Rebecca M. Valette is professor emerita of Romance languages at Boston College and an internationally recognized expert in language methodology, testing, and applied linguistics. She and her husband, Jean-Paul Valette, have curated several exhibitions of Navajo textiles. They are coauthors of Weaving the Dance: Navajo Yeibichai Textiles (1910–1950) and Navajo Weavings with Ceremonial Themes: A Historical Overview of a Secular Art Form. Her newest book, Clitso Dedman, Navajo Carver, was published in December.

Rebecca Valette’s Clitso Dedman, Navajo Carver is the first biography of artist Clitso Dedman (1876–1953), one of the most important but overlooked Diné (Navajo) artists of his generation. Dedman was born to a traditional Navajo family in Chinle, Arizona, and herded sheep as a child. He was educated in the late 1880s and early 1890s at the Fort Defiance Indian School, then at the Teller Institute in Grand Junction, Colorado. Today Dedman’s distinctive and highly regarded work can be found in private collections, galleries, and museums, such as the Navajo Nation Museum at Window Rock, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and the Arizona State Museum in Tucson.

Boarding School

Many Navajos who were sent to Indian boarding schools remembered the experience as very traumatic. Clitso Dedman was a notable exception, for he definitely blossomed in his new educational environment. His academic success was even more remarkable, given the complete disarray in which the schools he attended were floundering at the time. When he arrived at Fort Defiance in fall 1884, there were only twenty students in a new boarding school built to accommodate one hundred pupils. The situation did improve markedly, however, over the next four years. Then in 1889, when he and thirty fellow Navajos were transferred to Grand Junction, they found themselves in a totally dysfunctional off-reservation school where the only other students were seven Ute boys. There was just one teacher and no vocational program. Food was poor and the alkali in the water rendered it undrinkable. Eight of his older classmates ran away in November and miraculously managed to walk the 300 miles back to Fort Defiance. By spring, under new leadership, the educational environment was gradually ameliorated and new vocational workshops were built. Over his eight years in boarding school, Clitso learned not to be discouraged by difficult situations and to focus on optimizing the positive aspects of his experiences, attitudes that would contribute to the success of his future endeavors.

 Fort Defiance Indian School

In signing the 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo, the Navajo people agreed to “give up the education of their children between the ages of six and sixteen to the white man” so as to “insure their civilization.” According to Article 6, the Navajo signatories pledged “to compel their children, male and female, between the age of six and sixteen to attend school.” The U.S. government, for its part, agreed that for every thirty students of school age, it would provide a “house” and hire a teacher “competent to teach the elementary branches of an English education.” The duty of the agent would be to see that the above terms were carried out.

Since one of the broader aims of Indian education throughout the United States was to “Christianize” the many diverse tribes, President Grant announced his “Peace Policy” in 1868, whereby the establishment of reservation schools would be the responsibility of the various religious denominations. It originally fell to the Presbyterian Church to provide instruction for the Navajos.

In fall 1869, the Presbyterian Home Mission Board sent a young teacher, Charity Gaston, to Fort Defiance, headquarters of the newly created Navajo Indian Agency. She was housed in an old adobe building with a small classroom for twenty-five students. Attendance, however, was often less than half that number, and on some days no students came at all. When she observed that her more regular attendees were either sickly or handicapped, it was explained to her that the Navajo families kept their healthy children at home to help with chores, but were happy to send to school those unable to work, knowing they would be fed and cared for.

Despite her dedication and prior training, Charity Gaston faced an immense challenge. She knew no Navajo and had to rely on an interpreter to translate Bible stories and introduce the students to totally unfamiliar Christian concepts, such as heaven and hell. Even more difficult were classes in what the Navajos called “writing paper”: teaching the children how to say and spell English words, and how to write and add numbers. Spotty attendance continued to be an ongoing problem. By the second year, official enrollment had risen to thirty-five students, but the average daily attendance was only sixteen. In fall 1871, Charity and her new husband, the Fort Defiance missionary-physician Dr. James Menaul, were transferred to the Laguna Pueblo. Ten years and several poorly trained teachers later, average daily attendance at Fort Defiance School had fallen to seven. It was evident that the Navajo day school experiment was turning out to be a total failure.

In 1880, it was decided to build a boarding school under the assumption that on-campus housing would facilitate regular classroom instruction and greater immersion in English. The new Fort Defiance School, an impressive three-story stone building, finally opened its doors in September 1883. It was thought that parents would be eager to enroll their children, since the school would be providing for their daily needs, but the reality was quite different. When parents did come to view the premises, they became concerned that their children’s feet would not be in contact with Mother Earth. They were also loathe to let “outsiders” raise their children in a foreign culture. Less than twenty students at a time were ever in attendance. Superintendent Logan reported that during that first year, “he did not believe there was one single day when all of the school employees were on speaking terms with all of their co-laborers—that the children would come and stay a day or two, get some clothes, and then run away back to their hogans, but few of them attended regularly, consequently the school did but little real good.”

In summer 1884, as mentioned earlier, John Bowman, the newly arrived Indian agent at Fort Defiance, resolved to improve morale at the school and increase its effectiveness. In his annual report, he wrote that he had had tremendous difficulty in finding the “necessary number of students” for his new school, despite all his efforts at begging and cajoling, even bribing, parents to allow their children to be educated. As a result of his recruiting efforts, twenty-two students were enrolled that October. By November the number had increased to thirty-three. It was a modest success, but a success nonetheless, for none of the pupils tried to run away.

In fall 1884, young Clitso would have been one of the new students brought on opening day to the Fort Defiance School. On arrival, he would have been puzzled when asked to give his first and last name. Since the incoming Navajo students, unless they had Anglo fathers, were known only by their nicknames, the teachers would freely assign new names and surnames. One boy became Abe Lincoln, another Grover Cleveland, and still another Joe Tippecanoe. There was also a Rip Van Winkle. Clitso apparently was allowed to keep his nickname, probably because it was easy for the teachers to pronounce, and assigned the surname Dedman. It is not known what or who inspired the name “Dedman.” Was there a Dedman among the officers stationed at Fort Defiance? Or did one of the teachers have a relative named Dedman? The origin remains a mystery. Moreover, in the absence of school records, it is impossible to know whether the name was originally spelled “Dedman” or “Deadman.”

On arrival at Fort Defiance, Clitso would have had his hair cut short to get rid of the ever-present lice. This procedure was still mandatory in the 1920s when another young Navajo, future Code Talker Chester Nez, was sent to Navajo boarding school at age eight. He recalled:

On my first day at school, I lined up with the other boys. Tears streamed down many faces. The first order of business: a mandatory haircut. Hair fell in piles. I awaited my turn, hands squeezed into fists as I watched the shearing. I figured there must be some mistake. We Navajos believe in witchcraft. Cut hair and fingernail clippings should be gathered and hidden or burned. Such things could be used to invoke bad medicine against the owner. People should not leave parts of themselves scattered around to be picked up by someone else. Even the smallest children knew that.

 Singer Frank Mitchell, who arrived in Fort Defiance ten years after Clitso in 1894, provided a detailed firsthand description of what the school was like at that time. Although attendance had significantly increased and the educational program had become more formalized since Clitso’s arrival ten years earlier, many of the experiences of both boys would have been quite similar.

After his haircut, Clitso was given a bath—a totally new experience, given the scarcity of water on the reservation. Then he received an entirely unfamiliar set of clothing: underwear, shirt, jacket, trousers, and heavy (most likely ill-fitting) leather shoes. An immediate challenge was how to manipulate the unfamiliar buttons and buttonholes. Gone forever were his lightweight calico pants and moccasins. However, Clitso, like Frank Mitchell, probably took a certain pride in his new attire.

The next discovery occurred at mealtime. For his first eight years, Clitso had eaten food with his fingers, serving himself from a communal dish while seated on the ground with his family. When he went into the Fort Defiance refectory, he saw that students were expected to sit on chairs at a long table, furniture that to him was totally unfamiliar. They each had their own plates with knives and forks, utensils that he, too, would have to learn to handle. Many of the foods, such as rice and dried fruit, were new to him. Most remarkable, however, was that food was plentiful, something he had never before experienced.

In the evening, on entering the dormitory, Clitso saw a row of metal cots. He would now be sleeping on a “bed” under sheet and blanket, whereas heretofore he had slept next to Mother Earth on a sheepskin placed on the dirt floor of his hogan. In the corner of the dormitory were slop buckets to be used at night when it was too dark to go to the “privy” or outhouse, another unfamiliar structure. There was also a washroom with basins, soap, and towels. (One of the goals of the school was to promote cleanliness and limit the spread of diseases, such as tuberculosis.)

Also new was the American concept of time. On the reservation, Navajos organized their days according to the position of the sun: sunrise, noon, sunset, and nighttime. At Fort Defiance, as Clitso quickly learned, the daily schedule was determined by a mechanical instrument called a “clock,” which divided the day into hours and minutes. Students’ lives were regulated by the ringing of a large bell, which signaled the commencement of each activity: when to get up, when to line up for breakfast, when to go to class, and so forth. Furthermore, there was a “calendar” that organized the days into “weeks.” Classes were held Monday through Friday. On Saturdays, students were free to relax once they had bathed and changed into clean clothes. On Sundays, they would all “go to church.” Since there was no chapel, the students would be seated in the classroom and listened quietly to the English-speaking missionaries, often not understanding what was being said.