A Chance Encounter - Sculptor Gary Prazen Meets John Wayne

Teresa and Curtis Frazier’s 10-year-old son is in the local grocery store looking for his mother. His search proves more challenging than anticipated. “Mom,” he says, when he finally finds her, “I came in here looking for you, but everybody looks just like you.”

Teresa smiles as she hears Curtis recount that incident of 17 years ago shortly after they moved from American Fork (where Teresa lived 36 years) to Blanding, Utah. Their son Shea, a young Navajo boy, found himself thrust into a world in which those of his Native American culture were all at once more common than not. Ironically, it was this blending moment that drove home just how distinct they were as a family, just how different they once were without fully realizing it.

“It’s funny because I don’t see color,” Teresa says. “I don’t ever see that I am a different color or that my boys are a different color, that is, until I look at a picture of us and then: ‘oh my gosh, we’re like brown!’” she laughs. “It just does not even occur to me.” 

Teresa and Curtis are not interested in making skin color an issue in their lives. They are proud of their Navajo heritage, but struggle to understand the language. They are equally proud of their adopted Anglo-American heritage, but are not particularly keen on its maniacal aspects. They hold dear the Western-world education they have received, but remain curious students of the cultural traditions it supplanted. Like the symmetry in a Navajo rug, they found themselves seeking greater balance in their lives that eventually brought them to Blanding -- a place of European pioneer stock with a campus mostly made up of Native Americans, prominently Navajo.

They are employed at Utah State University Eastern, Blanding. Curtis is in the technology and engineering education department over the engineering portion of the college’s science, technology, engineering and math initiative. He also teaches mathematics. Teresa is director of the campus Upward Bound program. Both specialize in helping students qualify and succeed in college once enrolled. They are engaged in occupations in which they blend with the students and in a cause that perfectly meshes with their personal belief that education is the great equalizer. 

“I know we are role models,” Curtis says. “We want Native students to know that they can achieve success and that nothing is given, but earned. I think that’s the message that we provide.” 

Part of that success story includes their college degrees (a bachelor’s for Teresa in elementary education and a master’s in education leadership; a BA in engineering and master’s in math for Curtis), a comfortable home, four-flourishing sons and pathways of opportunity stretching before them. 

Their oldest, Curtis (Bud), a highly regarded ICU nurse at Mountain View Hospital in Lehi, completed a bachelor’s of nursing degree from the University of Utah; their second-born, Tyler, graduated in 2006 from Utah Valley University with a bachelor’s degree in business leadership. He works for Service Titan, a Los Angeles marketing firm.

Their third child, Travis, earned a bachelor’s degree in French from Brigham Young University and earned a certification as a nursing assistant and medical assistant. He attends the University of New Mexico School of Medicine after being accepted to three other medical schools, where he is studying to become a general practitioner. Their youngest, Shea, graduated with his associate of science in 2015 from the Blanding campus. His interest is in music. All four boys are Blanding campus alumni. 

The “nothing is given, everything is earned” part of their message speaks to sacrifices. It was a sacrifice for the Fraziers to give up a generous six-figure annual income to move to Blanding, but that’s only the half of it. The other half “their beginnings” on the reservation and transition into “white culture” makes it all the more remarkable. They say the reservation looks much the same as when they left as children, but now it feels entirely different to them. While they may look the part, they can’t act it. Not for a lack of trying, but for a lack of mannerisms, intonations and humor (yes, humor) that only comes by living on the reservation. They both get that and appreciate it when they see it. These are precious moments of self-realization, “like gazing into a mirror and seeing who you are even though you might not recognize the voice if it spoke back to you.”

Today, they work on a college campus with a core mission of serving the underserved, “a particularly important focus to them because only one percent of Native Americans receive a college degree each year.” This, despite the fact that the one factor that does the most to increase the odds of employment for Native Americans is higher education. 

“American Indians with advanced degrees have seven times the odds of American Indians with less than a high school education,” according to Algernon Austin in a Dec. 17, 2013, report, “Native Americans and Jobs: The Challenge and the Promise.”

Between two worlds

The Fraziers prove that higher education increases the probability of success and their presence in Blanding is a promise to help others succeed. It is the Golden Rule in Judeo-Christian terms. For Navajos, it’s more The Blessing Way, part of a sacred ceremony that espouses harmony and equilibrium. 

Among the Blanding Navajo students acutely aware of living in such balance, they refer to it as giving back to their people. The conversation usually turns to how they hope to eventually return to the reservation to put their skills to good use. It is a theme in their dialogue that runs like a thread through Teresa’s signature turquoise jewelry.

“It’s one of the enduring qualities of being a Navajo,” Curtis says. It’s a homing call, of sorts. 

Curtis and Teresa will tell you their move to Blanding was because they needed to get out of the traffic jams. But it is not a coincidence that they moved to within a 30-minute drive of the reservation and to a county where 50.4 percent of its 14,746 population is Native American. They needed to be there, Teresa says, even though at first they were not quite sure why. They especially had their doubts when they saw how challenging it was for their boys to move from an area in which they looked different from their friends, but felt the same as them, to a novel place in which they looked the same as many of their new friends, but felt different from them. “I feel like our kids have missed out,” Teresa says. “I feel like they missed that part … they have tried to learn the Navajo language and they tried to be more in tune with their grandma, who still weaves rugs … I wish they would have had more of that. I think that would have helped them a lot. They had such a difficult time going from one world to another world that I do think they missed out on that.”

She recounts an incident when Travis was in middle school. One day after class he walked into a friendly snowball fight between his friends from church and his Navajo-school friends. “When they spotted Travis, both sides began yelling ‘come over here, Travis.’ ‘No! Come over here!’ And Travis was like: ‘I didn’t even know where to go.’”

Their church was one place they knew they could go to escape the dissonance. It provided comforting familiarity in their new surroundings. They were both raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Unique to the Mormon faith is its scriptural ties to Native Americans that refers to them as “Lamanites” in the Book of Mormon.

The LDS Church has always felt an obligation to care for Native Americans. One way to do this was to provide social and educational opportunities that led to the establishment of the Indian Placement Program in 1954. The unique program peaked in the 1970s and ended in the 1990s, due to increased opportunities for schooling on the reservation, according to Genevieve De Hoyos in a 1992 publication, “Indian Student Placement Services.”

In all, more than 70,000 young Native Americans participated in the placement program. Collectively, they walked away with significantly higher educational attainments than those who did not participate, according to Bruce A. Chadwick and Thomas Garrow writing in the “1992 Encyclopedia of Mormonism.”

Curtis and Teresa both attest to this. They wonder where they would be today without the education and social opportunities afforded them through the LDS Placement Program and its members.

From place to placement

Curtis says he thinks the LDS Church achieved amply its objective of providing opportunities that were not readily available on the reservation at the time. Indirectly, the program also ensured these children were well-fed and clothed, something he knows was a serious concern for his mother. He says it was likely her reason for sending him (fifth of nine children) to the Sanostee Boarding School in Shiprock, New Mexico, at the tender age of 6, and further impetus for her, who by then was a young widow, to send him at 9 to Trenton, Utah, to be on the placement program.

It was not a traumatic experience for Curtis, despite his young age, maybe because he got to ride on the bus with his two older sisters bound for Ogden where their placement families were waiting for them. Curtis, easy-going by nature, quickly adapted to his new rural surroundings. Even though he was farther from home than he had ever been, he says he was much happier to be on the dairy farm than be on the reservation stuck in a boarding school.

“Boarding school was loneliness and isolation because of a separation from parents at an early age,” he says. “My foster parents provided a safe and healthy home for me, where I was valued as an individual. Of course, there was a period of adjustment, but I was a quick learner.” His foster parents, the late LeLand and Clara Cottle, were Cache Valley mainstays and a new staying power in the life of a young Curtis. He wasn’t their first placement student though. His oldest brother, Herb, had already lived in the Cottle home three years, a stay cut short by the sudden death of their father during his sophomore year in high school. Curtis came along a year later. Herb would eventually go on to earn a doctorate in education.

Typically, placement students lived with their LDS families for the school year and would go back to the reservation for the summer. Many (from 8-years-old and up) would return to their foster homes year after year until graduating from high school.

For Teresa, it was different. She was 4 when she was sent to live with the Williamson family in American Fork, Utah. She was too young to be on the Placement Program, so Junior and Gladys Williamson took her in as their foster daughter. And unlike placement students who would go home for the summer, Teresa would stay year-round.

“So I went into this new home in American Fork and it was traumatizing to me, she says. “I was 4 years old and I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just left in this home and I remember crying and crying. My foster mom would later tell me that she had to finally buy a radio to put by my bed and so ….” As Teresa reflects on that time, tears well in her eyes and the room becomes still. “My mom was … um … she was just busy, she just…” She stops again and takes a deep breath as she dabs tears from her eyes. “My foster parents were my mom and dad.”

She would not return to the reservation again until she was 11 when the Williamson family drove her down for a short visit. Now, as they look back on those long separations, they better appreciate how much their birth parents had given up to let them go. If the tables were turned, Teresa says it is a sacrifice she would never make with her own children.

“Because we didn’t live on the reservation, it created an isolation betweenus and our families,” Curtis says. “I remember when we would go to my mom’s place and she would say, ‘I wish more of my kids would come and visit me, you know? I’m lonely; there’s nobody here.’”

It was not until Teresa was in high school that she would actually go and stay with her mom for extended periods. Curtis says that it was during those times that Teresa’s foster parents were apprehensive about those lengthier reservation stays. Once, after Teresa had been away for more than four days, they became so anxious about her that they drove down and picked her up.

Teresa chuckles as she recalls that incident. “They were scared that I was going to be hurt and they were scared, I think, of the poverty. I don’t know.”

Curtis says it is an example of how wholeheartedly the Williamson family had taken Teresa into their lives and hearts. “And you know, the thing is, it extends to our kids because they look at Junior and Gladys as their grandma and grandpa,” Curtis says. “I don’t know how many times we’ve been to restaurants where our sons would say something like ‘hey grandpa, pass me the salt’ and the waitress would give a double take. I remember one even asking, ‘now how are you related?’”

This story is played out many times over across both families. On Curtis’s side, eight of his nine brothers and sisters were on the placement program. While all of them still consider the reservation to be their traditional home, all remain scattered and off the reservation save for one sister who recently returned.

His two youngest brothers were eventually put in the same foster home in Huntsville, Utah, “and to this day, though they are no longer living with them, they are considered regular members of the family,” he says. “All my brothers and sisters (and all but three with college degrees) are having their own kids and grandkids and when we get together for holidays, it’s with our foster families, not with each other.”

That likely has amounted to a great deal of double takes over the years. But it is not turning heads that matter to either of them. It is turning minds, through education, that makes up for the sacrifice of family and culture they missed along the way.

Go my son

The Fraziers credit education for helping to shape the people they are today and bundled into that is their LDS Church upbringing and its emphasis on higher education. No surprise that both found themselves at Brigham Young University in the early ‘80s, but what was a little surprising was how many other Native Americans who were also there. Native American enrollment at BYU was peaking. In all, more than 500 Indian students, mostly LDS, from 71 tribes were there each year of the 1970s, according to Chadwick and Garrow.

Curtis and Teresa felt at home with their mostly Anglo-student peers, but they also formed tight alliances with Native Americans, many of whom participated in clubs and entertainment organizations such as the “Tribe of Many Feathers” (where Curtis first laid eyes on Teresa) and the “Lamanite Generation.” It was not the fervor of the feathers that bonded them as Native Americans, however, as much as it was a shared yearning to earn their feathers for the betterment of their people.

No song captured that sentiment more ably than “Go My Son,” a crowd favorite performed by the Lamanite Generation throughout Utah and many parts of the nation. It was written and performed by two BYU students, Arlene Nofchissey Williams and Carnes Burson, a Navajo and Ute respectively. It begins with a spoken introduction: “Long ago an Indian war chief counseled his people in the way they should walk. He wisely told them that education is the ladder to success and happiness. ‘Go my son, and climb that ladder…’”

The song remains a favorite among many Native Americans to this day and, in recent years, was even included in the repertoire of a short-lived Blanding campus Native American performing group. Teresa says her foster parents especially loved it and played a recording of it often. Maybe because they knew Teresa, whom they loved as their own, was also a beloved daughter of a Navajo mother and father.

“We are kind of unusual and odd,” Teresa says with a grin. “It’s been a good journey. I’ve learned a lot about my people and my culture even though there’s so much more to learn, but just being part of the student’s lives has really been good. It’s taught us a lot.”

If that ladder to success is education, it is also a bridge for Curtis and Teresa between two cultures in the form of unyielding aspirations held for a son and daughter by parents on both sides of the void. “…. From on the ladder of an education, you can see to help your Indian Nation, then reach, my son and lift your people up with you.”

It is a lofty view the Fraziers share. Perhaps that is why, from way up there, the color of a person’s skin is so hard for them to see.

~ John DeVilbiss