HOSTEEN KLAH —Navaho Medicine Man and Sand Painter [SOLD]

HOSTEEN KLAH —Navaho Medicine Man and Sand Painter

By Franc Johnson Newcomb

University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1964

Softcover, 227 pages, first edition, 1964, illustrated

CONTENTS

Part I. Chief Narbona

1. Narbona Becomes Chief

2. Defensive Strategy

3. Lords of the Soil

4. The Death of Narbona

Part II. Grandma Klah

    5. Girlhood

    6. Bosque Redondo—The Long Walk

    7. Home and Family

Part III. Hosteen Klah

     8. Boyhood at Nee-yai-tsay

     9. Life with Apache Uncle

    10. The Education of a Medicine Man

    11. Weaver and Medicine Man

    12. Klah’s Graduation Ceremony

    13. “Flu” and a Ceremony

    14. Ceremonial Rugs and a Crown Prince

    15. An Eastern Vacation

    16. Chicago and a Miracle

    17. The Rainbow Trail

    18. The Museum

Synopsis

“Navaho medicine man and sand painter Hosteen Klah at seventy years of age knew much of the old Navaho way of life that was known to few others.  He had bridged the long span from the old days of tribal greatness and warfare to the new days of change and adjustment. Thus the story of Klah told here is also the story of his prominent family and reflects nearly two hundred important years of Navajo history.

“Klah’s great-grandfather, Narbona, was war chief of the Navaho during their heyday.  His mother made the “Long Walk” to the Bosque Redondo (Fort Sumner). After Klah was born in 1867, one year before the treaty establishing the Navaho [SIC] Reservation, his family moved back to their ancestral land and slowly regained their former wealth.

“The most influential medicine man on the Reservation, Klah also became an expert weaver.  Many of his sacred sand-painting designs were woven on tapestries and so preserved, for he had no successor.  The Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art (now the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian) in Santa Fe has as its nucleus Klah’s tapestries, ceremonial effects, and drawings of his sand paintings.  This book, like the museum, reflects and preserves the flavor and symbolism of a vanishing way of life.”

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Franc Johnson Newcomb lived for twenty-five years on the Navajo Reservation at her husband’s trading post, where Klah was their neighbor and friend.  She wrote and lectured extensively on Navajo religion and symbolism and collected more than four hundred sand-painting sketches.