Leonard F. Chana, who chronicled transitional and postmodern Tohono
O’odham culture in bright-colored acrylic paintings and stippled
pen-and-ink drawings, must have inherited his independent streak from
his father, a hard-working reservation entrepreneur during a time when
commercial foods, clothing and other items were becoming more popular
among the O’odham.

In the affecting, beautifully illustrated oral history of the local
artist’s life and work, The Sweet Smell of Home: The Life and Art of
Leonard F. Chana, his distinctive voice is paired with his even
more distinctive art to create a very intimate portrait of Chana, who
died of neurocysticercosis in 2004 at the criminally young age of 54.
Anthropologist Susan Lobo, with the help of Chana’s widow, Barbara
Chana, edited hours of interviews Lobo did with the artist in which he
talked about his art and his life. Lobo and Barbara Chana made a
crucial decision to edit the interviews lightly, and let the artist’s
English-as-a-second-language phraseology and syntax come through.
Chana’s voice, once you get into the beat of it, is mesmerizing, and
you can’t help but turn the page.

Here, he vividly describes what life was like for his father and his
father’s generation, O’odham who hired themselves out to farmers and
ranchers, working long, hard hours with time for little else:

“You have to get up early in the morning to get there by six o’clock
to work all day, and then come back late at night, drop everybody off,
come home, eat and go to sleep. And early the next morning get up and
go again. … Then coming back, somebody would want to stop in town,
and next thing you know, some of them head for the bars right away, so
it’s hard to get them out of the bars to go back home. And tomorrow
we’ll be back again. He (Chana’s father) finally quit, and he started
selling different things like food out of his truck.”

Leonard Chana came of age in the 1950s and ’60s, and thus was able
to watch O’odham culture changing before his eyes. He was a member of a
kind of transitional generation. He remembers attending saguaro wine
ceremonies, eating traditional O’odham food and learning about the past
from the elders. He spoke O’odham as a boy almost exclusively. And yet
he was sent away from home as a teen to California, to an Indian
boarding school. He fell into “drinking and drugging,” and watched as
relatives and friends from his semi-traditional boyhood died young, or
lost themselves in booze and violence.

In his 30s, Chana turned to art. He began the long, hard process of
quitting drinking, and taught himself how to draw and paint. He also
taught himself how to make a living as an artist, selling handmade
cards and paintings depicting O’odham life. Eventually he started
getting noticed. Byrd Baylor asked him to illustrate some of her books;
O’odham and other Native American cultural groups asked him to make
posters. He got famous, and became a kind of community leader and
activist.

His best drawings and paintings are so detailed that, if all earthly
evidence of O’odham culture were to disappear save Chana’s work, it
would certainly be enough to prove to future humans that the O’odham
lived a good life there in that harsh desert land, and that they were a
happy, industrious and wholly adapted people. His work is instantly
charming, depicting cartoon-like (in the sense that they look like
illustrations) elders and scruffy, barefoot kids, always with a puppy
in tow, dancing, playing toka, harvesting saguaro fruit and
generally doing what the O’odham used to do—and still do in some
places. His work is often narrative in its scope, as all great
illustration is.

Unburdened by a long cultural tradition of what an artist is
supposed to do, Chana learned early on that he could hustle his
way into a career. He had no qualms about working for hire, or for
giving the people what they wanted. He learned from his father that a
man with talent and energy could work for himself. Early on he made
Christmas cards and other commercial works depicting O’odham life, and
he felt proud when his customers admitted to framing the cards rather
than sending them.

“I’ve seen so much of the baskets, how we use tools, our houses,
what I could draw back then,” he says in this essential book for anyone
interested in O’odham culture, describing how he first started out as a
professional. “I was just starting to see what I could do. I don’t want
to work for anybody. I don’t want to get up at 7 o’clock and be there
at 8.”

This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.