CHEE AND HIS PONY

A fine, appealing story by the author of Skid. Chee, a Navajo boy from a reservation in Arizona, goes to a white man's school for two years and upon returning home with his grandparents, realizes that he must try to reconcile the old way of life with the strange foreign existence of the school and the ways of the white man he had learned there. Often the ways of life conflict as when he tries to interest his grandparents in sleeping on beds instead of on the floor during their visit to the school, and when he tries to wash every day with the limited water on the reservation. The reactions of the grandparents to life at the school with showers, sewing machines and plays are amusing, but the Indians never lose their essential serenity and dignity. Chee applies some of the white man's knowledge during the summer pasturing of the sheep with his friend Begay, whom he teaches to read, but it is his Indian and knowledge of the outdoors which helps him save the lives of two white men and win his pony. Invaluable as regional and Indian material for supplementary reading. This is also a superb, readable story.