No man’s life can be encompassed in one telling. There is no way to give each year its allotted weight, to include each event, each person who helped to shape a lifetime. What can be done is to be faithful in spirit to the record, and to try to find one’s way to the heart of the man. --John Briley
To capture the entirety of anyone’s life story is difficult at best, if not impossible really. And to tell the story of someone who, as is the case here, “lived fast and died young” is all the more challenging. But somehow Charnell Havens and Vera Marie Badertscher have managed to masterfully piece together the story of Navajo artist Quincy Tahoma (ca. 1917–1956). This first book-length biography about the Santa Fe Indian School artist is itself a work of art, not only for the many Tahoma paintings beautifully presented here--several of which are on public display for the first time--but also for the attentiveness to a narrative of Tahoma’s life that is convincingly “faithful in spirit to the [in this case, very sparse] record” and ardently strives to “find one’s way to the heart of the man” (Briley 1982:15).
Because extant records concerning Tahoma are scant, the only way to fill in the gaps is to rely upon information provided by those who either knew Tahoma firsthand or knew someone who did. From limited archival data and interviews with over fifty people, making the book primarily an oral history project, the authors assert that Tahoma’s life was one which “seemed to fluctuate between personal disappointment and professional validation” (92). This pervasive theme guides the narrative of Tahoma’s life, from an orphan adopted by his mother’s half-sister’s family to his untimely alcoholic death at age thirty-eight.
Organized into ten chapters, from “Beginnings” to “One Too Many,” the work also includes an epilogue which explores Tahoma’s legacy, a forward by anthropologist David Brugge, an introduction contextualizing American Indian art in the early-twentieth century, three appendices (one of which is a timeline of Tahoma’s life, a list of his prizes, medals, and awards, and one of his exhibitions and collections), in addition to endnotes, bibliography, acknowledgements, and an index. Each chapter opens with a “recreated small scene to launch into the more factual material” (9). The paintings accompanying each chapter roughly correspond to the period of Tahoma’s life being treated.
Havens and Badertscher are vigilant in their attendance to the social, cultural, and political times in which Tahoma lived. Examples include discussion about American Indians’ experience of boarding schools, the WW II years, and their shift from government wards to voting citizenry. The authors also include information about Navajo kinship and cultural worldview to identify Tahoma’s clan membership (which they assert Tahoma himself never knew but from which his name is derived), and explore possible reasons why he spent his early years with his mother’s half-sister’s family. The art world, and explicitly the arena of American Indian art produced by students of the Studio School founded in 1932 by Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Indian School, serves as additional important contextual information for the exploration of Tahoma’s amazing career as a painter, both private and professional.
To their credit, Havens and Badertscher adroitly handle discrepancies in Tahoma’s life history by comparing multiple sources, interviews, and records where available, as well as by adding healthy infusions of deductive reasoning. There is no extant birth certificate to confirm Tahoma’s birth date, but from interviews and census records the authors assert that Tahoma was born in 1917, despite Tahoma’s claim “throughout his adult life that his birthday was December 25, 1920” (20). Instead of the WW II Navajo code-talker Tahoma claimed to be, Havens and Badertscher have found no evidence of his ever being enlisted in any branch of the U.S. military service. But these incongruities are handed with grace and tact: they are part of what made Tahoma the colorful personality and creative artist he was. And whereas Tahoma developed a somewhat severe drinking problem in his adult life, the authors are quick to dispel any hint of the “drunken Indian” stereotype, pointing out that the belief that American Indians are biologically predisposed to alcoholism is “based on a bad study” (162).
While the book is clearly a triumph of orality and memory work in the rendering of a life history on one hand, on the other, it can be critiqued for the sometimes repetitive nature of the narrative. Yet, this criticism may be an empty one considering the aforementioned dearth of records as well as the fact that perhaps the narrative actually reflects the cyclic nature of Tahoma’s life, i.e., his painting productivity vis-à-vis drinking binges, and the professional accolades vis-à-vis his personal disillusionment. This work should appeal to a wide range of readers and scholars, such as cultural anthropologists, art historians, ethnohistorians, folklorists, and students of Native North America, to name a few. As David Brugge writes in the forward, “Biographies of individual lives can give us a deeper insight into many aspects of such a life. While it is perhaps true that controlled statistical studies ill provide the valid generalizations that we need, it is in the details of diverse life stories that we can find the better questions to study” (5).
Work Cited
Briley, John. 1982. Gandhi: The Screen Play. London: Duckworth.
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[Review length: 891 words • Review posted on April 2, 2012]