Red & Delightsome

At reservations all across Arizona last week, Navaho, Zuni, Hopi, Apache and Hualapai Indian children bade farewell to impassive parents, hopped up out of the fiery sun into chartered buses, and rolled off to spend the coming school year with white Mormon families in Utah. Mormons themselves, and ranging in age from seven to 18, the 360 young travelers were the raw material of a signally successful experiment in interracial living and education run by the Relief Society of the Mormon Church.

Hailed by Mormons as living rebuttal of the charge that they discriminate against races whose skins are not what the Book of Mormon calls "white and delightsome," the Utah foster-family plan for Indian children is now in its fifth year. Once away from the hogans and shacks of the reservations, the youngsters go under the stethoscopes of doctors at Provo's Brigham Young University, get any medical treatment they may need (including a long and expensive series of skin grafts for one boy who had fallen into a Navaho campfire). When they move on to their foster homes, the children get room, board, clothes, books, entertainment, and no more chores than the family's own children.

At first the kids from the reservation treat their white "families" and schoolmates with uneasy reserve. Orville Gunther, chairman of the Utah State Tax Commission, recalls that when Deanna Tahbo, a Hopi, first arrived in his home in American Fork five years ago, "our baby could fall down in front of her and yell and cry, and Deanna wouldn't as much as look at her. If there was something wrong with Deanna, we had to guess what it was. She wouldn't say a word." Last year, when Deanna was joined in the Gunther home by her sister Louise, Gunther's only problem was lecturing Deanna about too much lipstick ("I put it to her straight"), and this year Deanna, at 18, will graduate from high school on the honor roll. Twelve-year-old Wanda Cooney, a Hualapai, is proudly described by her white foster mother as "a champion on roller skates, with partners galore."

The social barriers are not completely down. More than 20% of the Indian children have been elected to class or student body offices, but Indian youngsters are apt to show up dateless at dances (the foster parents would like to see the Indian boys and girls balanced off in each school to alleviate this problem). All must go back each summer to the primitive life on the reservation. But many have successfully bridged the two civilizations, plan to return to their tribes as teachers and nurses. Others, including the five who won scholarships at Brigham Young last spring, are moving more completely into the white man's world. Says Mrs. Margaret Keller, who heads the program for the Relief Society: "The Indian youngsters are just like all our children; some succeed, some don't. But the important thing is that they be given an opportunity to succeed."

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