No Turning Back

By Harriett Engleman Foster

This book is the story of one mission school that was established to give the gospel to the Navajo people. Although Native Americans are United States citizens, each tribe has its own language and culture, which has kept them from becoming accepted participants in many English language activities. Our goal was not only to give them the gospel, but also to help them learn English and basic subjects, enabling them to become active citizens in New Mexico and beyond. Most of our eighth grade graduates have finished high school and many have received advanced college degrees.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jan 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490867274

Harriett Engleman Foster

My twin brother and I were born to David and Ora Engleman in rural Dawson County near Overton, Nebraska, in 1928. That same year, my husband, Robert (Bob) Foster, was born to Jesse and Gertrude Foster in rural Logan County near Logan, Nebraska. Our lives were like parallel tracks as we journeyed with our Lord throughout a lifetime of serving Him. After graduating from county high schools, we each taught in rural schools and then went to Omaha Bible Institute, where we met. We were married in 1951 and went to Kearney State Teachers College in Kearney, Nebraska, where we earned BA degrees in education. We were teachers at the Berean Mission Navajo School, which closed in 1992, forty years after it opened in 1952.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-6726-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-6727-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015901080

WestBow Press rev. date: 01/29/2015

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 Our Calling

Chapter 2 Our First Five Years

Chapter 3 Our First Furlough

Chapter 4 Berean Mission, Huerfano Station

Chapter 5 Mission Activities

Chapter 6 Berean Mission Navajo School

Chapter 7 School Activities

Chapter 8 The Girls’ Dormitory

Chapter 9 The High School Dormitory

Chapter 10 High School Graduates and College

Chapter 11 Our Move to Bloomfield

INTRODUCTION

FOR MORE THAN 60 years, Berean Mission, Inc. with headquarters in St Louis, Missouri, had missionaries serving throughout the world and with the Navajo Indian tribe in the United States.

The Navajo Reservation, the largest Indian reservation in the United States, is located in the Four Corners, the only area of the United States of America where the corners of four states, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, converge. Approximately 16,000,000 acres, known as Navajo Country, extends from the Colorado River in Arizona east to Navajo Dam in New Mexico. It borders the Ute Reservation in Utah to the north and extends south to Interstate 40. In the twentieth century, the reservation was a high barren desert with miles of rough trails between Navajo camps and the nearest Trading Post, where the Trader would let the people charge groceries and other supplies until they sold wool after shearing the sheep in April or May each year. Learn more about the reservation in The Enduring Navajo, by Laura Gilpin, Library of Congress, 1968.

The Checkerboard is an area east of the Reservation in New Mexico where some of the land is privately owned, some is allotment land for Navajo families, and some belongs to BLM, the Bureau of Land Management. Berean Mission, Inc. had three stations on the Checkerboard, one station at Thoreau, one at Marianna Lake and another at Huerfano, New Mexico. State Highway 44 was originally a two lane gravel road connecting Farmington, the largest town in the northwest corner of the state, with Albuquerque, the largest city in the state. By 1955, it was a paved two-lane highway. Now it is US Highway 550, a four-lane highway from I-25 at Bernalillo, north of Albuquerque through Bloomfield, New Mexico into Colorado.

Navajo was the only language spoken in many homes. Realizing the need for becoming active citizens, the parents in the home taught their children to respect their own culture but they became aware that the younger generation needed to go to school to learn the white man’s culture and language.

Missiongrams, Navajo Echoes, Huerfano Herald, Foster Facets and Thunderbird 78 were yearbooks, newsletters and/or pamphlets published to keep our constituents informed. They were not copyrighted.

I want to thank Jessica Platero for information on the Navajo culture and Winona Gray for her computer expertise. Without my husband Bob and our daughter Jane Foster Moore’s encouragement to step out of my comfort zone, this book could not have been published. Thanks to all of you.

CHAPTER ONE

Our Calling

BOB AND I HAD backgrounds which were like train tracks paralleling each other. Each of us, the eighth child in the family, was born in a farmhouse in central Nebraska.

My father, David L Engleman and seven of his siblings were born on the Engleman farm at Grand Island, Nebraska. After his father retired, David married Maybelle Black Engleman and took over the family farm. When she died of scarlet fever, he was left with four young sons. When he married my mother Ora Newtson, a second generation Norwegian immigrant, she became an instant mother to his boys: Leland (11), James (10), Dale (9), and Melvin (4). Two daughters, Renelda and Eleanor were the fifth and sixth of the second generation who were born in the same farm house where their father was born. Several years later when Dale and his wife Madeline moved there, their son Kenneth was a third generation Engleman born on that farm. There is now an Engleman school and an Engleman street named for the family in Grand Island. After they sold the family farm at Grand Island and moved to a farm near Overton, Nebraska, they were surprised when I, as our father’s eighth child, was born nine hours after my twin brother on January 12, 1928.

As the eighth of twelve children Bob was born to Jesse and Gertrude Andre Foster on December 17, 1928, on the Andre family farm at Logan, Nebraska. He and his siblings attended a two room rural school with two teachers and 40 students in all eight grades. He was the only student in his class when he graduated from eighth grade. He passed the Nebraska State Exams, and enrolled at Logan County High School at Gandy, Nebraska in September, 1943. Each year there were a total of about forty students in all four grades. With eleven other classmates