The Blossoming Tells Success Stories of Indian Placement Program
By Laurie Williams Sowby
OREM, UTAH – Growing up in the small town of Shumway, Ariz., in the 1930s and Gallup, New Mexico, during the 1940s, Dale Shumway had many friends who were Native Americans. When it was time to serve a mission, Shumway (whose family had since moved to Provo, Utah) expressed his desire to follow in the footsteps of his great-great-grandfather who had served among the Choctaws in Georgia and Oklahoma. He was called to the Southwest Indian Mission, headquartered in Gallup.
“I wasn’t the best missionary there,” he says, looking back 50 years, “but no one enjoyed the experience and the people more than I did.”
He enjoyed them so much, in fact, that he spent his life working with them, first as advisor to BYU’s Indian students for two years, then in the Indian Placement Program of LDS Social Services for the next 31. After retirement, he and his wife Margene served a mission to Nairobi, Kenya, but soon after their return resumed their activity with the Placement Program.
Heading up a reunion of former Indian Placement practitioners, they found themselves reminiscing about past experiences as they visited with loved co-workers and shared spiritual experiences and success stories. They had witnessed the fulfillment of D&C 49:24, “…and the Lamanites shall blossom as the rose.”
They were impressed that “now is the time to write about the amazing events and choice peoples involved in this important chapter of Church history.”
So the Shumways got busy gathering stories, interviewing former students in the program, and putting together The Blossoming, an inspiring book detailing the genesis of the Indian Placement Program (officially begun in 1954) and contrasting the past and present lives of many of its participants. The Shumways served as co-editors of the 277-page book, published in 2002 by Granite.
They interviewed 26 Lamanite families where either one or both parents had been “placement students,” describing their early years on the reservation (mostly Navajo), their gospel conversion, their culture shock, and the ups and downs in the dynamics of LDS foster care. Stories tell of their education, marriages, children, world of work and Church activity.
Highlights include Helen John, the first “placement” student; Edward Clark, a Lumbee from North Carolina; Anna Begay, daughter of a medicine man who lived with the Leland and Thelma Priday family in American Fork, Utah; and Frankie Gilmore and DuWaine Boone, who are now both serving as stake presidents on the Navajo Reservation.
The book is a tribute to the families who took them in as well as to the young people whose lives were changed by their involvement in the Indian Placement Program.
