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"Is it a big bus? Is it a yellow bus?"Įthel and Wayne, also 36, continuously engage Sierra in conversations like this. Sierra's round brown eyes zoom in on a school bus driving by. That's good for a few minutes, but now it's on to a picture book where Sierra deftly points out all sorts of creatures she has likely never seen anywhere but on a page. Ethel hands her a clipboard with coloring sheets. "I am ready to work now," she tells her mother during a recent car ride through town. She is a child on the move, kinetic like her whirlwind of thick black hair. Sierra was Ethel's and Wayne Chopito's second child, coming five years after brother Nolan. When she was seven months pregnant, Ethel stayed in her grandfather's hogan with a medicine man who prayed and sang over the baby in her womb for four straight days, setting in motion the tangled tapestry of neurons in Sierra's brain and starting her on the path of the Beauty Way. She played soothing cassette tapes of traditional Indian songs and Dr. Ethel spoke often to her unborn child both in English and Navajo. She didn't know at the time that was how they were learning."Įven while still in the womb, Sierra's brain was already weaving.
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She spent a lot of time with them, playing, talking to them. "The way I picture my grandmother, my Shimasini, now is her sitting under the tree with children all around her," said Ethel, a parent educator who teaches other parents early childhood skills. Nurture, teach, stimulate the whole child before birth and through the early years and the brain wires and weaves itself like the finest Navajo rug.Įthel, 36, learned the importance of that by reading college textbooks and by sitting at her grandmother's knee. Most children entering kindergarten in Gallup-McKinley County Public Schools are two years below their expected developmental levels.īut within this impoverishment lays the great richness of Sierra's Navajo and Zuni cultures and a family determined to teach it all to her.Īs it turns out, the traditional way - the Beauty Way, as they call it - is good science. "She is a bright star."īrighter than most children her age in McKinley County, the poorest county in New Mexico and the third poorest in the nation.
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"Sierra attracts people to her," said her mother, Ethel Ellison. Sierra, 4, is a favorite when she comes to visit this rustic family homestead where outhouses are still often the only form of waste management. The cousins are here and so are clan aunts and uncles and elders, come to see each other and her chei, her great-grandfather, who at 77 still herds his flock of 60 sheep and goats each day through the craggy hills of the family's isolated stretch of reservation land 15 miles west of Gallup, N.M. Here's Sierra Chopito with the vast, gritty horizon of juniper and sage and sandstone of the Navajo Nation spread out before her, fixated on a sprinkle of tiny buds like snowflakes on a patch of hard ground. Sierra delights in making her frybread in the shapes of animals.
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Sierra helps her mother roll out dough to make a Navajo favorite - frybread - for a family gathering on the reservation. Sierra Chopito, left, spends much time with cousins, clan aunts and uncles and elders at the family's land on the Navajo reservation 15 miles west of Gallup, N.M. Joline Gutierrez Krueger, Scripps Howard News Service