Photographs by John Running picture the Navajo people in their homes, surrounded by the material and spiritual landscape of their lives. Made possible by two grants, one from the L.J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation and the other from the Weatherhead Foundation, this work is born out of many years of love between No.61 Bennett and the Navajo People.

Bennett, a well known New Mexican author, weaver, and artist, successfully presents insights gained from her devotion to weaving, and through this technical relationship offers patterns of understanding between the traditional Navajo culture and the predominate and surrounding Anglo civilization. The enduring values of traditional Navajo life, so elusive to the Anglo mind, are made accessible through every day stories that illustrate simple but eloquent truths. Through her words we see the Navajo with a clearer focus and a deeper vision.

Noël Bennett is blessed with an unusually beautiful voice. It sings with rhythmic warmth; humor, and mellifluent but penetrating clarity. Its soothing lilt caresses the ear and bears a mesmerizing quality as it imparts the stories and legends she learned as an apprentice weaver on the Navajo Reservation.

For eight years Bennett worked on the Reservation, mastering the technical aspects of Navajo weavers art. She performed every activity associated with the craft - from shearing the sheep to the carding, spinning, and dyeing of the wool. She wove the traditional designs of the imaginative rugs so convincingly that a leading Indian Museum in Arizona thought that one of her first weavings was an authentic Navajo rug, labeling it a "Small Native Dye from Tuba City."

While following the weaver's way and working with the women, Noë1 Bennett heard and learned the philosophical values of traditional Navajo thought. Listening to the weaving legends as she sat patiently at her vertical loom, she came to understand the subtle psychological modes by which Navajo culture has survived and coped in its thousand years on the North American continent.

Halo of the Sun addresses some of the techniques used by the Navajo to handle the human condition. The stories reveal a road map to psychological well being. The legends seem a prescription for coping with life's adversities. The wisdom provided in these oral legends are pertinent to human society anywhere.

One story depicts the potential evil of a snake. It is resolved successfully and in such a way as to be a lesson in how to deal creatively with panic and fear. Another story describes friendship, generosity and the Anglo concept of "thank you." The most fascinating legends deal with the power in a name, names by contrast being carelessly tossed about in Anglo culture.

For the Navajo, saying a name aloud calls that thing into being. Therefore, a name is a sacred thing and the Navajo do not use a name lightly. In fact, a Navajo child is given its true name only after Grandfather has observed the baby for a year or two, considering the child's most distinguishable attribute. This trait, in the form of a symbolic Navajo name, like "Never-sleeps" or "Running-Woman," stays with a person for life, to be drawn on as a permanent source of strength and as a connection to one's unchanging essence and ancestry. After all, Grandfather chose the appellation.

"Time is nothing,"' Bennett writes. "But a story is a source of power." To illuminate the significance of the storytelling tradition to the Navajo, Bennett offers a personal and insightful quote by Indian author Leslie Marmon Silko. "I will tell you something about stories," Silko says. "They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have stories."

Noël Bennett grew up in California, receiving a B.A. in Art in 1961 and an M.A. in Education in 1962 from Stanford University. With her former physician-husband, she joined the Public Health Service in 1968 and shortly thereafter moved to the Navajo Reservation in Tuba City, Arizona. Noël, equipped with a cross-cultural heritage (her father was Lebanese and her mother is of diverse multi-ethnic background) and her artistic gifts, found herself in the center of the ancient Navajo Nation. She was determined to learn weaving, but not just "how to" but to understand, in the Navajo way, the entire thinking and feeling of weaving as well.

On reservation Noël found it difficult to find a Navajo weaver willing to teach an Anglo woman. Yet she went about the business of her life - going to the post office for mail, visiting the hospital where her husband worked, hauling clothes to the laundromat, always searching for a weaving teacher. Through her words we feel the rebuffs and resistance she met. We admire her courage.

"No one pitied my clumsiness with the weaving cards. No matter how much difficulty I encountered, no one offered help. No advice. No words at all. Just a soft easy giggle occasionally rippling around the growing circle. There was nothing to do but continue. Intently. Completely. With singleness of mind."

Noël persisted. She studied the Navajo language. She picked up hitchhikers on reservation in an attempt to learn more. Finally, there was a breakthrough. She found and befriended Tiana Bighorse, a Navajo weaver of great skill and, furthermore, a patient teacher.

From then on Noël Bennett immersed herself in the Navajo way of life. She made her own corn pollen pouch out of deer skin. tanning the leather herself. She sat at healing ceremonies. She cooked and ate in the Navajo tradition. Lamb, prepared in the Lebanese way, was a favorite dish in her childhood home.

"I loved the food," Noël said. "Some of the doctors and their wives were appalled by it. They wouldn't eat the mutton or fry-bread. If it was cooked, I ate it," Noël said. "I though it was nice they even offered me any."

She participated in traditional,Navajo ceremonies, sitting long hours on the dirt floor of hogans. But by weaving she entered Navajo life. She learned when to be silent. She learned how to ask questions without giving offense. She came to understand the Navajo sense of time. The skeins of plant-dyed yarn yielded much more than artful weavings. The woolen fibers carried her into the spiritual fabric of the Navajo way.

"It would be easy to misinterpret the Navajo form of body language," Noël said. "They say, if you don't know what to do, do nothing. Put your feet together, stand up straight and cross your arms. That is the position of not breaking any taboos. We, as Anglos, can interpret that as hostility, but they are just being quiet, patient and even shy. You cannot apply from our culture what you think is true to the Navajo."

As Noël Bennett learned the ways and people came to trust her, they knew she was not simply taking their knowledge; they felt her love and respect for their culture. And then, through her writings, she was to share understanding between her adopted culture and the American one.

Halo of the Sun is about the love of a people, art, weavings, customs, food, and ceremonies. Each story illuminates a specific value of classical Navajo culture. They are rendered for Anglo understanding because Noël Bennett is an Anglo who adopted Navajo culture with her heart. And now she presents these stories for readers outside the Navajo culture. Ultimately, these legends are a gift from the Navajo people. Just as the Wampanoag tribe taught the Pilgrims how to survive the physical hardships of 1620 - by planting maize and beans, by capturing turkeys, and harvesting cranberries - so the Navajo teach ageless wisdom in a time of shifting values, family upheavals, and psychological crisis. The life of the Navajo has never drifted from the land. Consequently, their values have remained constant and tied to the natural world of the elements.

Noël Bennett renders the Navajo legends in an honest, straightforward style while retaining the poetry of the mystical Navajo voice. Halo of the Sun is a joyous book, written well, replete with sadness and humor, but rich in rare sagacity.

"Return to your loom. Resume your work. Spin your web of wool. And as you weave and as you work, Life's Truths will come to you." So say the Navajo Holy Ones in Halo of the Sun.