'It's up to you': Banquet celebrates graduates with roots in the Ramah Navajo community

“Be powerful. If it’s to be, it’s up to you.”

That’s the message Bessie Randolph, 82, a founding member of the Ramah Navajo School Board, delivered Thursday during a midday banquet honoring recent high school and college graduates with roots in the Ramah Navajo community.

But Randolph’s address, delivered primarily in her native Navajo language, was intended for more than the four students recognized at the banquet. It was aimed at all American Indian students, all American Indian peoples. It was a call to take control of your own life.

And it echoed the triumph of the Ramah Navajo community that went to Washington in 1970, and through won’t-back-down determination won the right to start the country’s first Indian-controlled school, the Pine Hill Schools on the Ramah Navajo Indian Reservation in Cibola County.

Like wildfire

Thursday’s banquet at Albuquerque’s Indian Pueblo Cultural Center acknowledged the academic achievements of:

• Taylor Belone, graduate of Pine Hill High School, who is entering Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.
• Victor Beck Jr., a graduate of Brown University.
• Manson Largo, Ramah High School graduate, who has enrolled at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.
• John T. Begay, a Belen High graduate who is enrolled at New Mexico State University.

Only Belone and Beck attended Thursday’s banquet. Largo was going through orientation at IAIA, and Begay was taking final exams at NMSU.

Beverly Coho, 73, Randolph’s sister, has a career history that spans work with the Navajo Nation, the Veterans Administration, the Ramah Navajo School Board and the state of New Mexico.

She spoke of how the Navajo people of Ramah stood up to a system that took their children away from home and put them in boarding schools in other parts of New Mexico; Brigham City, Utah; Riverside, California; and other off-reservation schools.

“The people of Ramah said there has to be a more wholesome way of education,” she said. “It was a small idea that caught on like wildfire.”

It gave Indian children the opportunity to live with their families while attending school.

“They graduated as Indian people, knowing who they are, knowing their treasured heritage,” said Michael P. Gross.

Gross was just out of law school and working with the Ramah Navajo Chapter in 1970. He went to bat for the Ramah Navajos in Washington and in New Mexico to help them get their own school.

“Ramah Navajos started Indian self-determination — the right to run their own federally funded schools, hospitals, construction, everything,” Gross said.

He said he believes they paved the way for the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. That act provides maximum Indian participation in the government and education of the Indian people.

Randolph, who worked in early childhood education, said that Indian-controlled schools are paying off for Indian peoples.

“We got some doctors, lawyers, nurses, people in administration,” she said. “If we didn’t do anything, we would be in a cycle of asking for welfare. Education opens a lot of doors.”

Walk in beauty

Beck, 22, grew up in Phoenix and attended a college preparatory school there. He graduated from Brown, in Providence, Rhode Island, with a degree in sociology in May and is working as an artist’s assistant at a gallery in Santa Fe. He intends to go to graduate school, but he’s not sure where — other than it will probably be somewhere in the West.

“I wanted to come back to a landscape I’m more familiar with,” he said. “Before Rhode Island, I had never lived 20 minutes from an ocean. It was super humid, and in the winter it’s really dark.”

He’s trying to decide between law school and getting a master’s of fine arts in creative writing. He enjoys poetry and screenwriting. If he takes up the latter, he said he wants to write movies about the Indigenous community.

“There is a plethora of complex stories that have not been told,” he said. “My impetus is the stories I have not been seeing.”

Belone, 18, was valedictorian at Pine Hill. She said she enjoyed her education in that small community.

“Everyone in my class felt like family because there was about 20 of us, so there were always familiar faces,” she said.

She was leaving after Thursday’s banquet to pack up and drive to Northern Arizona, where she intends to major in sports medicine.

It’s not difficult to understand her choice of studies when you realize she participated in golf, volleyball, cross-country, track, basketball and softball.

But she said it was only when she got into managing a basketball team that she realized she enjoyed helping people off the court.

“My ultimate goal would be working with pro teams, but I’m thinking of just helping out some college teams,” she said.

One thing she wants to do is provide a model for other American Indian students, show them they need not be stuck in one place, that they can go where they wish and do what they want to do.

She said she takes to heart Bessie Randolph’s encouragement to walk in beauty.

“To me,” she said, “that means to carry myself in a respectable way and being beautiful internally.”