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| 5/28/2009 6:00:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article | Native celebration
Mesa Verde Indian Art Festival honors traditions, people
Hope Nealson
Journal Staff Writer
Whirling buffalo-headed Acoma dancers, a beaded "horse song" purse, hand-coiled Jemez pottery, a 10-foot-long, hand-woven Teec Nos Pos Navajo rug - descendants of Ancestral Puebloans, Utes and Navajos provided a glimpse into the ancient culture of the region at the Mesa Verde Indian Arts Festival.
From the open-air Chapin Ampitheater in Mesa Verde National Park, spectators watched the Acoma Pueblo traditional dancers perform hunter and rainbow dances throughout the weekend.
"Seven hundred years ago, it would have been just like this," said Acoma Elder, Bert Leno, who drummed. "The (hunter) dance is a prayer for the hunters to go out and kill their food - deer, bison, anything in wildlife. The girls would stay behind and sing to welcome the hunters back home to the house."
From one of 38 booths under a fluttering circus-style tent, 25-year-old Jay C. McCray staged a surprise coup for Best in Show - competing against many seasoned artists with just three years beading experience under his belt.
The Arizona State University graduate grew up painting and incorporated skills learned from his elders, like hunting for vegetable and mineral dyes with his grandmother in the Zuni Mountains.
"This festival is a really good opportunity for people to learn a lot about the Native American culture," he said. "I like how small it is here - the Heard Museum (gathering) is too big."
The artist from Gallup offered more than just beautiful beadwork, creating powerful statements such as a figure blanketed in a Navajo Chief blanket mounted on a page of the U.S. Constitution.
McCray said using the size 13 charlotte-cut beads has been an ongoing, organic process.
"I started with the blanket, and it started to naturally develop on it's own," he said, noting he got the idea for the Constitution page after he completed the beaded pouch.
"If you try to force it then it doesn't come out. It's a natural process that comes when it wants to," he said.
In "Horse Song" he was inspired by the beauty and power of horses, using the brain tan deerskin prepared by his grandfather as a canvas for his beaded pouch.
Another window into a tradition passed down from elders included 7-year-old Manuel Weahkee of Bloomfield, N.M., who took first in the youth division for the carving of his bear fetish. It was the second fetish he had ever carved.
His 10-year-old cousin, Bryson, took second. Both learned their skill from their Zuni grandfather, who was selling and educating visitors about the meanings behind the fetishes from the family booth.
"Brother bear was our guardian," Manuel Senior said. "He was put here on earth to take care of other animals."
Reviving the 300-year-old lost art tradition of the Jemez people, Joshua Madalena took first in the pottery division for his black-on-white pottery.
Using ancient coil-building and pit firing techniques, Madalena said he takes his designs such as rain clouds, water and lightning from traditional Jemez pottery, pictographs and petroglyphs - even a canteen found in the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in Albuquerque.
"I wanted to make sure to replicate the whole process," he said, noting it took him about a decade to find his specialty. "I wanted to find my own traditional art."
Madalena has been in the field of archeology and serves as a tribal advisor to the park. He said it's important to preserve the archeological heritage of the area, his ancestral home.
"If you can offer (his pottery) around the country legally, hopefully the looters will stop, because it's the desecration of our ancestral village," he said.
Navajo rugs were yet another time-honored tradition on display. Hundreds of people perused hundreds of rugs from the region to be auctioned.
Bob Payne, a Bloomfield resident who organized this and other Navajo rug auctions, said most of the rugs are put in by various trading posts in the area, especially Shiprock and Farmington.
Linda Martin, supervisory park ranger for Mesa Verde National Park, taught a Navajo rug seminar Saturday as part of the festival. She said many of the rugs display the stories and history of the Navajo, such as mythological figures like Yei or Yeibichai, holy people. Other rugs originate from special areas and become known for their geometric patterns, sometimes neutral browns, tans and grays or bright red - depending on the area - woven into geometrically patterns.
Although the ninth annual Indian Arts Market concluded last weekend, other aspects of the Mesa Verde Indian Arts festival will provide more history and culture through guided tours, dances and museum exhibits around Montezuma County through Sunday, May 31.
Reach Hope Nealson at hopen@cortezjournal.com.
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