Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Helen John: The Beginnings of Indian Placement

1985; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/45225406

1554-9631

Jonathan Birch,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

My grandchild, the whites have many things which we Navajos need.But we cannot get them.It is as though the whites were in a grassy canyon and there they have wagons, plows, and plenty of food.We Navajos are up on the dry mesa.We can hear them talking but we cannot get them.My grandchild, education is the ladder.Tell our people to take it.( Manuelito, c 1 880 ) .erhaps others than Helen John, Amy Avery, Golden and Thelma Buchanan, and Spencer W. Kimball might have compounded an equally powerful scheme for blessing the lives of Indians, but to these individuals fell that lot.Thousands of other participants have also made great contribution, in many cases at even greater personal sacrifice, but the Indian Placement story begins with Helen.This story is based on oral histories I made with her, Amy Avery, and Heber and Fay Woolsey.They have joined the oral histories of Golden and Thelma Buchanan made by William G. Hartley in the Church Historical Department Archives.It is the story of a beginning.Helen had grown up on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, the third child of Rose Toucha and Willie John's thirteen children.Her great-grandfather had been born about 1855 and had hidden with his people in Canyon de Chelly when the American cavalry under Christopher (Kit) Carson in 1863, in an effort to subdue the Navajo, trampled their corn and burned 5,000 peach trees.Locke reports tales that survived three generations of their suffering.One pregnant woman had frozen to death during the flight.Another son held his own father as he died of gunshot wounds.Some women smothered their babies, rather than have them starve.When the Indians finally began surrendering at Fort Wingate, about a hundred from one group of about 1,500 /.NEIL BIRCH lives in Sandy, Utah .He works as a social worker in infant adoptions .He is currently a high priest group leader in the Crescent 15th Ward .He and his wife Judy are parents of nine children .