By Jamie Figueroa

Green, yellow, and red outline three edges of the canvas. The flat expanse of turquoise sky holds a small, distant sun. Red, orange, then yellow—circle inside of circle inside of circle—black thin spokes reaching from its circumference. Above the clouds, above the mountain, is a Divine presence, the largest and most colorful figure. Below, what is life-giving and life-sustaining—corn growing. Kokopellis play their flutes, and a howler monkey, creative protector and guide, smiles from the lower right-hand corner as if more knowing than the human, who stands opposite in the lower left corner. Arms outstretched, the human reaches toward the Divine, a three-lobed hovering presence, feminine in suggestion and all-powerful. A spiral extends up through the top of the human’s head as if an expression of the imagination, a coil of possibility, an antenna giving and picking up signals from the unseen, yet ever-present. From their mouth blooms a pattern of flowers, one simple line of four-petaled prayers aimed at the Divine. The final flower is painted on the Divine as if heard, received.

In The Asking, Dr. Greg Cajete’s (Tewa/Santa Clara Pueblo) painting resembles what he calls “Nuevo Pueblo Mural Style.” To my eyes, it is a meditation on sacred relationships present in the ceremony of creating. Cajete explains, “This figure is thinking a creative thought, is chanting, asking in a prayer form for guidance and for blessings as they begin their path on this journey.”

To many, Cajete is known as a distinguished scholar, philosopher, and educator. Among significant Indigenous thinkers and writers with a legacy of impacting higher education and beyond, he stands alongside noteworthy contemporaries like Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa/White Earth) and Vine Deloria (Lakota/Standing Rock). Cajete’s name is synonymous with Native Science, given his work in the field spanning more than fifty years. Considering his numerous accolades, fellowships, lectures, and presentations both nationally and internationally, an extensive archive of interviews, and his five books, his popularity makes sense. As a former New Mexico Humanities scholar and member of the New Mexico Arts Commission, having spent twenty-one years teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and twenty-five years at the University of New Mexico, it seems nearly everyone has heard of him, and if not, they should.

What is less known and what captivates me—as a novelist, essayist, educator, doctoral candidate focused on creative sovereignty, and former student of Cajete’s—is his equally important decades-long devotion to the process of artmaking.

The images in The Asking are essentialized, simple and direct, uncluttered. Even so, the composition continues to reveal complex layers of meaning. The painting’s symbolism—its elegant meaning—speaks to the core of our existence as humans, our internal nature as creatives, reflected in outer nature. We are not separate from nature; we are nature. We belong to nature, which is creativity in motion, creation ongoing. “There is a timelessness, creation, dissolution, and reawakening—from micro to macro.” Cajete says, “We’re an expression of that, and creativity is a part of this process as well.”

The Asking is the cover of his book, Look to the Mountain (1993). His artwork is also on the cover of Indigenous Community: Rekindling the Teachings of the Seventh Fire (2015). This image depicts a series of eight circles, four inner and four outer. The four inner circles each contain a figure turned to face a different direction: east, south, west, and north. They are chanting, praying. Their words lift from their mouths in a strand of connection to what is beyond us but which we are not separate from. Dressed in brown, red, and white, these Puebloan figures appear against blocks of turquoise that stair-step upward along with the prayers. In the outer four circles, Kokopellis play. Red, green, and yellow curves and swirls indicate an unknown path. Triangles come together to form squares, and ladders climb up and down; both symbols represent purposeful and necessary positions of understanding, allowing us to see from above and below. The eight circles overlay four blocks of color, two red and two blue of varying intensity. All appears to be organized around the center of the canvas, which steadies the movement of this piece; each element reaches in and out simultaneously. “It’s another way of depicting pathway and relationship. Preparation, gathering of ideas, issues, and perspectives,” Cajete says. Both paintings in this “Nuevo Pueblo Mural Style” feel akin to the Mimbres and Mogollon pottery painting where images brilliantly captured the mundane and the mystical.

If we consider Indigenous culture and archaeological sites dating back at least 13,000 years, we realize that alongside all the basic human needs—food (gathering, making, storing, seeds), fire, shelter, protection—are creative objects and images. Across time, global Indigenous cultures reveal the same patterns. This is what we do as humans: we create. This is what we are: creatives. When we forget this essential expression and experience, meaning drains from us, our path feels limited and all turns bleak. Disconnected from the ground we stand on—from this essential truth and meaning that serves as our inner ground of being—we lack a relationship to place and context. Whoever we are, without creative engagement, we drift ungrounded, removed from our capacity to remake and renew. This reduces us to a husk of ourselves, caught on any current the wind threatens to take us. “Place influences you and all your creativity, all your expressions,” Cajete reminds us. “Place and context influence creation.”

Cajete calls himself a “practicing artist but not a professional artist.” He is quick to celebrate artists he knows and admires for their significant contribution to the world. But he notes that professional artists who make their livelihood from art must consider the marketplace. Instead, he has chosen to prioritize his own thoughts and internal motivations. Cajete has done this for decades; in embracing imperfection in each of his pieces—on canvas, in metal, stone, or ceramics—he strives above all else for the process. For many non-artists, the process can be the least appealing part of creating. For those of us who’ve devoted our lives to being creatives, we travel deep into the unknown and are transformed. It’s where we lose sight of what we intended, and no longer in control, we are prone to forcing the repetition of past success. The forms we seek to manifest have their way with us as much as we have with them. The mundane tools we wield—paint, clay, pen, paper—rise to a spiritual experience as what we don’t know is made known through our very own hands. “Let go and become the music and the dance of creation. Embody what you create. Embody what you teach. Embody what you experience, what you encounter,” Cajete shares as we look over his collection of images. “Become the music and dance of creation.”

As an undergraduate, Cajete’s early interest in art was curtailed at New Mexico Highlands University where art classes took a Western approach. There, he experienced critique, a Euro-centric curriculum and worldview, and a hierarchy that made art separate from all else and politicized it. Deterred from studying art in this formal context, Cajete found solace in the natural world and instead chose to focus on biology, then sociology and education. These areas of study came together to further inform his multi-dimensional perspective. Artistic expression became personal and served as the undercurrent that guided him as an educator, scholar, researcher, and leader in higher education:

I’m looking at the idea of creativity as being inherent to human beings and inherent to the natural processes in nature. When you begin to focus on creativity, then you begin to understand its nuances and … it’s beyond art. Art is just one popularized area of creativity, but the creative process is what’s important. To begin to understand, to begin to think about, and to see in yourself that you have many kinds of ways of expressing creativity. Those expressions are just as valid as something like painting.

“He is engaging in art the way our ancestors did before the Europeans arrived,” says Audrey Dreaver (Mistawasis Cree), assistant professor at First Nations University of Canada where she lectures on Indigenous art histories of the Americas and teaches studio art. “Before the European version of art was forced on Indigenous nations,” Dreaver continues, “our ancestors made art for their own reasons. Art used as a means to commodify art and culture that we see today is usually all about the money. By making the art for himself, Cajete is engaging in an Indigenous art practice that has been done for many millennia.”

Writing, dancing, singing, and teaching are all forms of creative expression for Cajete. Often, he will first write in his notebook, paint or sculpt, and engage in traditional singing and dancing, before working on his next book or outlining a lecture. Sometimes, it’s the drawing that reveals a deeper insight into what he is thinking and writing about. He engages in artwork because it is fundamental to his experience of being alive. Central to Indigenous knowledge understanding as articulated in Native philosophy, is this core acknowledgment that creativity is valued as life-giving and life-sustaining. “Art sustains me. In real, tangible ways,” says Cajete.

In looking through Cajete’s art, I appreciate the scope in materials, diversity of expression, and styles. Alabaster heads, sculptures three feet high, acrylic, pencil and pastel portraits—one of a Maasai warrior, one a K’iche’ Madonna, and one an Andean flute player—display Cajete’s interest in different cultures and tribal groups, some of whom visited IAIA under his direction. These studies of others reveal what Cajete calls “Mindful adherence to patterns. Art as ways of thinking, ways of knowing, of observing social, cultural, and spiritual patterns. Creating these pieces makes one cognizant of different patterns informed by distinct views and perspectives.” 

This admission by Cajete highlights the artful practice of paying attention. Attentiveness is essential to the creative process. In his collection, there are also K’iche’ yarn paintings and an abstract painting that is spontaneous and gestural, the paint fluid and varied. “Aesthetics,” Cajete explains, “is an appreciation of intrinsic meanings.” Additionally, Cajete painted his wife wearing her dance regalia when she was young, and a series of dancers, including one of himself. There are also sketches of his great-grandfather, Chief Manitou, and of his grandfather, who was the first to be sent to and survive a U.S. Government-run Indian Boarding School in 1915.

In Cajete’s quasi-retirement, after the most severe restrictions of the pandemic had been lifted, he began painting portraits of family members. The portraits honor past and future generations, those who died during the pandemic and those who remain. Alongside his process of creating, he is joined by his wife, his son, and grandson—all of whom are not professional artists, but makers of art. He also includes images of their work in his portfolio. It’s a shared family experience, intergenerational, and accessible to each of them. Cajete shares that this is common in Native families: everyone creates art. “Art in Native society reflects ritualization of the life process. The family doing art, the aliveness of the artifact is the aesthetic criteria,” Cajete says. “Give life to the art piece that you’re doing. Part of yourself is reflected in anything that you do artistically, but also in life as a whole.”

Currently, Cajete is again at work on a painting in “Nuevo Pueblo Mural Style,” with rainbows descending and ascending, and a figure is once again “asking,” a term Cajete uses interchangeably with praying. “There is ceremony to art. Ceremony is art,” Cajete says. “It is a mindset of creation that needs to be relearned.” It is this understanding of his own life and the myriad ways he engages with creativity that align when Cajete says that his path was never straight and hierarchical. “You’re going back and forth like this—” He moves his hand across the library’s tabletop where we’ve met for the afternoon to talk, his finger looping and spiraling to create a pattern. “My pathway is not linear. Going back, going forward, moving around in circles. That’s a good idea for a painting—the meandering of a journey and how it moves you forward and backward. It’s organic movement.”

Each one of us is called to engage our creative impulse, this inherent nature seated within. It is our human inheritance, our birthright. “You have to find your way, your pathway in the world, and that takes a lot of introspection and reflection both backward—what you’ve done before—and forward—what you envision,” Cajete says. “But the path is always meandering. It’s never direct.”  

---

Jamie Figueroa is the author of Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and shortlisted for Reading the West Debut Fiction. Figueroa’s memoir in essays, Mother Island, received a starred Kirkus review and was named among the LA Times “6 books to shake off colonialism and rethink our Latino stories.” Figueroa is Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio and is a longtime resident of Northern New Mexico.