Farmington, New Mexico Caught Between Earth and Sky

"It was the medicine men," the teacher tells the class, "who came up with the religious beliefs that are the backbone of our Navajo culture." Lloyd | House speaks in a gravelly voice, has a boxer's much broken nose and wears a traditional turquoise necklace around his neck. "The medicine man we are talking about today was called Naahwiitbiihi -- which means the 'man who always wins.' Sounds like Frank Sinatra, doesn't it?" he says, and chuckles.

The high school students, all Navajos, all shy and soft-spoken, all wearing high-topped sneakers and distressed blue jeans, don't seem to know or care who Ol' Blue Eyes is. On this spring day they are more interested in completing their model hogans, the round, age-old Navajo structures whose doorways must always face east, the direction of dawn, the region of all beginnings.

Until last summer, House, a former Marine Corps and All-Service welterweight boxing champion, was one of two instructors in Navajo language and culture at the Navajo Academy in Farmington, N. Mex. This fall there are three, but House is no longer among them. The academy draws its students from the vast, mostly desolate Navajo reservation next to this charm-free oil-and-gas town. The school has a Navajo headmaster and an all-Navajo board of trustees. It is the only Native American college-preparatory boarding school in the U.S.

The academy, which will celebrate its 15th anniversary at the end of this school year, has 176 students in grades 9 through 12. Almost all are Navajos -- the Dine, as they call themselves, which means the "People." This year there are also three Anglos, as whites around here are invariably called. Nestled against a high shelf of rock, the school consists of a snug quadrangle of dilapidated buildings on the grounds of a turn-of-the-century Methodist mission. It has a pleasant atmosphere and, if you blur your eyes a bit, looks like a down-at-the-heels New England prep school transferred to a bleak section of the Southwest.

The school was started in 1976 at the time when the Indian Self- Determination Act was passed, when the Federal Government was encouraging Native Americans to take their education into their own hands. Until the 1970s, the dominant principle of the Bureau of Indian Affairs was assimilation, and the government was content to let Navajo culture wither away and die.

Although the U.S. government has had a trust responsibility since 1868 to provide for Navajo education, it has done a sorry job. Native Americans in general, and Navajos in particular, have one of the nation's highest rates of illiteracy and high school delinquency. The average Navajo adult has received * only five years of schooling. Today half the Navajos on the reservation are under the age of 20, and perhaps a quarter of those teenagers are not in school. A third of all high school-age Native Americans are classified as educationally handicapped.

From the start, the academy sought to provide a supportive environment for Navajos, in contrast to public schools, where they were routinely treated as second-class students. But beyond that, according to headmaster Samuel Billison, the academy had a special mission: to educate young and gifted Navajos to be able to survive in the wider culture without losing their own. The school aimed to create a generation of Indian leaders who would understand the outside world but not envy it.