The Chicago Reader ran a comprehensive feature story about “The Return of Navajo Boy” in 2000, including the original impetus to investigate the 1950s documentary, “Navaho Boy”:
Somewhere along the way Robert Kennedy’s copy of Navaho Boy was lost. As an adult Bill pestered his father to find another one, but Robert died in 1980 without ever getting around to it. A year after he died Kennedy called the Brooks Institute and they found a copy for him, but by then he had forgotten much of his father’s narration. For several years he sat on the tape promising himself he’d do something with it. “I wanted to try and get some sound back to it,” he says. “Get some information on it and give it to my kids to tell them their grandfather did it, and just kind of leave it with our family.” He knew next to nothing about the people in the film or what their ceremony meant.
Read the full 22 page article here, as a PDF. Reprinted with permission.
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