The Sweet Smell of Home: The Life and Art of Leonard F. Chana (review)

Among the many possible functions of art are to encode memories and to aid healing. Sometimes, as in the work of Leonard Chana, those functions are interconnected, so that both must be considered closely to understand what is being presented in the art at hand. The Sweet Smell of Home uses the artist's words to tell his own story of loss and recovery; it mingles cultural and personal levels of lived experience in an account of social change, alcohol addiction, and creative regeneration. The story unfolds in episodic, sometimes digressive fashion via Chana's explanations of his artwork. More than seventy images (both black-and-white and color) supplement his narrative, the book's main text, prefaced by two forewords and two introductory essays, one by the collaborating anthropologist who recorded and transcribed his story and one by the artist's wife, who helped complete the project after her husband's death.

Leonard Chana (1950-2004) was a self-taught artist and a member of southern Arizona's Tohono O'odham Nation. His pen-and-ink drawings, featuring stippling, and his brightly colored paintings, mostly acrylics, are famous in the Tucson area, where they have not only been sold as works in their own right but have also been used on cards, posters, and brochures, often for community-based programs. Chana's work first received recognition nationally in 1986, when one of his drawings won a National Congress of American Indians art contest and was reproduced on a poster. More national exposure came through the illustrations he provided for two of Byrd Baylor's books for young adults, Yes Is Better than No (Tucson: Treasure Chest Publications, 1990) and The Way to Make Perfect Mountains: Native American Legends of Sacred Mountains (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 1997). Although these various publications brought his distinct style before the public's eye, he remained a regional figure and is rightly treated as such in this book.

Indeed, Chana's work is deeply rooted in place—the Sonoran Desert—and infused with O'odham imagery and references. The beloved "home" of which its title speaks (a title taken from one of his own favorite paintings, Sweet Smell of Home on My Mind [45]) is not a physical structure but the open reservation land itself. Much of his art depicts traditional activities that he engaged in as a youth but which have changed, even disappeared, in recent decades. In this sense, these paintings are memory paintings (a term not used by Chana or his coauthors): he uses these works to preserve his memories—to record, as he says, "how it used to be" (38). Prompted by nostalgia, at moments when he "was missing a lot of things that don't happen anymore" (40), the works are then able to reawaken the memories in him or to evoke them in other O'odham. As one woman told him, "It's more like a memory book, and that's what really makes me feel good when I look at your pictures . . . I lived in the city a lot and I rarely go back home. But . . . just to look at it, you can just almost see Home from there" (44).

In contrast to the memory work, other pieces are visionary, designed to inspire himself or others dealing with problems, such as addiction, that threaten to pull them down. In these, he says, he expresses "things I couldn't write down in words. The only way I could do it was picture-wise . . . I didn't know how to do it until one time I had this vision . . . I just started working on it and all this stuff came out" (98-99). Without Chana's explanations, these visionary works would remain inaccessible to anyone other than himself. His commentary also adds greatly to an understanding of his memory...