 MANUELITO,
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.
Not for long, of course.
The cousins are here and so are
aunts and uncles and elders, come to see each other and 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.
Sierra, 4, is a favorite when she
comes to visit this rustic family homestead where all but one particle-boarded
home has no electricity, no running water and where outhouses are still
often the only form of waste management.
"Sierra attracts people to
her," said her mother, Ethel Ellison. "She is a bright star."
Brighter than most children her
age in McKinley County, the poorest county in New Mexico and the third
poorest in the nation. Nearly three out of four children in Gallup-McKinley
County Public Schools receive free or reduced lunch. Most children entering
kindergarten are two years below their expected developmental levels.
But within this impoverishment
lays the great richness of Sierra's Navajo and Zuni cultures and a family
determined to teach it all to her.
As it turns out, the traditional
way — the Beauty Way, as they call it — is good science. 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.
Ellison, 36, learned the importance
of that by reading college textbooks and by sitting at her grandmother's
knee.
"The way I picture my grandmother
... now is her sitting under the tree with children all around her,"
said Ellison, a parent educator who teaches other parents early childhood
skills. "That was her happiest moment. She was in tune with the children.
She spent a lot of time with them, playing, talking to them. She didn't
know at the time that was how they were learning."
Even while still in the womb, Sierra's
brain was already weaving. Ellison said she spoke often to her unborn
child both in English and Navajo. She played soothing cassette tapes of
traditional Indian songs and Dr. Seuss ABCs.
When she was seven months pregnant,
Ellison stayed in her grandfather's house, a one-room, six-sided ceremonial
structure — 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.
Sierra, named for her mother's
vision of green mountains during the throes of contractions, was Ellison's
and Wayne Chopito's second child, coming five years after brother, Nolan.
 She
is a child on the move, kinetic like her whirlwind of thick black hair
that never seems completely tamed.
"I am ready to work now,"
she tells her mother during a recent car ride through town. Ellison hands
her a clipboard with coloring sheets. 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.
"This is a crab," she
said.
Sierra's round brown eyes zoom
in on a school bus driving by.
"That's a bus," she shouts.
"What kind of bus?" Ellison
asks. "Is it a big bus? Is it a yellow bus?"
Ellison and Chopito, also 36, continuously
engage Sierra in conversations like this, their words like raindrops in
the 50,000 nerve arroyos that carry sound to Sierra's brain.
"It's important that we keep
talking," Ellison said. "I've talked to her even before she
was born."
Words, sounds, sights, smells,
her family's positive and frequent interactions sparked trillions of brain
connections, called synapses, to form at an astounding rate of 3 billion
a second by the time Sierra was 8 months old.
Because of the attention she received
in her earliest years, her brain is well-woven with such synapses, assuring
her at least the increased potential for a higher IQ and well-being —
all without benefit of financial status or federal assistance.
"You don't have to be rich
to give good modeling," Ellison said.
Sierra's first two years were lived
in low-income housing in Gallup while Ellison studied for her teaching
degree and Chopito worked construction.
By 2, Sierra was trying to read.
"I read 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar'
so much to her when she was littler that she had it memorized and tried
to read it herself," her mother said.
 After
Ellison graduated, the family squeezed into a tiny two-bedroom duplex
perched on a ragged red bluff in the heart of town where trains wail and
rattle by at all hours and quick-pay loan companies clutter like beer
cans along the historic stretch of nearby Route 66, Gallup's main drag.
Inside, though, there is warmth
and love and learning. Mother and daughter sprawl on the floor playing
with a small cast-iron stove. It's a clearance sale purchase from the
local Cracker Barrel and one of the legs is hanging on with glue, but
it's just fine for make-believe.
"I'm making corn," Sierra
announces as she scoops air from a tiny pan.
"How about some tortillas,
too?" her Mom asks.
Sierra moves on to stringing jeweled-colored
beads. Her Mom asks her to count them. Sierra makes it to 15.
"That's very good," her
Mom says. "Now can you count in Navajo?"
Sierra needs a little help but
she does it, her tongue deftly clicking in the cadence of the Navajo.
Later, Daddy and daughter will
share their nightly bowl of rocky road ice cream and Mom will read to
Sierra like always.
"I like to get them books
instead of toys," she said. "You can always make toys out of
mud and sticks or cardboard boxes."
That is what Ellison did as a child
on the reservation where "Sesame Street" and Gameboys were things
she only imagined, if she thought of them at all.
"It's a child's paradise,
if you think about it," she said of the rough-hewn land. "Like
an endless playground."
And so she takes Sierra back there
weekends, spring breaks, summers. Someday soon, maybe next year, Ellison
will ask to begin her own family's home site on an acre of her grandfather's
land.
Her grandmother, the heart and
mind of the clan, is gone now, passed on since January.
"She's in spirit," Sierra
explains with a worldly voice.
She's also in Sierra, weaving.
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