The Navajo as Seen by the Franciscans, 1898-1921: A Sourcebook (review)

Howard Bahr's The Navajo as Seen by the Franciscans, 1898-1921, is an invaluable sourcebook for the extraordinary confluence between the Dine and the early Franciscans, especially three of these friars, Fathers Anselm Weber, Leopold Ostermann, and Berard Haile, all priests of the Franciscan Province of Cincinnati, Ohio. Father Anselm, the Superior of the Mission at St. Michaels, Arizona, from 1900 till his death in 1921, was largely responsible for adding over 1.5 million acres to the Navajo Reservation, writing countless letters to Congressmen and visiting Washington to lobby for additional lands for the Dine. Father Leopold was one of the key contributors to An Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navaho Language and an important person in building rapport with the Dine; and Father Berard, who lived among the Dine for over half a century and was an extraordinary linguist, did much to provide a written Navajo language and to record traditional Navajo chants and rituals. The writings of these three friars, together with those of Father Marcellus Troester, who arrived in 1906, and Father Emanuel Trockur, who came to the Reservation in 1917 and became the historian of the Franciscan missionaries, are represented in this book of magazine articles and personal writings. The writings of Fathers Anslem, Leopold, and Berard constitute most of the primary sources in Bahr's book, with the historical writings of Father Emanuel constituting the chief secondary sources. Many of these writings are difficult to access, and their being assembled in one book is a great contribution to the study of the Franciscan view of the Navajo during the pivotal years, 1898-1921.

This book is the first of a projected two-volume collection of Franciscan portrayals of life among the Navajos, this volume spanning the first and most extraordinary phase of the Franciscan presence among the Dine. It is divided into six parts: (1) Beginnings, (2) Indian Policy, (3) Early Ministry, 1901-1910, (4) Navajo Land, (5) Among the People, 1911-1920, and (6) Navajo Customs and Character. Because Bahr lets the Franciscans themselves tell their own stories and articulate their own viewpoints, the book is an invaluable window into the early Franciscans' understanding of the Dine. His headnote to each piece of writing is short and to the point and helps the reader contextualize the text that follows.

This reader found these articles, together with the bibliography, the notes on the contributors, and the appendix of Franciscan Friars of the St. John the Baptist Province who served the Navajo Missions from 1898 to 1921, not only a fascinating study of the Dine and their world, but of the personality and different viewpoints of the early friars. The lens through which they viewed these (to them) strange people was that of an immigrant German Franciscan Province founded mainly to minister to the German-speaking people of Cincinnati. Some of the articles they wrote at the beginning were for the Province's own German-language magazine, Der Sendbote, and are here represented in translation; others are over a century old and contain the attitudes of missionaries of that time going among a people as different from the Germans of Cincinnati as were the Chinese to the same Province's missionaries in China. And yet, because of their openness, their growing love of the Dine, and especially of their determination to learn the Navajo language, these early missionaries became sympathetic and wise ethnographers of the Navajo people and their language and customs. The dates of the various writings themselves reveal how the friars grew in their empathy with and understanding of the Dine. Bahr's book, with its brilliant introduction detailing the friars' contribution to the mutually enriching Franciscan/Navajo confluence, is an illuminating account of the sensitivity of the early Franciscans to the Navajo.