After experiencing the new photography/audio documentary "A Gesture of Kinship" at the Utah Museum of Natural History, some visitors may confess to suffering a mild cultural concussion.

The insights of a select group of young adult Navajos speak convincingly to the power and continuity of a Navajo way of life.

The genesis of the show goes back to 1978 in Montezuma Creek, Utah. Photographer Bruce Hucko, then 24, had just completed a children's photographic workshop for Navajo youths and didn't want to return to his regular job in Salt Lake City. Hucko asked the school's principal if he knew of any jobs in the area, and the principal said the kindergarten teacher needed a classroom aide. "I took the job," said Hucko. "My first day was National Native American Indian Day, Sept. 28, 1978, and I stayed for 10 years."

For the first year, he lodged with the kindergarten teacher's mother in her Hogan. "They were nice to me," he said. "I kind of assumed I wasn't even among, you know, Navajo people. It was like living with a bunch of great neighbors."

During his time in Montezuma Creek, teaching photography, creative writing and art to the children, Hucko took pictures of his students — more than 6,000 pictures.

"After school and on weekends," he said, "we'd go out photographing. I had some old cameras that I gave to the kids and taught them how to use. I had a darkroom in my little trailer, and after I gave them a roll of film, we'd go out and take pictures."

While the children hiked around the reservation, occasionally snapping a photograph, Hucko photographed them.

Years later, while perusing the images he'd taken of the Navajo children, Hucko came up with an idea for a photographic follow-up. "That's when I called Donna Deyhle," he said. Deyhle, a friend and professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, eventually collaborated with Hucko on the project.

"As Donna and I talked, we decided there was a neat opportunity to kind of get a cross-sectional view of what's going on in the minds of young Navajo adults."

"I think what Bruce and I really wanted to do," Deyhle said, "was break up some of the stereotypes people have of who Navajo people are today." According to Deyhle, they wanted to show the complexity of the Navajo identity and that young Navajos are still drawn to the landscape and life on the reservation.

"As with lots of other people," she said, "young Navajos are struggling with traditions, languages and maintaining the richness of the past intermixed with the exciting potential of the future."

According to Hucko, things are really changing in Montezuma. "It's like any other town on the reservation; there's tradition, there's contemporary stuff, there's progressive stuff, and there's oil influence."

When he took the photographs, Hucko was not trying to document the Navajo culture per se. "But now," he said, "with the old photos serving as memory devices, the kids were able to go back and recall those times. That's part of what the interview was, having them tell their stories, what they remember about growing up and how things were then and how they are now."

"What it means to be Navajo is different today than it was yesterday," said Deyhle. "But it is still a vital way of being, and it's going to be passed on in different ways even more so to their kids."

"A Gesture of Kinship," which runs through Jan. 15, 2006, contains 17 handsomely framed photograph montages, each 29-by-22-inches in size. "The background photo is color, taken recently in what I call each subject's back yard, the area around their house," said Hucko. Over each color landscape, Hucko mortised three to five black-and-white photographs — from the past and present — along with superimposed text taken from the interviews conducted by him and Deyhle.

With the photographs and the audio presentation of the interviews playing continuously in the background, the museum has an impressive, insightful and informative exhibition that will influence many visitors to reconsider what it means to be a Navajo.

If you go

What: A Gesture of Kinship

Where: Utah Museum of Natural History, University of Utah

Gallery hours: Monday-Saturday, 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Sunday, noon-5 p.m.; closed holidays; First Monday each month, 9:30 a.m.-8 p.m.

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Cost: Adults, $6; senior citizens/children, $3.50; first Monday each month, free

Phone: 581-6927

Web:www.umnh.utah.edu


E-mail: gag@desnews.com

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