Farmington, New Mexico Caught Between Earth and Sky

By Richard Stengel

"It was the medicine men," the teacher tells the class, "who came up with the religious beliefs that are the backbone of our Navajo culture." Lloyd | House speaks in a gravelly voice, has a boxer's much broken nose and wears a traditional turquoise necklace around his neck. "The medicine man we are talking about today was called Naahwiitbiihi -- which means the 'man who always wins.' Sounds like Frank Sinatra, doesn't it?" he says, and chuckles.

The high school students, all Navajos, all shy and soft-spoken, all wearing high-topped sneakers and distressed blue jeans, don't seem to know or care who Ol' Blue Eyes is. On this spring day they are more interested in completing their model hogans, the round, age-old Navajo structures whose doorways must always face east, the direction of dawn, the region of all beginnings.

Until last summer, House, a former Marine Corps and All-Service welterweight boxing champion, was one of two instructors in Navajo language and culture at the Navajo Academy in Farmington, N. Mex. This fall there are three, but House is no longer among them. The academy draws its students from the vast, mostly desolate Navajo reservation next to this charm-free oil-and-gas town. The school has a Navajo headmaster and an all-Navajo board of trustees. It is the only Native American college-preparatory boarding school in the U.S.

The academy, which will celebrate its 15th anniversary at the end of this school year, has 176 students in grades 9 through 12. Almost all are Navajos -- the Dine, as they call themselves, which means the "People." This year there are also three Anglos, as whites around here are invariably called. Nestled against a high shelf of rock, the school consists of a snug quadrangle of dilapidated buildings on the grounds of a turn-of-the-century Methodist mission. It has a pleasant atmosphere and, if you blur your eyes a bit, looks like a down-at-the-heels New England prep school transferred to a bleak section of the Southwest.

The school was started in 1976 at the time when the Indian Self- Determination Act was passed, when the Federal Government was encouraging Native Americans to take their education into their own hands. Until the 1970s, the dominant principle of the Bureau of Indian Affairs was assimilation, and the government was content to let Navajo culture wither away and die.

Although the U.S. government has had a trust responsibility since 1868 to provide for Navajo education, it has done a sorry job. Native Americans in general, and Navajos in particular, have one of the nation's highest rates of illiteracy and high school delinquency. The average Navajo adult has received * only five years of schooling. Today half the Navajos on the reservation are under the age of 20, and perhaps a quarter of those teenagers are not in school. A third of all high school-age Native Americans are classified as educationally handicapped.

From the start, the academy sought to provide a supportive environment for Navajos, in contrast to public schools, where they were routinely treated as second-class students. But beyond that, according to headmaster Samuel Billison, the academy had a special mission: to educate young and gifted Navajos to be able to survive in the wider culture without losing their own. The school aimed to create a generation of Indian leaders who would understand the outside world but not envy it.

The school grew slowly and steadily. It offered small classes and recruited a corps of solid, no-nonsense teachers, some of whom are still there. To be admitted, Navajo students had to score at or above the 40th percentile nationally -- that is, better than 39% of all U.S. students. That may not sound too stringent, but those young Native Americans who could meet that requirement were among the top fifth of all Navajo students.

Pale sunlight streams into the spare classroom of Richard Clark, an Anglo English teacher. Clark, an austere-looking man with a crew cut and a deeply lined face, has been teaching at the academy for nine years. At the blackboard, several sophomores are diagraming sentences. A timid girl with glasses identifies a predicate phrase modifying a compound verb. When she's finished, Clark scans the room and says with a wry smile, "Paulette, you're the next volunteer." Paulette, a tiny girl with a large pompadour, dutifully marches to the blackboard and, in a spidery hand, diagrams a sentence with a nonrestrictive relative clause.

Clark is strict but sympatico. "We're making up for all that they didn't learn on the reservation," he says. "But they learn fast." The curriculum at the academy, which includes four years of a foreign language, is considerably more rigorous than that of public schools on the reservation. Clark says that when the students arrive at school, fresh off the reservation, they are often shamed by their lack of education and are painfully reticent. "Every year," says Clark, "we get students who are at fourth- or fifth- grade reading levels."

Clark recounts that some of the students find the work too tough at the academy and leave to attend public school. "But then they come back because they miss the structure," he says. This was the case with Steve, a slight boy with spiky hair who sits in the back of Clark's class. He dropped out of the academy last year and enrolled at one of the local public high schools. The reason, he says, was "because I thought it would be easier." But public school proved too easy. "I couldn't learn over there," he says. Steve wants to go to college, and he says he has a better chance if he graduates from the academy. More than 80% of the school's graduates go to college, an extraordinarily high percentage for Native Americans.

Paulette was at a public school before coming to the academy. "Here the students really care," she says. "The kids at public school are rezzed out." This phrase provokes snickers from the class. Rezzed out means being provincial, unsophisticated, too much of the reservation. Those kids, she implies, don't care about studying. Claude, a barrel-chested tackle on the football team, came to the academy from a public school in Arizona. "At the public school," he says, "the guys would just drink and party. Here is a better atmosphere." If a student at the academy is caught drinking -- or smoking dope, which is rapidly replacing alcohol as the abuse substance of choice among teenagers -- he or she is immediately sent home.

The students have grown more assimilated over the years, says Martha Amedeo, who has taught literature and drama at the academy from the beginning. Today the Navajo language is a foreign tongue to more than half the students, who must struggle through two years of the difficult, tonal language of their forefathers. Amedeo notes that a few years ago the girls wore their perfectly straight black hair long and natural. Now all the girls in her class sport frizzy permanents.

When it comes to mainstream America, the students feel ambivalent -- or; as a medicine man might put it, caught on the horizon, part of neither Earth nor sky. Curious but wary, they regard American culture as though they were gazing at it through a ritzy department-store window. They appreciate the academy in part because it is insulated from the outside world. Although nearly all of them intend to go to college, most say they will return to the reservation afterward. For Denneilia, a clever, pretty girl who was last year's senior- class president, the sky is the limit for what she could achieve in the outside world. Yet she admits that she will probably return to the reservation + after college. The real world is prejudiced against Navajos, she says, adding that it is important that she not forsake her cultural heritage.

The Navajo Academy was growing steadily until about four years ago, when tensions between the academy and the Methodists resulted in a rupture. The mission wanted more rent. When the academy would not or could not pay it, the mission tried to evict the school. The academy went to court, getting a three- year stay until the end of the school year in 1991. The Methodist Church recently filed suit to force the school to comply with the court order and depart by June of next year.

Meanwhile, the board of trustees has come up with a plan to build a new school on land donated by the Navajo Nation. The land was freely given -- 640 acres, to be exact -- but where would the money come from? Not the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which allocated a paltry sum -- $8.1 million for fiscal 1991 -- to finance new construction of all Native American schools. Instead, the academy drafted a prospectus for a new institution costing $31 million. The academy proposed an innovative fund-raising technique to the BIA: the school would raise the money through a private bond issue, and the BIA would allocate yearly mortgage payments over 30 years for the cost of construction. At the same time, the academy began lobbying for a congressional appropriation to underwrite the new school. Two bills were introduced in Congress this year to help the school, but no money was appropriated. Instead, the two Senators from New Mexico have directed the Department of the Interior to submit a report by February 1991 to the appropriations committee on the special needs of the academy.

The BIA insists that without a congressional guarantee the bureau cannot make such a lengthy fiscal commitment. The bureau also has some concerns about the way the school has been run. It has a point. The trustees seem out of touch with the daily life of the school and amateurish when it comes to financial matters. Some of the teachers are journeymen with little commitment to Navajo education. The school's long-term financial problems are compounded by a short-term one: the academy is facing a deficit of about $150,000 this year. Despite some conflict among teachers, students and administrators, they are united on one issue: the academy is a source of pride to the Navajo Nation and ought to be preserved.

Headmaster Billison is concerned about the future -- but not despairing. He ^ has the face and manner of a world-weary sage and notes that his grandfather and several uncles were medicine men. The Navajo Beauty Way, he says, is to seek harmony with the world. Whatever happens, he will make peace with it. He mentions that the target date for breaking ground for the new school is next year and gestures toward the handsome architectural plans on his wall. "The Navajo philosophy," he says, "is that you always think positively."