Lucky, the Navajo singer

Lucky the Navajo Singer was, he thought, forty years old when he dictated his life story in 1940 to doctors Alexander and Dorothea Leighton. Lucky was orphaned twice before he was six or eight years old, first when his mother died, and again on the deaths of his mother's parents. Lucky then spent several formative years with a Navajo elder who was raised in the traditional Navajo way, a man whose wisdom was a resource for the small group of Navajos living in relative isolation southeast of the main Navajo Reservation. As he relates his life story through his great friend and interpreter, Bill Sage, the mature Lucky emerges as a complex human being whose story presents invaluable insight into daily events - both mundane and sacred - at a Navajo community in the 1940s. Griffen has rescued this autobiography in a tribute not only to Lucky, but to the Leightons, who in 1940 were fledgling psychiatrists at the beginning of their cross cultural research. At long last the story of Lucky the Navajo Singer joins the all-too-few Native American life histories.