mateo

Presents Rich with Provenance

The latest expressions of collectors’ largesse await you in Lloyd’s Treasure Chest

By Nicolasa Chávez
BY NICOLASA CHÁVEZ

The Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA) regularly displays recently acquired items alongside items from its immense permanent collection, but visitors rarely get to experience an entire display dedicated only to recent acquisitions donated by individual collectors, groups, galleries, and artists. That changed last June, when MOIFA opened Recent Acquisitions: The Gift of Folk Art in its popular downstairs gallery, Lloyd’s Treasure Chest.

This exhibition features a grouping of Haitian Vodou ritual items donated by Dr. William T. Waters. The collection includes well-documented and-photographed pieces, including the altar bottle made by the oungan (priest) Pierrot Barra. Renowned for using recycled materials, especially baby dolls, for creating his representations of the Lwa (spirits), he created this piece to represent the Lwa of the Marasa, or the Divine Twins. 

Artist Mike Amersek’s grandson was inspired by MOIFA’s exhibition No Idle Hands: The Myths and Meanings of Tramp Art to donate an intricate “Crown of Thorns” radio cabinet. The artist, originally from Sevnica, Slovenia, moved to the U.S., eventually settling in Carlsbad, New Mexico and Jerome, Arizona. He picked up the puzzlework woodworking style from a man who learned it while in prison in Yuma, Arizona. When grandson Philip Amersek and his wife Caroline Amersek passed the piece along, it came with an accompanying envelope stating it had “no glue no nails used” and that it was made from “12,774 sticks of wood.” 

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Two items on display are part of a large bequest of 167 objects by the late Dan Prall, who was a dedicated volunteer at MOIFA for nearly 18 years, and a passionate collector of traditional and contemporary Spanish Colonial and Native American art. These items include a hand-adzed, carved, and painted cabinet by furniture maker Raymond J. López of Santa Fe, and a hand-carved and painted bulto (three-dimensional image of a saint) of San Acacio by santero artist Gustavo Victor Goler of Taos. From the religious to the decorative to the utilitarian, the larger group of objects represents the breadth of Prall’s collecting passion and his joy in getting to know the artists.

Avid travelers with collectors’ eyes, Jerri and Thomas Morin recently donated varied folk art forms from South and Southeast Asia. Among them are four wayang klitik (flat, carved-wood puppets) from East Java, Indonesia, which they found on a trip to Bali over twenty years ago. Layers of paint suggest that their puppeteer made attempts to keep them in their performance routine even after their original painted surfaces chipped away, as characters clashed and collided in battle scenes. The Morins’ gift enlivens the extant collection’s representation of East Javanese village-based folk art. One of these puppets will be on display with other selections from their gift.

Donors Carolyn B. and Don Etter collected an exquisite Philippine baro’t saya (Tagalog for “blouse and skirt”) made in 1965. Their daughter, Carolyn B. Etter, donated this ensemble honor of the Etters. The roots of thebaro’t saya stretch back to at least the early eighteenth century, when local dress practices were recorded by Spanish colonizers. Christianized Filipinos living in the central lowlands blended traditional styles of dress, containing pre-colonial antecedents, with Spanish fashions of the day. This twentieth-century baro’t saya features historical layers of colonial influence in the Philippines, as well as ongoing artistic innovation within flexible traditional forms. The finely woven piña fiber cloth is itself a colonial innovation, since pineapples were brought from Brazil to the Philippines by the Spanish. The fine cutwork and matching shoes and clutch nod to the contemporary era in which it was made.

These recent donations reflect the passion, joy, curiosity, and understanding of world heritage shared by MOIFA, friends, scholars, and donors who have traversed the globe to bring disparate histories to life.

Nicolasa Chávez is a fourteenth-generation New Mexican and Curator of Latino/Hispano & Spanish Colonial Collections at the Museum of International Folk Art. She has curated various exhibitions, including Flamenco: From Spain to New Mexico, which is currently traveling throughout the state. She is author of the accompanying book The Spirit of Flamenco: From Spain to New Mexico, published by Museum of New Mexico Press.

Nicolasa Chávez (opens in a new tab) is the curator of Latin American & Nuevomexicano Collections at the Museum of International Folk Art. She is a respected historian, curator, and performance artist and previously served as the Deputy State Historian of New Mexico. Her past exhibitions at the museum include New World Cuisine: The Histories of Chocolate, Mate y Más, The Red that Colored the World, Flamenco: From Spain to New Mexico, and Música Buena: Hispano Folk Music of New Mexico.

Photo Synthesis

Documents and photographs important to Native history have long been treated like personal souvenirs by non-Native people, but as this story shows, reparations are achievable.

By Hannah Abelbeck
BY HANNAH ABELBECK

One hundred and fifty years ago, thousands of Navajo people undertook a second arduous 300-mile journey across New Mexico as the first Native nation to—with the 1868 Bosque Redondo Treaty—negotiate a return to their homeland.

This year, two significant historical records turned up just in time for the commemorations. The first is a copy of the 1868 Treaty, recently unearthed from the attic of a descendant of negotiator Colonel Samuel Tappan. The second is a rare photograph I found, taken during the week of treaty negotiations and long thought to have been lost. Despite the highly significant moment they mark—the creation of the Navajo Nation and formalization of government-to-government relations with the United States—neither the photograph nor the Tappan copy of the treaty have been available to the Diné people for 150 years. 

As a photo archivist, I’m no stranger to the time-consuming, deep challenges of working with dispersed photographic material. But in this case, the ordinary difficulty of this process was compounded by the long legacy of troubling relationships between collectors, historical institutions, and Native communities. Documents and photographs important to Native history have long been treated like personal souvenirs by non-Native people. Both the treaty copy and photographs were kept by American military personnel and passed down to their descendants. While the objects survived and were cared for, their remarkable stories also suggest just how much Native history has been lost, sold, forgotten, mislaid, hidden, remains privately owned, or is languishing in cultural institutions far from the communities they document. One hundred and fifty years of distance, inaccessibility, and misinterpretation have added insult to injury.

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I began researching photographs from this era in 2015, while helping Devorah Romanek, curator at the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum, and Khristaan Villela, now director of the Museum of International Folk Art, with loose ends while they were researching the Souvenir of New Mexico album at the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives. The Souvenir, also called the Meem album, is a bound set of 63 photographs marking three major events underway in 1866: the Long Walk, the French Intervention in Mexico, and post-Civil War military expansion (and profiteering) in the Southwest. These interrelated subjects are seldom discussed together, yet the Union personnel who photographed, compiled, owned, and circulated the album’s images were personally invested in all three projects. 

Until the Souvenir album was donated to the Photo Archives in 2007, the Museum of New Mexico only had copies of the  individual pages photographed on nitrate film, probably in the 1930s when John Gaw Meem purchased the album. Consequently, while the images have long circulated as illustrations, the bound album had infrequently been interpreted as a set of photographs. Especially significant is the rare subset of portraits of Diné people taken during their internment at Hweeldi (Bosque Redondo). A few of the images are widely published, like the portrait of a Navajo man with a bag, powderhorn, and bow on the cover of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Six other copies were owned by an Army officer named Charles  Jennings, who took them back to New York. His son copyrighted them in 1914. 

Untangling potential circumstances surrounding the creation and the circulation of these images—and other related  photographic material from the 1860s Southwest—was part of the research process for Romanek’s forthcoming book about the  album and its photographs. Intrigued and baffled by what we could find and what we couldn’t, I spent many evenings searching for additional photographs to help disambiguate, contextualize, and attribute work by photographers who passed through New Mexico territory during the era. The photographers capable of taking portraits of Navajo people make for a very short list. The photographic process was difficult, supplies were rare, and photographing Navajo people in military custody was a type of access that not every photographer had.

The most promising potential portraitists  are a colorful and motley crew. They included N. Brown e Hijo (Nicholas Brown and his son William Henry Brown), who in the 1860s split their time between St. Louis, Santa Fe, and Chihuahua. Also promising were Constant and Victor Duhem, enlisted brothers and French immigrants who arrived in New Mexico from Gold Rush California in 1862 with the Union Army. Other potential contributors included Gaige, whose first name is in dispute, but who was paid to photograph forts and died in Arizona in 1869;  William A. Smith, who wanted to work with Gaige and liked to eat at La Fonda; and William Abraham Bell, a British physician who learned photography during a two-week crash course when he joined the Kansas Pacific Survey in 1867 and who may have abandoned his glass plate negatives in the Southwest (not to be confused with British photographer William H. Bell of the 1872 Wheeler Survey). Their photographs have been difficult to distinguish from one another’s work, especially since much of it has been missing, scattered, jumbled, unattributed, misattributed, and apocryphal.

Valentine Wolfenstein, a young Swedish immigrant who took a photography lesson in St. Louis before traveling west over the Santa Fe Trail, was one of the few to capture photographs at Fort Sumner. Early in the search, I found a folder in the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives with correspondence between former photo curator Richard Rudisill and historian Frank McNitt, discussing Wolfenstein’s work. Around 1970, they’d learned from a descendant of Wolfenstein’s that the photographer had been at Fort Sumner in 1868. He had a small room set up as a photographic studio when General William T. Sherman arrived to conduct the treaty negotiations with Navajo leaders. In fact, Wolfenstein wrote in his journal that Sherman even helped him set up one of the shots, arranging the group and the camera, which helped him “take the best pictures I have so far.” McNitt joked that “the odds of finding these old prints probably is one million to one, but I am starting on the trail.” Neither McNitt nor Rudisill ever found a copy. Devorah and I laughed that it would probably be our wild goose chase too.

In his journal, Wolfenstein wrote that he mailed a set of eight photographs to General Sherman. For me, like for McNitt and Rudisill 45 years ago, the Sherman angle hasn’t produced anything (yet), despite multiple attempts. But Sherman’s papers weren’t the only option. 

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian has a Wolfenstein photograph of Head Chief Barboncito that once belonged to a descendant of William N. Grier. According to Wolfenstein, he departed Fort Union at the same time wagon trains of Navajo people left for Dinétah. But Wolfenstein traveled to Fort Union, where he went to play the flute at a wedding celebration. He took $75 worth of prints with him, photographs he took at Fort Sumner. Because I had noticed that the provenance of related photographs from 1860s New Mexico could be traced to people who were in the territory during those years, I discovered that Grier probably arrived in New Mexico to command Fort Union around the same time as the wedding. Curious what other photographs Grier may have had access to, I asked the NMAI archivist if other photographs arrived at the Smithsonian along with it.

I was hoping for any additional images from this era—by the Browns, by the Duhems, by anyone. The archivist sent a pdf with thumbnail images. The blurry, faded image would not have seemed remarkable to almost anyone else, but I recognized the group photo Wolfenstein described taking, even though it was vaguely captioned, unattributed, and misdated. 

I immediately contacted Jennifer Denetdale, a Diné historian and a descendant of Manuelito and Juanita, to let her know what I suspected I had found. 

In the photograph, Barboncito, Manuelito, and his brother Cayetanito appear in the front row, seated at the far right, with a small boy who may be Barboncito’s son. The three men, all important political leaders, are dressed exactly the same as they are in related studio portraits Wolfenstein made, which means that those may have been taken during the week of treaty negotiations as well. The whole group is large, and may contain many, maybe even all, of the headmen that negotiated and later signed the treaty. A few of the older signers died within a few years of their return, and this might be the first and only time they posed for photographs. A few other people are recognizable, including Narbona Primero in the front row and interpreter Jesus Arviso in the back, both of whom were photographed again in 1874 when a delegation of Navajo leaders traveled to Washington, DC to discuss pressing concerns with President Grant. At the center of the group is an unidentified Diné woman, who may have played an important role in the events. 

When I found a second copy of the group photo this spring with the caption “Navajos treating with General Sherman to return to their old homes,” it was an incredible confirmation that our confidence in the photograph’s identification was warranted. This other, smaller nineteenth-century copy was once owned by  anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, and it has been at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology for over fifty years. 

The Navajo Nation Museum’s month-long exhibition on the Naaltsoos Saní (the 1868 Treaty) opened June 1. Along with the first copy of the treaty, on loan from the National Archives, the exhibition includes a wall-sized reproduction of the identified photo. The photograph offers a glimpse into a moment when Native people successfully argued against the odds for their tribe’s survival and return to their homeland, but it can also be seen as more than that. Not as a souvenir or curio, but as a long-submerged image of Navajo leaders, reunited with a Navajo institution that is using it to tell its own story. 

Hannah Abelbeck is the digital imaging archivist at the Photo Archives of the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors. The archives can be searched online (with the option of ordering prints) at palaceofthegovernors.org/photoarchives.html.

Hannah Abelbeck (opens in a new tab) is the photo archivist in the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives at the New Mexico History Museum and is actively working to increase access to its photographic collections.

Semiotic Sovereignty

and the appropriation of Native voice

By Karl Duncan  and Marla Redcorn-Miller
BY MARLA REDCORN-MILLER

The following interview with Mateo Romero (Cochiti) describes a more abstract form of cultural appropriation that takes place in intellectual spaces such as academic institutions, museums, and art venues. Romero is a contemporary Pueblo painter and was raised in Berkeley, California. Although he grew up in an urban area, he formed a connection to Cochiti Pueblo through Santiago Romero, his father. Romero attended Dartmouth College, and studied with acclaimed artists Ben Frank Moss and Varujan Boghosian. He is an award-winning artist who has exhibited internationally in Canada and in the United States. Romero paints in his studio in Santa Fe and lives in Pojoaque Pueblo with his wife, Melissa, and their children Erik, Povi, and Rain.

Marla: Appropriation in Native American art is often considered in tangible terms, whether it is a specific design, theme or style of art. But the term semiotic sovereignty is about the space of knowledge and ideas itself in museums and academic institutions. 

Mateo: Well, it actually comes from a conversation I had with Bob Preucel, an anthropologist from Brown University. Bob was talking about this term called semantic sovereignty—semantics as in language and linguistics and use of language—and this notion of using words and language to claim sovereignty. The idea really resonated with me, and I took it on as a visual artist. 

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There’s a component of lecture and spoken word that happens around art, but a lot of the work that I do, a lot of work that the artists around me in the community here do, it’s not verbal. The artist goes into the studio, and it’s kind of solitary. Artists create work and exhibit work that will show up at an opening or a museum or other art space. People look at the work over time and hopefully a dialogue grows out of it. But my thought about this term is that artists that I know, myself included, can be understood in semiotic terms—the work as a set of signs or symbols and how these constructed symbols form meaning. This of course is not my idea, but an idea that I have shifted a little and applied to my experience in the studio, using symbols to create narratives and meaning and construct identity and all these other things. The spaces or contexts that these symbols of art occupy—whether it’s a gallery, museum or university—are contested spaces, prime real estate, especially for indigenous people. 

And the other thing contributing to this idea of semiotic sovereignty is from an earlier conversation I had with Oren Lyons, who was the principal chief of the Onondaga at the time. I asked him about his quote that I love so much: “True sovereignty is the act thereof.” Right? So, with sovereign space, you don’t ask someone for sovereign space. You take sovereign space. You claim sovereign space. This can be with art or language or symbolism, you know, any kind of information. Because the colonization of the Americas was so bent on taking away this space of indigenous language, symbolism, narrative and replacing it with its own, it is so important that indigenous artists, writers, reclaim these areas of knowledge through their works. This is claiming sovereignty, the space of sovereignty. 

What’s interesting to me is that there are so few of us Native artists. We’re a tiny minority, descendants of the people who were left and weren’t killed in the land grab. So, we are this tiny fragment of people who are remaining and there’s not enough of us really to generate this information wholesale. 

In absence of our own people generating this sovereign or conceptional space, some members of mainstream culture just take it. 

Marla: It’s an appropriation of this space?

Mateo: Yes, an appropriation. They take what they want. And the most obvious example would be an artist who is conclusively not Native but claims to be Native because he wants access to the resources that Native artists and Native lecturers have. They take what they want. I’m not surprised. I’m not naïve about it. It’s not an eye-opener to me. 

Marla: Why is it so important that artists not misrepresent themselves as Native? 

Mateo: If you survived all of the genocide, all of the pressures and colonial aspects of it and you’re still here, it’s an amazing thing. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a struggle, right? It’s a struggle to maintain this Native identity and this Native voice. But it’s gorgeous. It’s a gorgeous struggle. It’s so nuanced. It’s so textural. It’s so rich. 

Marla: It makes one wonder why someone without these experiences would claim otherwise.

Mateo: Coming from the Bay Area and being exposed to just mainstream American culture for almost half of my life, it’s not enough for me. There’s not enough there. . . . It’s too mainstream. It’s too material. It’s too focused on greed. And I can see why some artist would be like, “I’ve got to get in on this Native thing.” I get it. I understand. It doesn’t surprise me. I can think of several examples of artists whose Native identity is very suspect who have been embraced by the art world. 

I feel that Native artists can’t really generate accurate cultural information or even personal information because we have this smog, cultural smog that’s being produced by people who are not from the community, and they are lying about their background in order to get access. They are unabashed. They are doing this because they don’t have a sense of their own culture. They don’t have cultural enclosures. They don’t have a sense of what community constitutes for them. So, you talk about your communities, your own closures, it’s doesn’t even register with these people. 

Marla: What is it about the fabric of mainstream culture that makes this type of appropriation acceptable, and even supported in some cases, as you suggest? 

Mateo: They don’t care. They don’t give a damn. They want what you have. They look at everything as a resource. Everything is something to be commodified, controlled, used, discarded. We’re in a late capitalist epoch. We are engaged in commodifying everything, and that core capitalism is anti-humanist. 

Appropriation is a really dressed-up word for stealing. Stealing photography from other people, stealing ideas from other people has been going on for a long time. But it’s particularly vicious when you talk about Native communities, because we’ve been the object of discourse. We’ve been the object of colonialism and academic discourses. We have all these social problems living on the reservation in terms of compromised educational systems, low employment and economic capabilities—all these things we’re facing. And on top of it, people rip off the art. The land and resources have been taken. Now, the conceptual space of who you are is being appropriated. Your very identity is being ripped off. 

Marla: So, somebody who comes in and constructs these types of “Native” identities obviously doesn’t have that primary experience you have described. 

Mateo: They can’t. No. It’s structurally forbidden. It’s not permitted. It’s esoteric experience. 

Marla: What does it feel like to have somebody steal your voice? 

Mateo: I think it’s like getting molested or something. I mean, it’s creepy stuff. But because of this late capitalism, everything is up for grabs, because everything is being commodified and diced up and parceled out, including your culture, including your symbols, including your land, including your voice—all that stuff is up for grabs. All you can do is take your voice and encourage other Native people to rise up and say what their thing is. I’m not fearful of the repercussions of having a voice. I’m fearful for myself and for other people of the internal, psychological damage that occurs from not having a voice. 

It’s like a call to arms. I feel like Native artists and filmmakers and writers and dancers and performers—all these people—have to occupy the space. I’m 51 years old now. I’m beginning the later part of my life, and I’m thinking if there’s a message, it’s, “Try to reach an audience of younger Native people. Energize them.”  Energize that community of Native students, mid-career artists, people who are writing, people who are lecturing, people who are teaching. Create a base of people and just tell them, “if you do not fight for this space, you will be asked out of this space. Someone else, who isn’t even a Native, will come and take your spot.”

Marla Redcorn-Miller is the deputy director of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

Karl Duncan  is the executive director of the Poeh Cultural Center at the Pueblo of Pojoaque and a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). A proud member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and San Carlos Apache Tribes, his work is deeply rooted in his heritage and commitment to Indigenous culture.

Marla Redcorn-Miller is the director of the Osage Nation Museum in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. She is also a former deputy director of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture. Her interest in art and the museum field stems from the influence of her father, who was a prominent Osage artist, and her mother’s people from the Redstone Kiowa community. Other notable roles include education curator positions at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe and the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art in Tulsa. She has a BA in art history from Dartmouth College and an MPhil in art history from Columbia University.

Dance of the Monarch

By Emily Withnall
BY EMILY WITHNALL

Thomas Haukaas (Lakota) beads like a painter. At first glance, a viewer might simply see colorful animals or butterflies in his soft beaded baby cradles—but a closer look reveals social messages. One cradle, Mitakuye Oyasin, depicts men, women, and children in a number of configurations. Figures robed in blue, green, red, and purple ride black, yellow, and pink horses. Haukaas’s use of the lane stitch for the light blue background results in short, layered rows of beads that create a fluid effect, giving the people and horses the appearance of being in motion. 

With so much detail and color to take in, it is possible to miss the image of the courtship between two men. Viewers have to look carefully to see the short earrings and leggings that differentiate the men from the women. Inspired by painter Thomas Hart Benton’s technique in revealing subtle social interactions, Haukaas aimed to do the same with his Mitakuye Oyasin cradle—something he admits is much more challenging to do in beadwork than in painting. The inclusion of a same-sex couple on the cradle achieves this subtlety, and sends the message that the men represent one of many versions of what it means to be a family. “We get to define who we are related to,” Haukaas says. “This is who we are and what we are.” 

Haukaas cites the Defense of Marriage Act as the inspiration for the cradle, which he made before the law was overruled in 2015. “In my own tribe, one of my distant cousins and his husband were awarded custody of his nephews and nieces, because the tribal court decided their own home wasn’t stable enough. It has worked out really well,” Haukaas says. “We believe that there’s the spirit and there’s the flesh. My cousin’s spirit was female, and so it was a balance between male and female, spiritually, and that’s the reason the decision was made.”

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Haukaas is much like his beaded cradles. He articulates his beliefs gradually and through subtle nuances in language. And although Haukaas holds some of his opinions quietly, he welcomes curiosity and wants potential collectors to know what they are buying. “My pieces are meant for dialogue, for discussion, for thinking about,” Haukaas says. “That’s my ultimate goal.” 

The Mitakuye Oyasin cradle is one of three cradles featured in the Beadwork Adorns the World exhibition at the Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA), along with Economic Conundrum and Kimimila (Immigration), which has the most visible message. The words “the border crossed us” appear across one end and frame a monarch butterfly: a symbol of migration as well as transformation and growth. Haukaas crafted this cradle as a contribution to MOIFA’s Gallery of Conscience Between Two Worlds immigration exhibition, which concluded in 2016. “I was thinking of the DACA children when I was making that cradle,” Haukaas says. “We need to come up with some border laws that work and that are fair. What’s going on now currently is so upsetting because there are so many factions, and some of them I think are very racist. I have great difficulty with that.” 

Marsha Bol, director emerita of MOIFA and curator of Beadwork Adorns the World, is a longtime friend of Haukaas and supporter of his work. Her primary area of expertise is Plains Indian art, beadwork and quillwork in particular. “I first met Tom in 1992, so as Tom might say, we’ve watched each other become elders,” Bol says. They met at a United Tribes Powwow and art show in Bismarck, North Dakota, and from the start Bol was drawn to Haukaas’s expertise and to the layered meaning in his work. “His skill is extraordinary,” Bol says. “He has really worked hard to maintain the traditions, and yet he has managed to make those traditions relevant to the tribe for centuries.” 

The exhibition is accompanied by Bol’s book, The Art & Tradition of Beadwork (Gibbs Smith, Publisher). Both the book and the exhibition display beadwork from indigenous communities across the world, spanning the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. 

 “Societies around the world tend to make beadwork for particular occasions and uses,” Bol explains. “So the exhibit starts with childhood—and of course babies are the first thing.” Along with seven of Haukaas’s cradles, the exhibition also includes his fully beaded ceremonial boy’s shirt, and a ledger drawing depicting a courtship scene. 

Traditionally, women have been the beadwork and quillwork artists in the Lakota tribe—and as Bol discusses in The Art & Tradition of Beadwork, this is also generally true of many tribes globally. Mastery of beadwork was one way Lakota women achieved high status, but Haukaas says that the 1935 Indian Reorganization Act changed some of the traditional gender roles within the tribe. With the act came a slew of office jobs designed to help the tribe function. “Through the years the tribes—particularly mine—have given women those jobs,” Haukaas says. “These women need money, and you are surer that the children will be fed if you hire women.” As a result of becoming the primary breadwinners, many Lakota women no longer had time to do beadwork. Men turned to cultural practices like making drums, dancing, and, yes, making beadwork. 

“Men have become the guardians of culture by necessity,” says Haukaas, who himself learned the art of beadwork mainly from women. His interest in beadwork was sparked when, at eight years old, he watched traditional Lakota dancer Ellis Head dance at the 1958 O’Kreek powwow. Enamored by Head’s beaded outfits, Haukaas wanted beautiful beaded garments of his own. Lakota dancers bead their own outfits, so this motivated Haukaas to seek teachers so he could learn the art.

He laughs as he recalls that he was not a good dancer. He proved to be adept at beading, however, and chose to follow that art as well as the practice of psychiatry. In his 20s, Haukaas attended college to become a social worker, and focused on child abuse and child welfare. When it became apparent to him that abusers often did not respond to counseling, Haukaas later decided to pursue a degree in psychiatry. Haukaas sees a link between his work as a psychiatrist and his beaded cradles. “The interest in the cradles and our people is my motivating factor.” 

In his own art, Haukaas eschews geometric designs in favor of the pictographic and abstract floral designs his family has long been known for. “I took my family’s work from the 1890s and put it on steroids. I blew it up, made it bigger, used more color, used tons of detail as if I were doing a really fine drawing,” Haukaas says. “I did it because I knew that my tribespeople would understand it. I want them to say, ‘I can do that too’—and they can.”

Now an elder, Haukaas mentors younger Native beadwork artists to ensure that the tradition continues. “I’m doing everything I can to help people understand that in our eyes, this is art,” he says. “I hope that recognition brings more collectors and more chances for people to put food on the table.” Haukaas points out that it’s a mixed blessing when a museum buys a big piece of Lakota beadwork, because although it provides money for the tribe, that piece becomes less accessible to the tribal members. Typically, they can’t afford to travel to urban areas or pay museum entrance fees.

As a psychiatrist, Haukaas sees the effects of poverty on his community in deeply personal ways. He is concerned about the violence that Native people continue to face, both from within and outside Native communities. “The arts help me cope with the world that I think is unfair on a number of levels,” Haukaas says. 

His eyesight is going, so Haukaas estimates that he has just a few years left to make cradles. His current project is a cradle that sends a message of safety for Native children, given the ongoing violence Native people endure. Haukaas hopes to see more artists engaging with social issues. He says, “We don’t have enough artists with vision who speak the truths of our lives.” 

Bol is proud that Beadwork Adorns the World features so many of Haukaas’s cradles. “There’s nothing harder to make in Lakota beadwork than a cradle,” Bol says. “And not many people do it anymore.” Haukaas sees them as soft, textured sculptures. “God, I love to hold a cradle,” Haukaas says. “There’s nothing prettier than when there’s a child inside.”

Traditionally, the maternal aunt would make a cradle to signify the special relationship she would have with the child. Haukaas has also made many cradles for family members and others within his tribe. Not only does he enjoy the artistic challenge, but he deeply considers the meaning of the images he beads onto the cradles. His images communicate the values that he wants the Creator to give the baby.

“It doesn’t matter what culture you’re in; we all want the same thing,” Haukaas says. “We want longevity, we want a good life, we want love, we want family, and we want our tribe to grow.”  

Emily Withnall was born and raised in New Mexico, and now works as a freelance writer and editor in Missoula, Montana. 

Emily Withnall (opens in a new tab) is the editor of El Palacio and the host of Encounter Culture. Prior to stepping into the editor role, she wrote for the magazine for eight years. Emily has also been published in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, High Country News, Orion Magazine, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Gay Magazine, Source New Mexico, and other publications. She lives and writes in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Flowing From Our Wildest Imaginations

The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act turns fifty

By Willy Carleton

BY WILLY CARLETON · PHOTOGRAPHS BY SHERMAN HOGUE/BLMNM

My legs dangle over the small bridge as I watch the Rio Chama rushing below, rippling over stones. Over the constant din of the moving water, the leaves of scattered cottonwoods at the river’s edge clap softly with brief bursts of wind. Beyond the banks, a sloping plain rises toward towering cliffs and rock amphitheaters stratified with the reds, yellows, and browns of long-gone geological epochs. Above them on the distant horizon, a spruce- and fir-lined rim separates land from the expansive blue summer sky. I see no other people until several rafts emerge around the willows at the river’s bend. The rafters raise their arms and shout with excitement as they swiftly pass below me. The roar of the river soon drowns out their shouts and I sit alone again, staring at the well-worn stones below the ripples. 

This bridge is at a unique crossroads of two paths—one on land and the other on water—that were both indelibly shaped by two significant acts of Congress that celebrate their fiftieth anniversary this year: the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (WSRA) and the National Trails Systems Act. The land route is the Continental Divide Trail, which was designated as a national trail in 1978 under the Trails Act of 1968, and cuts through some of the nation’s most rugged, isolated, and exquisitely beautiful territory from southern New Mexico to northern Montana. The path below me is the section of the Rio Chama that was designated as Scenic (and, just upstream, as Wild) in 1988 under the WSRA.  

Born out of decades-long battles over dam development across the nation, but especially in the West, the WSRA aimed “to protect and enhance” certain segments of “free-flowing” rivers that “possess unique water conservation, scenic, fish, wildlife, and outdoor recreation values of present and potential benefit to the American people.” The act prevented dam construction and certain extractive industries, such as mining or logging, in protected river sections with the goal of forever preserving the nation’s most beautiful rivers. As then-New Mexico Senator Joseph Montoya expressed at the time, “What is really important is that a region of striking natural beauty will be preserved for this generation and all the generations which follow. Without such protection, encroachments by an expanding and sometimes greedy human race are almost inevitable.” Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle voted in favor of this landmark federal protection of rivers. The result has made the past half-century, in the words of Tim Palmer, “America’s richest in river protection.” 

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The bill originally designated eight sections of rivers across the nation as Wild and Scenic. Luckily for New Mexicans, the section of the Rio Grande from the Colorado border to just north of Pilar, along with the first six miles of the Red River that meets the Rio Grande, was among those original eight designations. In subsequent years, the United States Congress has amended the act nearly a hundred times to designate more sections of rivers. To date, 13,000 miles along 208 of our country’s rivers and streams have been designated. In New Mexico, local advocacy groups successfully lobbied congress to designate three other sections of rivers under the act: the Chama River between El Vado and Abiquiu Dams (1988), the East Fork of the Jemez River (1990), and the upper stretches of the Pecos River (1990). 

The WSRA, as then-Senator Stewart Udall explained, was “patterned after the Wilderness Act” of 1964, and prioritized river sections with recreational activities, such as rafting, camping, and fishing, that could spur a tourism economy in the region. The Rio Grande received initial designation in part because of the trout fishery in the Rio Grande Gorge. Although the act focused on recreational concerns, New Mexico senators worked to ensure that agricultural uses, especially cattle-grazing practices along protected waterways, would not be hindered by the legislation. 

The greater Rio Grande in New Mexico and southern Colorado felt the impact of the act almost immediately. In the summer of 1969, a concerted effort among government and citizen groups employed it as one of several tools to successfully block the construction of the proposed Parsons and Whittemore paper pulp mill along the Rio Grande in southern Colorado. Such a plan, many worried, would send effluent from the mill into the sections of the Rio Grande protected under the WSRA. As J. W. Anderson, then the state director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), explained to The Santa Fe New Mexican in 1969, “We look upon the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act as our mandate within the wild rivers areas to insist upon water quality standards set by the state of New Mexico and approved by the secretary of the interior.” After a summer of contentious debate, the backers of the pulp mill ultimately took their plans elsewhere. Had the mill been built, water quality would have undoubtedly declined along northern New Mexico’s stretch of the Rio Grande, from the Gorge to Los Luceros in Alcalde and farther downstream.

While the WSRA continues to serve as a vital protection for New Mexico’s rivers, some river advocates nonetheless express concern that it has not yet been used to its full potential in legal fights to protect rivers. Jen Pelz, the wild rivers program director at WildEarth Guardians, emphasizes that the WSRA explicitly requires the federal agencies with jurisdiction of designated river sections to “protect and enhance the values” that caused those sections to be designated in the first place. This language, Pelz suggests, presents “a possibility to use the act more strongly and to push the agencies to do the work the act demands of them.” As an example, Pelz points to the designated section of the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico, which has recently experienced very low flows largely due to upstream agricultural use in the San Luis Valley. Pelz explained that the act could potentially be used to demand a minimum flow and prevent the river from drying entirely, which would be a benefit for wildlife, recreationists, and agriculturalists throughout northern New Mexico.

Many local environmental advocates today are also careful to note that, although WSRA remains a significant legal protection, the current struggle for comprehensive river protections likely will require further policy work and, ultimately, legislative action. Lifelong conservationist and river outfitter Steve Harris, who helped in efforts to designate the Rio Chama in 1988, says, “A problem with the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act was that it had a simplistic function that didn’t easily account for the complexities of the river.” The act only protects the surface water and a narrow strip of riparian shoreline of rivers, he explains; but many rivers may suffer from harmful extractive industries, such as fracking, that occur within the watershed well beyond the protected shores of the river. “There has to be something more than an idea of just setting boundaries around a river and protecting it.” Harris suggests that local, state, and federal officials consider creative policy measures such as the establishment of a river’s legal right to water, adopting a human right to twenty liters of water per person per day, and “enshrining a water conservation ethic in the operating rules of water systems and state legal regimes.” 

This need for more far-ranging protections mirrors the contemporary understanding of  rivers as ever-evolving systems that include entire watersheds. The original WSRA viewed river systems as simply the waterway and its nearby shores and embodied now-dated notions of ecological stagnation. “I believe the choice is clear-cut,” Senator Joseph Montoya expressed to his congressional counterparts in 1965. “Either we have a living museum where succeeding generations can see traces of the natural wonders that once laced this whole land of ours together, or the grasping imprint of the hands of … predacious development interests will completely blueprint our river and stream resources.”

Yet, says New Mexico naturalist Jack Loeffler, “We should return some semblance of fluidity to our perception of waterways in our laws and allow them to evolve as a biotic system evolves.” To treat a river as “a living museum,” in other words, only works if we allow for the inevitable, natural changes of an evolving waterway.  

Scholars in recent decades have also reconsidered the notion of “wild.” Even in 1965, as the bill was still being drafted, Senator Udall explained that “in a strict sense, a truly wild river is rare today. The term ‘wild river areas’ is used in the bill in a special sense—to denote those segments of streams, tributaries, or rivers which are in a free-flowing condition, or which can be restored to that condition.” Today, many scholars consider the idea of “wildness” as simply a human idea placed on more-than-human parts of the world rather than an intrinsic quality of the earth. After all, as New Mexico writer William deBuys has pointed out, in the age of anthropogenic climate change, no corner of the Earth, whether from the deepest depths of the ocean to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, has been unaffected in some way by the rising global carbon levels of the past two centuries. 

Despite looking the part, the designated-Wild portion of the Rio Chama in fact possesses some of the most profoundly unwild qualities of any river in the country. This section of river sits between two major dams—Abiquiu and El Vado—and, since the advent of the San Juan Diversion Project, carries water pumped through twenty-six miles of pipe across the Continental Divide to provide for Albuquerque’s growth over a hundred miles downstream. “The Chama is one of the most highly managed and developed rivers in the country,” Harris states matter-of-factly. As William deBuys wryly points out, the Rio Chama “might be wilder in your imagination than it is in fact.”

Yet, as I sit and watch the river descend through the red-rock canyons, bemoaning such human fingerprints on the river seems hardly useful. I find serenity and beauty in this river as it is, and I find myself immensely grateful for the fifty-year-old fingerprint of an unwild regulatory tool designed to maintain its wildness.

The protections of waters under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act are valuable not because they preserve something pristine or primordial, but because they offer vital safeguards against harmful forms of development that would pollute delicate river systems that we rely on for agriculture, drinking water, wildlife forage, and soul-recreating recreation. Though the WSRA neither provides comprehensive watershed protection nor protects all stretches of New Mexico’s waterways (had sections of the Rio Grande between Santa Fe and Albuquerque been designated under the act, for example, the construction of Cochiti Dam would likely never have happened), it nonetheless has been, and remains to be, an important tool for New Mexico river protection. The WSRA deterred development in known instances such as the Parsons and Whittemore pulp mill plans, and potentially many other development projects that never made it beyond the drawing board because of the legislation. As deBuys says eloquently: “Maybe the greatest benefit of the act so far are the battles no one ever had to fight.” 

Fifty years ago, the nation’s political and cultural stars aligned to produce legislation aimed at protecting rivers across the nation. The golden anniversary serves as an important reminder of a collective aspiration for far-reaching river protections that has only partially been fulfilled. As a recently deferred decision by the BLM on whether to lease fracking rights to parcels within the watershed of the Rio Chama suggests, it is likely that further policy measures will ultimately be necessary to fully protect the waters of this Wild and Scenic river. The half-century mark of the WSRA provides an opportunity to not only celebrate the act’s achievements, but also to examine where improvements can be made to ensure that, in another fifty or one hundred years from now, someone can dangle their feet from this same bridge and marvel at the beauty passing below.  

Willy Carleton is an agricultural historian with a PhD in history from the University of New Mexico. He is an editor of edible Santa Fe and depends on the water of the Rio Chama to grow vegetables on his farm in Medanales, New Mexico. 

Willy Carleton is an agricultural historian with a PhD in History from the University of New Mexico. He is an editor of edible New Mexico and depends on the water of the Rio Chama to grow vegetables on his farm in Medanales, New Mexico.

More Than Words

A yarn-bombing love brigade celebrates caring about veterans ... tangibly

By Peter BG Shoemaker
BY PETER BG SHOEMAKER

Ten years ago, Shirley Klinghoffer launched her seminal Santa Fe-based Love Armor Project, an effort to demonstrate the power of art to heal and to comfort the country’s warriors. Now eighteen years into America’s second-longest war, she thinks it’s time to do it again. “People can’t forget what’s going on over there, and more importantly, who is going over there,” she says. 

The artistic heart of Love Armor—in 2008 and now—is a hand-knitted protective cozy for the iconic Humvee. Ten years ago, Klinghoffer and her collaborators, recognizing the meditative and therapeutic qualities of knitting, recruited fiber artists from across the country to contribute panels, that, when sewn together, fit like a cozy over the two-and-a-half-ton vehicle. New Mexico soldiers took part in the unveiling of the cozy at the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA), and the event made national and international news. 

Love Armor 2018 acknowledges the shifting and expanding landscape of caring for those who choose to fight the nation’s battles. “I’m against all wars,” Klinghoffer says, “but when people put their lives on the line, that I’m all about.” In addition to the “incendiary” anger that gave birth to the original project ten years ago—when she heard that men and women were being killed by roadside bombs because their vehicles weren’t armored—there’s something else. Her father, who grew up in a Polish shtetl and fled to the US, joined the army like so many others seeking to return the gift of refuge with that of service, and went on to fight in the waning days of World War II. 

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Tens of thousands of New Mexicans have served, and continue to serve, in the military. But such efforts are ones of profound sacrifice—of the bodies and minds of those that serve, and of their families. Klinghoffer originally envisioned Love Armor as a way to provide comfort, support, and understanding to those communities.

And that mission continues with the tenth-anniversary celebrations. Funded in part by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation, the Love Armor 2018 exhibition offers workshops focusing on advances in neuroscience and art therapy, fiber arts, social justice, and interview training by the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project. Multidisciplinary artistic statements and conversation-starters, including a performance by Acushla Bastible, add depth and meaning to serving in the military, a choice that still only 0.4 percent of Americans (as active military) make.

The central location of the tenth-anniversary project is the former tank garage and motor pool of New Mexico’s National Guard, which for the last ten years has served as CCA’s main exhibition space. It was also the site where every serving New Mexico soldier during World War II took either the oath of enlistment or office.

“Even in New Mexico, people don’t realize we have this vibrant relationship with the military. Through it you can begin to understand the true diversity of the people who have fought for this country,” Klinghoffer says, emphasizing the experiences of Anglos, Hispanics, Native Americans, African Americans, and LGBTQ soldiers.

A CCA neighbor, the New Mexico National Guard Bataan Memorial Museum property, is managed by New Mexico’s Department of Cultural Affairs. This partnership between the state’s military and cultural organizations is more than one of convenience. It represents a close bond between the military and the state’s cultural identity, and a shared understanding of the role the military has played and continues to play here. 

New Mexico is the home of the so-called Battling Bastards of Bataan—the 200th and 515th Coast Artillery—all of whom left from the compound that now hosts the CCA, and very few of whom returned from the Philippines after the horrific forced Bataan Death March and its aftereffects. This year, the New Mexico Military Museum, adjacent to CCA, added an exhibition of First World War letters, photographs, and film, called World War I 1918: The Year of the Doughboy. And the New Mexico History Museum is commemorating the centennial of the Armistice with an exhibition opening on November 11, 2018. The world’s first atomic bomb was developed in Los Alamos and tested at what is now known as the Trinity Site in the Jornada del Muerto Valley near Alamogordo, the focus of New Mexico History Museum’s Atomic Histories exhibition (up through May 31, 2019).

Phyllis Kennedy, a program coordinator at New Mexico Arts, says she was struck by the surprise many veterans expressed that “somebody cared about them.” And while there is a federal arts in the military program as well as state programs elsewhere, Kennedy is pleased that “we’re doing things our way—like Love Armor—face to face, New Mexico-style.” 

Peter BG Shoemaker, a former Marine, is a frequent contributor to the magazine.

Peter BG Shoemaker is a Tbilisi-based writer and frequent contributor to El Palacio on conservation matters.

The Practice of Aural History

Jack Loeffler shares a lifetime of collected voices, a testament to what connects us

By Jack Loeffler

Imagine yourself camped in the Kuakatch Wash in an isolated area of the Sonoran Desert. It is just after dawn. You’ve made your first cup of coffee thanks to the old Coleman stove in your truck. You are sitting in your camp chair. Your sound recorder is turned on, lying in your lap, attached to a pair of microphones by cables. You are wearing stereo headphones. Your microphones are aimed to the east. You are listening to the biophany, the chorus of life that is awakening in the Sonoran dawn. 

And then you register the sounds of alarm calls from a species of birds to the south. Another species slightly to the north begins to scream their alarm, and yet another and another moving ever northward through your field of hearing. You pull out your binoculars and in the distance you spot a low-flying hawk moving south to north. 

For a few moments, you register your sense of being kindred with these fellow species, and your personal perspective is immensely expanded as your self is subordinated by the sense of place in time. You are but a tiny dot of consciousness within the flow of Nature.

Another time, you’re seated in an old chair in a cottage in the village of Punta Chueca, a Seri Indian village on the Mexican mainland coast of the Sea of Cortez. You are recording an elderly shaman singing part of his repertoire of Seri songs. In Spanish he informs you that he is going to sing the song of the leaf-cutter ant. Slowly his countenance changes, and he begins to sing. At the end of the fourth cycle through the song, he slowly regains his human expression and considers what he intends to sing next. By the end of the session, you realize that you have recorded a selection of songs that reveals the way that Seri Indians relate to their home habitat. They embody their fellow species in song. As ethnobiologist Gary Paul Nabhan says, the Seri Indians know far more about the nature of their homeland than any scientist can ever know. Nabhan also pointed out that the Seri language is its own phylum, related to no other known language. 

I’ve been aiming my microphones at sources of audible expressions of the consciousness of our planet since 1964, and have thus gained the finest education I could possibly imagine. My aural history archive now contains thousands of hours of recordings of music, the spoken word, many diverse habitats throughout the North American Southwest and beyond—the myriad sounds recalling the half-century timespan of the spirit of place that pervades this region of the planet. I recently donated my extensive aural history archive to the New Mexico History Museum, where funding is presently being sought to make this digital archive available to the public.

I call it aural history because that term has a much broader sense of integrated perspective than oral history, which is linear. The practice of aural history is the process of compilation of recorded sound that may result in a great compendium of perspectives during a period of time in a geographic region. 

Like the birds of the Sonoran biophany and the Seri Indians’ embodying song traditions, my aural histories seek to capture the interconnected wholeness of cultures in Nature. I’ve been fortunate to be able to do so in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado; in the Navajo Nation, the greater Southwest, the American West, and the Colorado River Watershed, among other places. During my explorations, I’ve encountered the themes of rootedness, connection, and the commons. These themes have served as a great network that unites these aural histories, cohering many wholes into one. 

In 1975, I was fortunate to receive the first of several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to record Hispano folksongs throughout New Mexico and southern Colorado. One of the stipulations to receiving the grants was that I had to somehow put the music back into the culture. Thus I became a radio producer, and my first series of 149 thirty-minute programs was entitled La Música de los Viejitos. This series ran on KUNM and other public radio stations in New Mexico and Colorado for several years. To date, I’ve now recorded between three and four thousand Hispano folksongs, as well as folksongs from Anglo, Basque, and various Native American cultures. It’s taught me the extent to which music roots culture to homeland. 

Then, in 1982, I was approached by faculty members at the University of New Mexico and citizens of the Navajo Nation to produce a three-part documentary radio series addressing the relocation of around seven thousand Navajos from their traditional homeland. In 1974, The U.S. Congress passed Public Law 93-531 that would settle what many regarded to be a land dispute between Hopi and Navajo Indians, and thus divide a land area of 1.8 million acres on Big Mountain jointly used by both tribes. This resulted in the relocation of Navajo Indians from their traditional homelands. Many Indians and non-Indians alleged that this would actually open up this mineral-rich land to corporate resource extractors, as happened in the late 1960s and seventies on Black Mesa.

This harks back to the days of Manifest Destiny in the mid-nineteenth century, when the U.S. government rounded up and marched eight thousand Navajos to Bosque Redondo, where they were incarcerated alongside Mescalero Apaches for four long years. Although this year celebrates the 150th anniversary of the 1868 treaty that allowed the Navajos to return to their homeland from Bosque Redondo, the Navajos were still vulnerable to similar forced relocations, however different the era and the stated rationale. 

I spent several months travelling throughout the region of Big Mountain in northern Arizona, interviewing traditional Navajos who faced unwilling relocation. The most successful of the three radio programs I produced was called Monster in Dinétah; the monster was the U.S. government. 

One person I interviewed was Roberta Blackgoat, a highly venerated woman who helped lead the resistance against Navajo relocation. I spent an afternoon walking with her as she herded her flock of sheep and goats. After we had shepherded them into a corral for the night, she invited me into her hogan (the traditional circular Navajo living structure). We sat and drank coffee while I recorded her through evening’s twilight. She had this to say: 

My great-great-grandmother is buried on this side just a little ways from wherever you’ve been herding sheep. And my next great-grandmother’s buried right across the canyon here. And my grandmother, I saw her when I was about six years old and she died. She’s buried on the south side of here. Some of her children are buried here. And us grandkids, my sister and brothers are buried around here too, and my children and also my grandchildren. So I just couldn’t say I’m going to leave or I need to be relocated. I can’t do it. My roots are just about that big, maybe three or four down deep, so they can’t be pulled out. … I’ll just load up my gun and then walk out towards them if they start coming to me.

In 1984, I received a grant to produce yet another radio series entitled Southwest Sound Collage. I’d already begun conducting recorded interviews in anticipation of this series. On January 1, 1983, I returned with my compañero, noted author Ed Abbey, to his writing cabin from a weeklong camping trip in the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix, when we decided to record him ruminating on what life had revealed so far. His book of essays, Desert Solitaire, and his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang had catapulted him into a growing coterie of hardcore environmentalists who were intent on protecting the North American Southwest from further extraction of natural resources. Abbey considered himself an anarchist and a naturist. He regarded pantheism as a far wiser spiritual path than monotheism.

He said:

I consider myself an absolute egalitarian. I think that all human beings are essentially equal, deserve equal regard and consideration. Certainly, everyone differs in ability. Some people are bigger, stronger; some are smarter; some are more clever with their hands; others are more clever with their brains. There’s an infinite variation in talent and ability and intelligence among individual humans, but I think that all, except the most depraved—violently criminally insane—generals and dictators—are of equal value. There’s another basis for this kind of egalitarianism. Just by virtue of being alive, we deserve to be respected as individuals. Furthermore, that respect for the value of each human being should be extended to each living thing on the planet. … We can and must learn to love the wild animals, the mountain lions and the rattlesnakes and the coyotes, the buffalo and the elephants, as we do our pets. And developing that way, extend our ability to love to include plant life. A tree, a shrub, a blade of grass deserves respect and sympathy as fellow living things. I think you can go even beyond that to respect the rocks, the air, the water. Because each is part of a whole …

It was after I produced this thirteen-part series of half-hour programs that I asked Ed to critique them. He listened to the entire series twice, and then said that the interviews should be compiled into a book. He introduced me to the folks at Harbinger House Press in Tucson, and thus my first book, Headed Upstream: Interviews With Iconoclasts was published in 1989, shortly after Abbey perished at the age of sixty-two years and forty-five days.

I think of Headed Upstream as a book of friends, because almost everyone in that book was indeed a friend, some of whom are still with us. Anna Sofaer spoke of her Sun Dagger work at Chaco Canyon. John Nichols landed hard on capitalism. Gary Snyder addressed the concept of bioregionalism. John Fife revealed why he started the Sanctuary Movement for political refugees from Central America. Dave Foreman talked of Earth First! Doug Peacock spoke of his life as a Green Beret medic during the Vietnam War. Garrett Hardin articulated the concepts that went into his seminal essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Philip Whalen discussed the genesis of the Beat Generation. Stewart Udall addressed the ethical considerations he had faced as secretary of the interior. The great historian of Native American issues, Alvin Josephy, addressed the provocative question, “It’s not that will Indians vanish, but will Indian-ness vanish?”

Creating this book firmly placed me on course as an aural historian, one that provided me with a means of following my fascinations. Then in 1995, I was awarded a grant from the Ruth Mott Foundation to produce a radio series entitled The Spirit of Place. I loaded my recording equipment and camping gear into the camper on the back of my old Chevy pickup truck and headed out. I was on the road for four months and travelled throughout the American West interviewing American Indians of many tribes.

Mylie Lawyer, a Nez Perce matriarch living in Lapwai, Idaho, told me this story: When her grandfather was a boy, he and his friend were out playing when they saw what they first thought was a buffalo herd coming toward them from the east. They’d caught the first glimpse of the Lewis and Clark expedition about to pass through the homeland of the Nez Perce Indians. 

Sharon Dick, a Nez Perce fisherwoman who caught salmon in the traditional fashion from her vantage on the Columbia River, worried that with the coming of dams, the salmon would one day cease to run and thus deprive her people of their spiritual sustenance.

Ed Edmo, a Warm Springs Indian who lived in The Dalles, Oregon, told me how he had watched the waters of the mighty Columbia be stoppered by the dam that resulted in the flooding over of a meeting ground where members of many tribes had traditionally gathered annually for countless generations.

A California Indian basket-weaver who wished to remain anonymous told me that she was thwarted by a forest ranger as she gathered those grasses specific to the type of baskets that her family had woven for many generations, a practice now forbidden by some rule or regulation. She rued the fact that the ranger had no understanding of the intrinsic nature of this habitat.

I also recorded Vernon Masayesva, a Hopi Indian who had served as supervisor to the Hopi schools, and later as chairman of the Hopi Tribal Council. He told me part of the creation story of how the Hopi people first emerged into this world through the Sipapuni near the confluence of the Little Colorado and Colorado Rivers. They wandered about the dry desert until they arrived in what was to become their homeland, after consulting with Massau, a spiritual being who provided them with seeds of corn, a gourd of water, and a digging stick. Thus the Hopis affiliated with their homeland on the three southern promontories of Black Mesa. Their village of Old Oraibi is regarded as the oldest continuously inhabited village in the coterminous United States.

The more I spoke with these Native peoples, the more I came to understand that the monoculture into which I had been born had lost touch with our species’ place in the flow of Nature.

In 2001, my friend Craig Newbill, then the director of the New Mexico Humanities Council, introduced me to members of the humanities councils of the seven states that withdrew waters from the Colorado River. They were submitting a grant proposal to be administered by the Arizona Humanities Council to the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a traveling exhibition addressing the history of the apportioning of the Colorado River, a long-term project begun in 1922 that became known as “The Law of the River.” I was asked to write an additional proposal to produce a radio series to both enhance the exhibition and reach a radio audience. Subsequently I was provided with funding from both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation to produce a six-part radio series entitled Moving Waters: The Colorado River and the West. This was for me the equivalent of going after a graduate degree in water law in the arid West.

I travelled throughout the Colorado River Watershed, visiting the headwaters of the Green, San Juan and Colorado Rivers, and even paddled a rented canoe near the Colorado River delta in the Sea of Cortez where river water now rarely flows. I interviewed 75 people, including Native people, various agency bureaucrats, environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, politicians, water lawyers, and two former secretaries of the interior. I entered into the bowels of the Hoover Dam that former Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation Floyd Dominy regarded as “the Taj Mahal of engineering.” (It was Dominy who was responsible for the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, the most contested dam in America.)

I interviewed another close friend, William deBuys, a fine writer and scholar who provided me with an excellent overview of the enormous significance of the many issues that comprise the bigger picture of what the Colorado River represents in Western American culture. Bill went on to write A Great Aridness, a provocative book that introduces us to the profound consequences of global warming and climate instability due to ever-rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

By now, I have engaged in far more aural history projects than I can recount here. But each one has contributed to my greater understanding over this last half-century. The North American Southwest is my homeland through which I continue to range to thus learn what I can.

As mentioned earlier, I recorded a conversation with Garrett Hardin wherein he described to me his thinking that resulted in his 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” His subsequent essay, “An Ecolate View of the Human Predicament,” was brought to my attention one December day when Ed Abbey and I were hiking though the Sonoran Desert. Abbey and Hardin had become pen pals, and when we returned from our hike, Abbey loaned me the Scientific American in which Hardin’s most recent essay had appeared. As chance would have it, I was soon in Santa Barbara, where he lived, and I interviewed him. 

I asked him to review what he had said in his most recent essay. In Hardin’s own words: 

…If we start talking about global resources as if they are globally owned by everybody, and everybody should have access to them on the basis of their perceived need, we will have created a global commons. My point being that we must not create a global commons, however well-intentioned we are. Instead, it is better to continue a system based on private property, which in this instance means national property—nations being the only large organizations that can enforce their own laws—to continue to consider the globe as divided into numerous nations. Each nation has to take care of its own property. If it doesn’t do a good job, it will suffer for it.

What interested me most about Hardin’s thinking was his focus on the commons: as a reservoir of natural resources to be extracted for human use that needed to be privatized as part of the global economic standard. I find the International Journal of the Commons’ definition of this term to be most apt: “The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.” Hardin’s interpretation seems to me to be a perspective restricted to a standard forwarded by corporate capitalism that remains the prevailing standard that shapes modern monocultural attitudes. This continues to rankle even thirty-five years after our interview. 

Subsequently, my daughter Peregrina and I interviewed Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize for economics for her book, Governing the Commons. This is her reply to Garrett Hardin’s thesis regarding the commons:

The work we’ve been doing in recent times in terms of moving beyond this—we’re not rejecting this but moving beyond—is showing that when you model individuals as having richer preference functions, limited knowledge but ability to learn, that they’re willing to engage in cooperative action if they trust the others involved. And trust has become, in our research now, a really key link. Garrett Hardin, for example, doesn’t use the word anywhere in what he wrote. … If people have rules imposed on them, and they don’t trust the process that generated those rules and don’t think they’re appropriate, they’ll cheat whenever they can.

I asked Ostrom if she concurred with the Russian anarchist, philosopher, and scientist Peter Kropotkin, who forwarded the notion that evolution of species and human culture owed more to mutual cooperation than mutual antagonism. She vigorously responded affirmatively. However, in all fairness, Hardin had pointed out in his original essay that collective access to the commons works only until the population grows too great.

The concept of the commons has remained in the forefront of my own thinking for many years. In 2010, while working on an aural history project entitled “Thinking Like a Watershed/Watersheds As Commons,” I asked my late great friend Rina Swentzell, a native of the Santa Clara Pueblo, what she considered to be the commons.

Rina responded: 

From a Pueblo point of view, the commons is everything. It is the context that we live in. The community was always thought of as being whole. Everything was interconnected. There was always a center to it as well, and I was a center and you were a center. There were many centers as a part of the whole thing. There are so many simultaneous things that can happen at once, which is all part of the commons. The wind is blowing, the water’s flowing, and we’re actually walking around and talking. It’s all part of this idea of what we all share. It’s that notion of sharing.

In that Pueblo context, then, the focus was always, what is it that surrounds me? We felt that it was the earth, the sky, the clouds, the wind, and that incredible term that we have that for me says it all: it’s the p’o-wa-ha—it’s the water-wind-breath, the thing that we’re feeling right now. And that connects, it moves through our entire world in such a way that it connects everybody and everything. That becomes the commons in a sense. What is that blowing through the window right now that’s giving us all vitality actually? That’s the flow of life. It’s the ultimate of what is common to every living being. What do we have in common with the trees, with the rocks, with all of that that makes our life what it is today?

Swentzell’s Puebloan perspective is absolutely on the mark. What do we have in common with creation? Everything. Indeed, we are part of the commons. We are part of the flow of Nature, not separate from the flow of Nature. From this perspective, every living entity through time has both shared in and contributed to the commons. The commons does not exist exclusively for human use. 

This has led me to consider the notion that indeed, human consciousness is itself a commons. Every culture is shaped by the prevailing system of shared attitudes; a single cultural system of shared attitudes is shaped by its concurrent system of biases. In other words, the American culture of the present is largely shaped by a paradigm based on economic growth, largely to the exclusion of ecologically sound principles. The common pool resources to which Hardin and Ostrom refer are finite and will soon run out “once the population has grown too great.” As Abbey aptly noted, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Over these last fifty-some odd years, I have engaged in the practice of aural history. I have listened to the perspectives and points of view of many people from many distinct cultures. While I have interviewed many who were shaped by today’s global mono-culture, I have also spoken with many more of diverse cultural perspectives. Thus I have been made privy to an astonishing diversity of human insight. I have engaged in deep conversation with Hispanos, Basques, and indigenous people: Hopis, Navajos, Tewas, Keresans, Nez Perce, Tohono O’odham, Chiricahua Apaches, Utes, and Yaquis, many if not most of whom still retain their inherited sense of traditional practices and values. Most of these folks have been shaped in large measure by the nature of their respective homelands, by their home ecosystems, watersheds, bioregions. I have been allowed to listen to a wondrously wide range of collective wisdom and have come to the conclusion that without the great expanse of diversity of perspective, we are excluding levels of consciousness that are vital to our own continuity.

This long aural history journey has led me to the realization that I must do one more project: a multi-part radio series and anthology entitled Restoring Indigenous Mindfulness Within the Commons of Human Consciousness. We are part of Nature’s continuum, and we must come to realize that intuitively. As my friend Camillus Lopez, the great Tohono O’odham lore-master, once said to me:

“If we look at Nature and do not see ourselves in it, then we are too far away.” 

Jack Loeffler has produced more than four hundred documentary radio programs based on his original recordings, authored or co-authored eight books, written dozens of essays for diverse publications, and has produced numerous sound collages for major museums including the Museum of International Folk Art and the New Mexico History Museum. In 2017 and early 2018, he co-curated, with Meredith Davidson, the Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest exhibition at the New Mexico History Museum.

Back to the Future

100 years in, the Museum of Art is reinventing itself in a way that echoes its earliest objective

By Alison Swing and Kate Nelson

For Mary Kershaw, all it took was one sight of brick walls soaring up to an industrial-style ceiling. For Mike Halpin, it was the old-time freight elevator with a pull-down gate and three buttons: up, down, and stop. For Stuart Ashman, it was empty space.

Ashman’s Halpin Building remembrance starts in 2005, with a cabinet meeting in then-Governor Bill Richardson’s office. The General Services Department reported that it had an empty building on its hands over in Santa Fe’s Railyard District. Ashman, then secretary of the Department of Cultural Affairs, immediately raised his hand. “What do you want?” Richardson asked, feigning annoyance. “I want the building,” Ashman answered. “I want to make a contemporary wing for the Museum of Art.” Richardson laughed. “You’re an empire builder,” he told Ashman, but then added: “Give it to him.”

From that quick exchange, the longtime warehouse’s fortunes budged just a bit. It still endured more than a decade of sundry storage needs and office nooks. But as the Museum of Art marks its 100th year, it looks a few blocks to the south and west, where a blocky building with all the charm of a shoebox nearly missed its chance at redemption. Thanks to the recent gift of $4 million from Santa Fe philanthropists Robert and Ellen Vladem,  along with many other philanthropic contributions, the Museum of New Mexico’s fundraising goals and the $12.5 million target for the project is getting nearer, and it’s on its way to renovation into the Vladem Contemporary, fulfilling a long-held goal of “one museum, two locations.” 

Before ground can be broken on interior improvements, along with a sleekly designed addition that will swoop up and over it, let’s explore the history of a neglected building on a busy corner. It all started with the railroad and an odd alignment of tracks—one set for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe’s spur line from Lamy (now used by the Rail Runner), and a since-removed narrow-gauge set for the old Chili Line that ran to Española, Chama, and Antonito, Colorado. The tracks roughly formed two sides of a triangle, and between them, the Charles Ilfeld Company saw an opportunity. Longtime purveyors of what its founder called “everything”—clothes, dishes, groceries, ranch equipment, cattle, beans, sheep, and most especially, wool—the company built a warehouse there, at the intersection of Montezuma and Guadalupe streets, in 1936 or 1937. It gained terrific rail access, north to south. But its timing couldn’t have been worse.

Ilfeld, a 19th-century Jewish immigrant from Germany, had died in 1929, whereupon the empire passed to his business partner and brother-in-law, Max Nordhaus. But he died in 1935. A leadership vacuum in the middle of the Depression was bad enough, but competing economics clouded the horizon—namely, supermarkets. Other warehousing and distribution firms sprang up to serve the new and improved Piggly-Wigglys of the Southwest, biting off valuable portions of the Ilfeld Company. It moved into hardware for a while, but even that didn’t last. The Ilfeld warehouse cleared out in the late 1950s. A bottling plant briefly moved in. (Historians haven’t been able to pin down which it was; a Coca Cola plant sat nearby, but it dated to the 1920s.) 

In 1960, the State Archives hired Joseph F. Halpin as its first director of records. His initial task: Find a place for all those records. At the time, the storage was about to burst the state’s Bataan Memorial Building at its seams. Halpin latched onto the old warehouse, and while his children, including young Mike, finished their school year in Albuquerque, he finalized its purchase by the state and oversaw a box-by-box move. A clunky old freight elevator and a loading dock that faced a corner of what would eventually become prime real estate were just what the overburdened archives needed to efficiently move and manage its mandate.

That summer, Halpin’s young family joined him in Santa Fe. Mike recalls running around the warehouse with his younger sister, Mary Jo. They loved playing with the elevator, in part because “you had to get pretty good to get it to stop level.” His dad kept relocating his own office within the space as more records moved in, but he always seemed to gravitate back to the north end: a later, off-kilter addition to the building that emphasizes the original footprint’s alignment to diagonal tracks that no longer exist. The addition sits square to the street pattern that came later and, today, forms the least attractive part of the complex, both inside and out. 

Upon Joseph Halpin’s death in 1985, the building took on his name—and continued taking on boxes of records. By the 1990s, it was crammed. Not only that, but the roof leaked, the heating and cooling faltered, and public access was compromised. A state bond election approved funding for a new building in the South Capitol Complex. In 1996, the Halpin name stayed, but the archives moved. For the next nine years, a variety of state agencies and even a few city departments used the old hulk for office space, until that fateful cabinet meeting in 2005.

“When I was director of the Museum of Art in the 1990s, we had designed an expansion for it on Sheridan Street, to the west of the museum,” Ashman says. “Contemporary art museums sort of arose at the end of the last century. SITE Santa Fe was built. Chicago did one. But changing anything in downtown Santa Fe? Well, you know the joke: How many Santa Feans does it take to change a light bulb? Six. One to change it, and five to say how nice it was before you changed it.”

His Sheridan Street addition failed the historic-preservation gauntlet. But the Halpin? “It was kind of a great deal,” Ashman says. “I’m an alternative-space kind of guy. I saw it and thought, ‘We could just paint the walls and let the artists go crazy in here.’” 

First, though, the Palace of the Governors had a crisis on its hands. Its historical collection was stored in the old Armory Building on Lincoln Avenue, and it needed to move so that the building could be razed in order to build the New Mexico History Museum. The Halpin’s vast basement was ideal. Then, a flood at La Villa Rivera—the old St. Vincent’s Hospital and today’s Drury Plaza Hotel, on East Palace Avenue—damaged state archaeological collections held there. Halpin’s main floor provided a high and dry perch for them, along with some part-time office space for a few staffers. “If anyone had bothered to inspect it,” says Eric Blinman, director of the Office of Archaeological Studies, “it would have been red-tagged as unfit for human occupation. The heating and cooling was problematic, to put it mildly. But it was the only space in town—literally.”

State employment had boomed, feeding a competitive hunt among agencies in need of room. Julia Clifton, director of the Laboratory of Anthropology, remembers pleasant summers in the Halpin—the high ceilings and brick walls in the storage area stayed reasonably cool. “But in the winter, there was no heat,” she says. “You didn’t like to spend much time in there. There were a lot of things we liked about it. You could just pull up to the loading dock and roll things in. But no heat was a hard thing to get around.”

“The weakest part,” Blinman says, “was probably that most recent addition, the office tacked onto the northwest side.” Walk through that portion today and you might think you’re in a pennywise parish office. It feels flimsy and still bears the ethos of a 1970s decorating binge. But as for the rest of the Halpin, Blinman says, “The bones are good. It was incredibly well-built.”

Enter Mary Kershaw. When the director of the Museum of Art first visited the Halpin, she recalls that the east side of the building with filled with roller racks, each one stacked with archaeological artifacts. Planning had begun for the New Mexico Museum of Art’s centennial, which involved a remembrance of the building’s inception, before its November 1917 grand opening. Intended to hold the newest in locally produced contemporary art, the Museum of Art was inspired by the historic adobe church at Acoma Pueblo, in a way that would establish Santa Fe Style as a thing. Kershaw felt a 100-year convergence taking root. The museum’s collection had grown beyond its storage space. With the passage of time, the contemporary became the historic, and the building just didn’t have room to show the latest standouts. Some pieces were too big. Others felt at odds with the older architecture.

During that planning, Kershaw again visited the Halpin, mostly to check out its storage potential. The rolling racks of artifacts had moved to the new Center for Archaeological Studies on Santa Fe’s western edge. “This beautiful, two-story industrial-size space stood before me,” she says. “I looked at it, and it spoke to me. It really did. It said, ‘Mary, I am not storage only. I am your contemporary art space.’ And I didn’t disagree.”

Everything about its location seemed right. The Department of Cultural Affairs already owned it, but if it sold, the money would go back to the General Services Department. Finding a DCA purpose for it made sense. It stood on a prominent corner, right next to where the Rail Runner disembarks, near the Jean Cocteau arthouse cinema. Contemporary galleries have blossomed around it (and, sometimes, chafed at its rundown appearance). The New Mexico School for the Arts will soon move nearby, to the old Sanbusco Center. But this building was created for storage and, throughout its life, used mainly for that. Turning it into a people-friendly, event-welcoming gallery would require more than a few nips and tucks.

 In an open competition for architects, an Albuquerque partnership stood out. DNCA + Studio GP’s plan recommends tearing off both the northern addition and a smaller one on the south side. In their place, two-story additions will rise, then reach across the Halpin’s length as a bridge. The designs retain both of the building’s orientations—to the old narrow-gauge tracks and to the modern streets—and creates room for a second gallery, an education space, artist studios, offices, and an expansive open-air patio. A second, ground-floor patio will appeal to train riders, possibly with the addition of a café with light fare. Visitors could walk through the length of the main building or enter galleries on the east side where, unfortunately, most of the brick must disappear. “You can’t hang art on bricks,” Kershaw says ruefully. “We’ll preserve as much of it as we can.”

The design invites light into the building, filtering it where necessary, but altogether crafting a sense of place entirely foreign to the building’s 80-year history as a hunkered-down, nondescript storage unit. “This will be the first time where the balance of the building’s purpose changes,” Kershaw says. “It’s not just about stuff. It’s about learning and engagement.”

For Blinman, who endured the building at its worst, that’s welcome news. “We made it through that scarcity, and now there’s this new use that none of us could have predicted,” he says. “They managed to hang on long enough for something good to happen.”

Thanks to the Vladems’ major contribution, the building will bear their name, but Joseph Halpin’s legacy will also be recognized in some fashion, which pleases his family. “We’re happy the building’s being put to good use,” Mike Halpin says. Besides, he adds, Santa Feans have a funny way of noting landmarks by what they used to be. “For a lot of people, until we all die off, it’ll still be the Halpin Building.”

Alison Swing works is a former ranger at Lincoln Historic Site, part of the New Mexico Historic Sites division of New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. She earned a BA in history from the University of Washington and an MS in historic preservation from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kate Nelson (opens in a new tab) is a longtime New Mexico journalist who retired as managing editor of New Mexico Magazine where she earned numerous awards from the International Regional Magazine Association.

Chief of Hearts

By Marcus Amerman
BY MARCUS AMERMAN   

I create many things in beadwork, but of all the things I bead, I appreciate making bead portraits of my heroes the most. My particular style of rendering faces and imagery in sewn beadwork was born out of respect for the hero—specifically conceived, developed and honed with the intention of honoring the subject of the beadwork through their faithful depiction in size-13 glass beads. This attitude towards my process found itself ideally suited when I was commissioned in 2002 to create a memorial portrait of someone I personally knew as a great leader, mentor, and friend: Lloyd Kiva New. I see my “photobeadalism” as created to honor those who led, taught, created, and lived for their people. Lloyd was such a person.Just ask my mom.

My mother, Harriet Amerman, 91, was Lloyd’s student during World War II, and fondly remembers, “He taught me art in high school at the Phoenix Indian School. I always chose his class because he was so funny. He was always nice, and friendly, and funny. He liked to crack jokes!”

Or you can ask my cousin, Linda Lomahaftewa, professor of painting at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) for forty years. “I took a textile and fabric design class from him when I went to high school at IAIA. He was always encouraging. He could tell you what was great about your art, and also what needed exploration or direction in a way that didn’t make you feel criticized. It was always encouraging for me.”

I could tell you how supportive he was of fashion, and of our IAIA fashion performance group, NATIVE INFLUX, and how he loaned us the use of his home for two weeks to help us prepare for a fashion show at the opening of the IAIA’s Museum  of Contemporary Native Arts. Or I could tell you how he would always come to your opening, show, performance, or booth, and be delighted…and tell you why. He was a champion of contemporary Native American art, and I think he saw the arts as a faultless mirror, reflecting the life and health of a people. “No arts, no culture,” he would say. He cared about the fate of his people.

Lloyd was a chief. Lloyd was my chief, and I think his place of importance in the history of contemporary Native American art is unique and stellar, like some sort of cosmic collision that creates planets and moons. Maybe that’s why I put a spiral galaxy and the Eagle Nebula on the fabric of the jacket that Lloyd wears in my beaded portrait of him. He saw the big picture, he was the big picture, and that’s why I made it look as if you could see through him to a bigger, better world.

Lloyd was a charismatic leader, and he was a warrior chief. He was at the forefront of the battle. He was wise. He was a teacher of warriors…and created a school for them. Lloyd taught me that success in our Indian art world required a combination of creativity and bravery: creativity to innovate the idea that can take our people a little further, and bravery to actually do the thing. Creativity is the plan, but bravery is the execution. And bravery isn’t fearlessness or a lack of fear, but rather it is clear-eyed acknowledgement of the fear, danger, and consequences, along with the will to go beyond fear.

I think this idea occurred to me when, after Lloyd’s death, there was a gathering at MIAC of all Lloyd’s favorite Indian Artists. Shonto Begay, Margarete Bagshaw Tindell, the Naminghas, and the Romero brothers were in attendance, and I thought, “These are all my favorite artists, too.” They were innovators, iconoclasts, groundbreakers, and culture heroes, spanning many years of Native artistic expression. I don’t think anyone there had a day job. They were all obviously and spectacularly committed to their art. They were all like clan leaders of their artistic mediums, comfortable with each other in the larger context of the tribe we call Indian art.

He had the most chiefly of digs, as well. He occupied a palatial hilltop adobe mansion that served as his war shirt, but instead of war deeds painted on hide, it had wonderful works of art on its walls that were all accompanied with a tale of the artist, and all ended with the artist giving the piece to Lloyd out of respect. It was an honor to be invited to Lloyd’s for one of his lavish parties, and there was always a chance that you might meet a personal hero or famous person from the national or international stage. I put the sunset in the background of Lloyd’s beaded portrait because I remembered how beautiful Santa Fe sunsets were from his house.

Lloyd felt like family to me. I didn’t have a grandfather growing up, but if I could have chosen a grandfather, it would’ve been him. I was fortunate enough to reintroduce him and his student, my mother, after a fifty-year gap, at an Indian Market in Santa Fe. The joy of that kind of recognition after so many years, and the realization that no one was ever that far apart was cathartic. It made me feel like Lloyd was one of those eagles who took me under his wing and helped teach me to fly and feed myself without my necessarily knowing that I was learning. He was my chief. He was a man of the people. That’s what they do.

My mom recently told me, “One time, we went on a field trip to Mr. New’s store in Scottsdale, and my sister Mary said, ‘Oh, this is such a pretty dress!’ Lloyd had overheard them and said, ‘It’s got a pretty price tag on it, too!’” She said they all laughed. That sounds like Lloyd. He always brought much humor and frivolity to the table. He was enthusiastic and young at heart and always somehow seemed perpetually hip. He made it seem easy, like heroes do.

I’ve been fortunate in this lifetime to have met some of my heroes: the Dalai Lama, Cesar Chavez, Jesse Jackson, and Suzanne Harjo. In my opinion, he’s right up there with all of them. They all exuded the same energy. They all had a peaceful, joyful and powerful presence, but Lloyd…Lloyd was my chief.

Marcus Amerman is a beadworker and multi-media artist from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. He resides in Kooskia, Idaho.

Marcus Amerman (opens in a new tab) is a beadworker and multi-media artist from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. He resides in Kooskia, Idaho.

Straight Back to Our Own Country

How a Navajo shaman negotiated with one of America’s most legendary generals for his tribe’s survival

By Hampton Sides
BY HAMPTON SIDES

This story accompanies Esther G. Belin’s poem, “The Petition(-ing, er) of Peace(-ful)(mak -ing, -er).”

At the War Department, Kit Carson met with generals Phil Sheridan and William Sherman. Sherman was preparing to travel west as part of a special commission to make treaties with numerous tribes. Among other ambitious projects, he and his fellow commissioners would be visiting New Mexico to consider closing down Bosque Redondo. During their visit in Washington, Sherman in all likelihood discussed the Navajo predicament with Carson. 

There is some evidence that Carson had slowly come to recognize the massive failure of the Bosque. Having now successfully created a reservation for the Utes in their own homeland, perhaps Carson had come to see the wisdom of allowing the Navajos to return to their native country as well.

On a bright morning in late May, the same week that Kit Carson died, several thousand Diné gathered on the plains of Bosque Redondo, away from the Pecos, out on the hard, bright ground where they could all see one another. A chant rose up from their midst, a song that slowly built on itself as the collective energy took hold. Then, the Navajos began to clack stones together, and a clear pulse ran through the tribe.

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The sound of the clicking rocks puzzled the soldiers over at Fort Sumner. At first they feared it was the first stirrings of an insurrection, and they climbed to the rooftops of the Issue House to investigate. 

The Navajos had formed a circle several miles in diameter, so large that any person standing on the circumference could look across the plains and see only tiny human dots on the circle’s opposite side. Then, taking small, measured steps, they began to close the ring. As they stepped forward, the Navajos continued to chant and clack their rocks. Slowly, the circle began to shrink on the plain, tightening like a great noose. 

In the center, a young coyote stood up and began to run in fright. As the circle closed up, the coyote ran frantically this way and that, until it finally understood it had nowhere to go: It was trapped inside a human corral.

Whether out of sheer terror or an instinct to feign death, the coyote lay down. Then Barboncito, the small, bearded medicine man from Canyon de Chelly, stepped inside the circle and approached the trembling animal. Several others helped him hold the coyote down. Barboncito opened his medicine bag and removed a bead of abalone shell. Carefully, he placed the white bead in the coyote’s mouth and began to pray over the animal. 

The chanting and the percussion of the rocks stopped, and in the silence, each person on the circumference slowly backpedaled: The great noose was opening up again. 

Barboncito was keen to see in which direction the coyote would run. That was the purpose of the ceremony, in fact. It was an ancient ritual, one that Navajo medicine men performed only in extreme circumstances, to look for signs that concerned the future of the tribe.

Suddenly Barboncito and the others pulled away, and the coyote sprang up. It looked confused at first. And then it turned in the direction Barboncito had hoped. The coyote bolted across the thickets of cholla and mesquite, and escaped from the confines of the human circle. 

It was running headlong toward the west.

A few days later, on May 28, 1868, General William Sherman arrived at Bosque Redondo with his entourage from the Great Peace Commission. He must have known that his friend Kit Carson had died five days earlier. Sherman understood that with Carson’s passing, an era had ended and a new one had begun. Carson helped to put the Navajos here, and now Sherman had the authority to undo what his friend had done. Sherman was no softhearted advocate for the Indians, but he could see that the reservation was an abject failure, that the Navajos were despondent and the farms fallow. “I found the Bosque a mere spot of grass in the midst of a wild desert,” he later wrote, “and that the Navajos had sunk into a condition of absolute poverty and despair.”

General Sherman joined the other members of the commission in one of the buildings on the grounds of Bosque Redondo. There they met a small delegation of Navajo headmen, led by Barboncito and Manuelito. Two Spanish interpreters translated the proceedings, and army stenographers recorded everything. 

General Sherman rose and spoke first. “The Commissioners are here now for the purpose of learning all about your condition. General Carleton removed you here for the purpose of making you agriculturalists. But we find you have no farms, no herds, and are now as poor as you were four years ago. We want to know what you have done in the past and what you think about your reservation here.”

Barboncito stood up to answer for the Navajos. He had great poise, a calmness at the center of his being. But an unmistakable passion also rose from his words and gestures.

“We have been living here five winters,” he said. “The first year we planted corn. It yielded a good crop, but a worm got in the corn and destroyed nearly all of it. The second year the same. The third year it grew about two feet high when a hailstorm completely destroyed all of it. For that reason none of us has attempted to put in seed this year. I think now it is true what my forefathers told me about crossing the line of my own country. We know this land does not like us. It seems that whatever we do here causes death.”

Barboncito then explained to Sherman his aversion to the prospect of moving to a new reservation in Oklahoma. “Our grandfathers had no idea of living in any other country except our own, and I do not think it right for us to do so. I hope to God you will not ask me to go to any other country except my own. This hope goes in at my feet and out at my mouth as I am speaking to you.”

Sherman was visibly touched by Barboncito’s words. “I have listened to what you have said of your people, and I believe you have told the truth. All people love the country where they were born and raised. We want to do what is right. We have got a map here which if Barboncito can understand, I would like to show him a few points on.” It was a map of Navajo country, showing the four sacred mountains and other landmarks Barboncito immediately recognized. 

Sherman continued, “If we agree, we will make a boundary line outside of which you must not go except for the purpose of trading. You must know exactly where you belong. And you must not fight anymore. The Army will do the fighting. You must live at peace.”

Barboncito tried to contain his joy but could not. The tears spilled down over his mustache. “I am very well pleased with what you have said,” he told Sherman, “and we are willing to abide by whatever orders are issued to us.” 

He told Sherman that he had already sewn a new pair of moccasins for the walk home. “We do not want to go to the right or left,” he said, “but straight back to our own country!”

A few days later, on June 1, a treaty was drawn up. The Navajos agreed to live on a new reservation whose borders were considerably smaller than their traditional lands, with all four of the sacred mountains outside the reservation line. Still, it was a vast domain, nearly twenty-five thousand square miles, an area nearly the size of the state of Ohio. After Barboncito, Manuelito, and the other headmen left their X marks on the treaty, Sherman told the Navajos they were free to go home.

June 18 was set as the departure date. The Navajos would have an army escort to feed and protect them. But some of them were so restless to get started that the night before they were to leave, they hiked ten miles in the direction of home, and then circled back to camp—they were so giddy with excitement they couldn’t help themselves. 

The next morning the trek began. In yet another mass exodus, this one voluntary and joyful, the entire Navajo Nation began marching the nearly four hundred miles toward home. The straggle of exiles spread out over ten miles. Somewhere in the midst of it walked Barboncito, wearing his new moccasins. 

When they reached the Rio Grande and saw Blue Bead Mountain for the first time, the Navajos fell to their knees and wept. As Manuelito put it, “We wondered if it was our mountain, and we felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so.”

They continued marching in the direction the coyote had run, toward the country they had told their young children so much about. And as they marched, they chanted—

Beauty before us

Beauty behind us

Beauty around us

In beauty we walk

It is finished in beauty 

Hampton Sides is an American historian, author, and journalist. This excerpt from Blood and Thunder was reprinted with the author’s permission. Sides’ account of the discussion between Sherman and Barboncito is taken from United States, Proceedings of the Great Peace Commission of 1867–1868.

Hampton Sides (opens in a new tab) is best-known for his gripping non-fiction adventure stories set in war or depicting epic expeditions of discovery and exploration. He is an acclaimed journalist and the author of the bestselling histories Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound On His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, On Desperate Ground and, most recently, The Wide Wide Sea.