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Walking in Beauty, the Heart of the Navajo with Thomas Davis

One of the most powerful Navajo prayers is this chant:

With beauty before me may I walk
With beauty behind me may I walk
With beauty above me may I walk
With beauty all around me,
may I walk.     

This concept of beauty, within and without, is central to the Navajo conception of life and the universe.  As the earth faces an ever-increasing array of challenges with humankind separated from the natural world as the twin ideas of bigness and the importance of greed and choice at the center of American decision-making, Native American communities have a lot to say about the culture and values that are important to rediscover if balance, another central tribal idea, is to be brought back to the earth.

Thomas Davis helped found the College of the Menominee Nation with Dr. Verna Fowler and was a leader in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education and supercomputing.  During his years in education, he helped found national and international organizations, including the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium, that have affected the lives of American Indians and indigenous peoples from around the world. He is married to the poet and artist Ethel Mortenson Davis. He is an active published novelist and poet.

Davis’s latest book is Apples for the Wild Stallion, a novel about a teenager with nonverbal autism who one night sees a white wild stallion in the moonlight that changes a life that doesn’t welcome change. He is also the author of the Edna Ferber Fiction Award winning novel, In the Unsettled Homeland of Dreams, published in 2019.  His 2020 book of poetry, Meditation on Ceremonies of Beginnings, the Tribal College and World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Poems, was published by Tribal College Press and named an Outstanding Book of Poetry by a Wisconsin Poet.  Other books that have been published include:  Sustaining the Forest, the People, and the Spirit (2000); Salt Bear, a children’s novel (2012), Inside the Blowholes  (2012); The Alkali Cliffs, and two formal epic, book-length, poems, The Weirding Storm, A Dragon Epic (2017) and An American Spirit, An American Epic (2019).

Service Leader: Donna Johnson   Music: Carol Boyd