. . . you are wearing moccasins that do not fit you. The sooner you both come back to your own people, the better . . .
Oliver LaFarge conceived this fiction about the Navajo and their dis-integration into white society while living among them as an anthropology grad student during the 1920’s. As he explains in the foreword, “The general scene, the appearance and behavior of those Indians, their dress, their camps, their games, their weapons, their land, were honorably set down as he had seen them. [It] was an age of innocence.” For some, he might well have added, for that is the crux of the plot recounting a tragic love story about the clash of cultures.
Laughing Boy is living in the traditional way when he is ensnared by the charms of Slim Girl, a beauty from the town with a mysterious double-life. He follows her, against the advice of family, to be tamed by the comforts of civilization: a stone house and chimney, canned goods, and fire water elixirs. Yet even as he enjoys prosperity silversmithing and trading, he converts her back to the old ways that the Indian Residential Christian Schools sought to beat out of her. In an effort to become a good Navajo woman, she learns to weave elaborate rugs based on the tapestry of her life. If only she can escape the monetary sway of her old ways before he discovers her secrets, they will be able to amass a fortune that will allow them repair to the reservation in style.
I found this 1929 Pulitzer Prize winner intriguing for language as sparse and poetic as the desert and Native dialect. As a singer, I appreciated Laughing Boy’s many impromptu songs expressing his daily thoughts and prayers. As a crafter, I loved Slim Girl’s reflections on the similarity of life to the loom with its many threads. Here is a romance and tragedy of epic proportions for the reader who aspires to glimpse the First Nations way of life from a lens closer to the truth than has been offered by Hollywood, though it was made into a film in 1934. To hear Oliver Lafarge’s progressive opinions on the state of Indian affairs in 1963, the year of his death, watch this brief interview. (192 pages in Signet Classic paperback)