By Conor Risch

As an intern at the Albuquerque Tribune in 1997, Stacia Spragg-Braude received an assignment to photograph the Begays, a Navajo family who were organizing a festival celebrating Churro sheep, an animal sacred to the Navajo. Spragg-Braude's first trip to the reservation in Southwestern Arizona led to a ten-year project about the Begay family and their struggle to preserve their Navajo culture and pass it along to subsequent generations. Among its other honors, the project was a finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Award in 2006, and earlier this year The Museum of New Mexico Press released Spragg-Braude's book, To Walk In Beauty: A Navajo Family's Journey Home.

After her internship, Spragg-Braude worked a contract year for the Tribune, then tutored at a community college until she was offered a staff position at the newspaper. She won a National Endowment For the Humanities grant in 1999, which allowed her to tour a show of some of her photographs of the Begay family throughout New Mexico.

During her time at the Tribune, she continued visiting and photographing the Begays as a counterpoint to her work for the paper. "It gave me a chance to [have something of my own] without any idea of turning it into anything in particular, which was really freeing when you're working on a staff where you're constantly thinking about giving something form and an end," she explains.

Spragg-Braude traveled to the reservation during her free time. Sometimes she was able to stay only a day. On other trips she would spend weeks or even a month at a time.

Quickly she learned the history of the family, and the story of the Churro sheep, the historic lifeblood of the Navajo population. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, war and political intervention had separated the Navajo from the Churro and reduced the herds. In the 1930s and '40s, during a livestock reduction to prevent over-grazing, the government slaughtered 80 percent of the Churro sheep with little explanation. Mary and Goldtooth Begay, the oldest generation of the family Spragg-Braude photographed, had witnessed the slaughter and suffered heavily from the spiritual and economic loss.

Forty years and much hardship later, through a chance visit to Utah State University in the 1980s, Goldtooth Begay came to know Dr. Lyle McNeal, a researcher and educator, who discovered some of the small number of Churro left freely grazing. McNeal launched the Navajo Sheep Project, which helped Goldtooth and other Navajos restore the Churro population on the reservation, which led to a reestablishment of their culture.

"What drew me to this family was they were really intent on trying to preserve their identity for their kids and to give their kids something of a legacy from their grandparents," recalls Spragg-Braude, "I really felt a universal yearning that a lot of people from all kinds of cultures have, that you hold onto your identity for your kids."

Spragg-Braude viewed herself as a friend with a camera, rather than a documentarian, because the family welcomed her as such. She photographed Goldtooth's passing in 2002 at the age of 105, and Mary's passing at 87 in 2005. When she photographed the births of a new generation of the family in 2006, she began thinking about making the project into a book.

Spragg-Braude had taken notes throughout her time with the family, and she also began recording oral histories. Those stories became the text for To Walk In Beauty, which she relates to a lyrical poem. "How would I write a poem about their lives?" she recalls asking herself as she edited the photographs and text together.

Though the project began without premeditation or a goal in sight, Spragg-Braude says she gained a sense of purpose throughout her time with the family. During a traditional gathering for Goldtooth's 100th birthday, the family sat around a fire and shared their thoughts with each other. "I remember everyone saying, 'We're grateful that you're here photographing this so our children will know what we've done and who we are,'" Spragg-Braude recalls. "At the time I had my own selfish reasons for doing a project, and photojournalists often do that," Spragg-Braude says. "I realized this is something else to somebody else…I'm doing this because of the story and I'm honoring the story in the way that I can tell it."