© LeRoy DeJolie

© Dale Tsosie

© LeRoy DeJolie

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Robinson: Has there been anything that surprised you here, in addition to what you just said?

Tobias: I'm surprised by the extent of contemporary humor among the Navajo. They have a great sense of humor that manifests itself in almost everything. You look around the Navajo Fair, you're really looking around the greatest picnic in America. Everyone is having a blast. So often when you drive across America and you enter Native American lands, you're likely to have the odd encounter with an Indian, and you know it because they look Indian and have a long pony tail. And I think that a lot of Americans — much more so than Europeans — a lot of Americans are immediately on guard around a Native American. There's a reticence borne of the obviously hysterical trauma on both sides of the uneasy relationship. And there is the sense of poignant melancholy that infuses what we know to be a very traumatic history. And so we're reticent and we're even ashamed, and we tend to address a Native American with a degree of sobriety that on one hand is altogether appropriate, but we miss, that the Native American, I think universally, has a zest for life, a passion for life, a joy in living that they've demonstrated in their art forms and their interactions and their family gatherings and in a picnic like what we've just experienced, that is so contagious and phenomenal, that you have a whole different insight into the Native American.

I found the overall tenor of the Navajo Fair spectacular. And, as a filmmaker, an orgy of colors and sounds and sequences and drama, and the faces passing by, and the carousel of light that just is unstoppable. To me, it kept reminding me of areas of West Africa and South Asia where you point the camera anywhere and you get something that's fascinating — whether it's the light, the dust, not to mention the colorful costumes, the dance, the laughing. The elders who are out in the sun so much here, and spend very little of their life under fancy face creams, the weather-beaten texture of their skin reveals such humanity and such experience and such endurance and character, that you just fall swoon to it. And to see LeRoy guiding his participants through that passion play of humanity, and to have the privilege of following him and his group with a camera, is just sheer joy and wonderment.

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