Online Curriculum for grades 7 - 12
Online Curriculum for grades 9 - 12
SYNOPSIS
Official Sundance
Film Festival 2000 selection, The Return of Navajo Boy, chronicles
an extraordinary chain of events, beginning with the appearance
of a 1950s film reel, which lead to the return of a long lost
brother to his Navajo family.
Living for more
than six decades in Monument Valley, Utah the Cly family has
an extraordinary history in pictures. Since the1930's, family
members have appeared as unidentified subjects in countless
photographs and films shot in Monument Valley including various
postcards, Hollywood Westerns and a rare home-movie by legendary
director John Ford. But it is the sudden appearance of a rarely
seen vintage film that affects their lives the most.
In 1997 a white
man identifying himself as Bill Kennedy from Chicago showed
up in Monument Valley with a silent film called "Navajo Boy"
which he says his late father produced in the 1950s. Seeking
to understand his father's work on the Navajo Reservation, Kennedy
returns the film to the people in it. When Cly family matriarch,
Elsie Mae Cly Begay, watches the film she is amused to see herself
as a young girl and delights in identifying other members of
her family. Elsie recognizes her late mother in the old film
as well as her infant brother, John Wayne Cly, who was adopted
by white missionaries in the 1950s and never heard from again.
With the return
of "Navajo Boy," Elsie seizes the opportunity to tell her family's
story for the first time, offering a unique perspective to the
history of the American west. Using a variety of still photos
and moving images from the 40s and 50s and telling their family
story in their own voices, the Clys shed light on the Native
side of picture making and uranium mining in Monument Valley.
When the long lost
brother, John Wayne Cly, learns about the return of "Navajo
Boy" in a New Mexico newspaper, he contacts the Clys in hopes
that they are his family. As he tells his side of the story
The Return of Navajo Boy takes on a literal tone, setting in
motion John Wayne's unforgettable return to his blood brothers
and sisters in an emotional reunion in Monument Valley.
This unique Sundance
Film Festival 2000 selection weaves together all the different
threads of the Cly family story, narrated by Elsie's son Lorenzo
Begay. Through this inside narrative of the Cly's inspirational
saga, The Return of Navajo Boy gives new meaning to old pictures
and performs a healing miracle of its own.
