raven as it passes over the sandstone at sunset on the Navajo reservation.

Phoenix-based Peter Aleshire believes that the Navajo reservation is one of the most sublimely beautiful places in the world.