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Reviewed by:
  • To Walk in Beauty: A Navajo Family's Journey Home
  • Jeff Berglund
Stacia Spragg-Braude . To Walk in Beauty: A Navajo Family's Journey Home. Afterword by N. Scott Momaday. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2009. 200 pp. Cloth, $45.00.

A former photographer for the Albuquerque Tribune, author Stacia Spragg-Braude has assembled an intimate portrait of one family's continuing effort to maintain their ties to Navajo cultural traditions. The author first came to know the Goldtooth and Mary Begay family when on assignment for a story on the successful reintroduction of the culturally vital Churro sheep in Jeddito, Arizona. After the Long Walk and in the decades subsequent to the federal government's livestock reduction program, Churro sheep were virtually eradicated. Readers looking for an in-depth history of Navajo history and sheep would be advised to look at Marsha L. Weisiger's Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country (2009), but readers interested in glimpsing emotionally resonant moments of familial and cultural resilience will want to spend time poring over the eighty-one black-and-white photographs Spragg-Braude has culled from her archives.

Spragg-Braude's photographs from 1997 to 2007 document the everyday lives and special occasions of the extended Begay family and the ways that Churro sheep provide a sustaining link to cultural values. The book's epigraph by Sharon Begay, a daughter of Goldtooth and Mary ("I was always afraid of being Navajo"), provides one narrative thread for this seemingly random assortment of family portraits. It is easy to see that the various family members find many ways of being Navajo, whether they are making "under the wind" bread; participating in several young relatives' Kinaaldas; preparing for a Blessingway ceremony; herding, shearing, and butchering sheep; blessing a hogan; playing video games with family; grieving the passing of a loved one; break dancing; burying a baby's umbilical cord; or celebrating a baby's first laugh. Sharon's niece, Heather, notes in a later section of the book:

You can't say you want to keep sheep just because it's part of your tradition. . . . You have to want to do it[,] because it's hard work, and you have to have a clear understanding of what you're doing. . . . I think there are people in my generation who will want to and will have the mindset to preserve them. Maybe even myself or my own siblings will want to do that somewhere along the way and have a better understanding of what teachings our grandparents were trying to instill in us.

(158)

This is an engaged process of becoming, a journey over a lifetime for many generations.

One of the clearest orienting principles for Spragg-Braude is her reference to the Blessingway in her introduction and title; in citing a section of the prayer-song [End Page 138] in English, "In Beauty I Walk," at the outset, Spragg-Braude implies that the activities captured in her photographic frames are part of prayer-action, a living version of a lifelong journey leading toward Hozho, or balance, harmony, wisdom in old age, and good health. The book is divided into four sections, following the lines in the English translation of the prayer-song:

With beauty before me I walkWith beauty behind me I walkWith beauty above me I walkWith beauty around me I walk.

(17)

For some reason Spragg-Braude has altered the order of the sections, perhaps to instill a different sense of chronological movement. By the end of section 2, after the death of the family's elders, the chronological direction ebbs and flows with image selections that play off past and present of family members as well as the commentary and insights provided. This leads to confusion at times, but this momentary disorientation leads to rereading of photographs and accompanying captions and statements. (Admittedly, some of the confusion comes from the extended cast of individuals, identified by their first names and sometimes only making brief or intermittent appearances.)

This sometimes-confusion also creates a degree of intimacy and conveys the feeling to readers that they are thumbing through the pages of a family photo album...

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