Franc Lynette Johnson

Franc Lynette Johnson was born March 30^th, 1887 in Tunnel City, Wisconsin.  She was named after her father, Frank Lewis Johnson, an architect, who died when she was only three. After his death her mother taught school to support her three young children.  Her mother died when she was twelve, but she inherited a strong sense of self from her mother and continued her education along with her older sister Ella. 

In 1912, eight months after New Mexico attained statehood, Franc came west by rail to teach at the Navajo Indian boarding school in Fort Defiance, Arizona.  She earned $25 a month and lived and ate with the students in the dormitory. Two years later she married Arthur Newcomb, a clerk at the trading post, and became known as “the Indian trader’s wife. Eventually she was recognized within academic circles as a scholar and writer on the Navajo way of life.  Franc befriended Hosteen Klah, a medicine man, and he invited her to attend his healing ceremonies, and she became the first white person to record Navajo symbolism. Her documentation of Navajo art and culture, writing, lecturing, or reproducing ritual sandpaintings onto two-dimensional painted surface, made a significant impact of Southwestern studies.

During the flu epidemic of 1920, when one tenth of the Navajo population died, she used her knowledge of the Navajo religion and healing ceremonies becoming a respected medicine woman.  She was inducted into the tribe, the first white woman to have such an honor bestowed on her, and given the name Atsay Ashon.

Franc wrote numerous books about the Navajo.  She and her friend Mary Wheelwright established the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe.  All of her watercolor re-creations of sand paintings – almost 1,000 in all – plus her pottery and basket collection were donated to the Museum.