Diné play large role at Gallup Ceremonial

There may not have even been a Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial this year if not for Navajos.

Last year during the depth of the recession, things were looking bleak indeed for the 88-year-old festival. Local businesses, the usual sponsors, were holding onto their wallets.

Finally this March, just when some were suggesting maybe the Ceremonial should take a year off, Fire Rock Navajo Casino came through with enough cash to keep it going.

As well as being a shrewd PR move, reviving the Ceremonial was good for business. Judging from the looks of Fire Rock's parking lot last weekend, Ceremonial-goers were gambling on more than the Navajo tacos at the food stands.

But it wasn't just Navajo money that kept the Ceremonial alive. Everywhere you looked around Red Rock State Park Friday, the Diné presence could be felt.

Here are a few vignettes of interesting Navajos the Times encountered at the Ceremonial.

The Go-To Guy

It was not hard to find Stewart Barton Friday. Every volunteer at the Ceremonial was separated from him by two degrees, at most.

"Mr. Barton? I just saw him over at the concession area."

"Mr. Barton? He's down at the arena."

"Mr. Barton? He's right here."

The 69-year-old board member and volunteer moves a little slower than he did 34 years ago, when he first started helping out with the Ceremonial. But he's still a blinding flash of turquoise in his official Ceremonial shirt, barking orders, lugging microphone stands, inspecting the damp earth of the arena to see if it will suck off the dancers' moccasins.

"Stew is the last of the Ceremonial icons," said Ben Welch, director of Red Rock State Park, where the Ceremonial is held. "If he left, I don't know what we'd do."

Actually, Barton is grooming a successor - more on that later - but the truth is, he is an icon. And his involvement with the Ceremonial goes back even further than the 34 years he's been volunteering.

"As a small kid, I lived right over there on Aztec Street," Barton recalled. "That's when the Ceremonial was downtown. I used to climb over or crawl under the fence to see the dancers."

One time, one of the powwow dancers lost a bell from her regalia. The young Barton picked it up and hurried after her to return it.

"Keep it," said the dancer with a heart-melting smile. Barton still has it.

It was almost like Barton was being groomed to work at the Ceremonial. When he finished high school at Fort Wingate, he went off to college in Oklahoma, where he sat in class with Kiowas, Cheyennes, Arapahos and Chickasaws.

"I got to know all their different customs, the dances that they do," Barton said. "When I got out of school (long-time Ceremonial board member) Marlon Atison said, 'Stew, you know all these people already. Why don't you become a board member?'"

Three years later, Barton talked his wife Flo into joining the board. The couple worked tirelessly, and it sometimes seemed to Barton that his avocation as Ceremonial volunteer took up more time than his day job teaching industrial arts at Fort Wingate.

The couple's children grew up with the festival, and that's why Barton isn't worried that things will fall apart if he decides to retire from his post.

Daughter Tammy helps organize the processional; daughter Trudy registers people for the parade; and son Stewart Barton III is his dad's right-hand man.

"Eventually, he's going to take over," said Barton, with as much pride in his voice as if he were turning over the family business.

The Sand Painter

In his younger days, Tom Clark of Tsé Daa Kaan Chapter studied sand painting with a local medicine man. But he found himself more interested in the medium than its curative powers.

Clark started collecting sand and doing his own paintings, dutifully avoiding the sacred images whose use is confined to ceremonies.

"Mine were more abstract," explained Clark, who is Tábaahá (Edge Water) and Tódích'íi'nii (Bitter Water) - his mom was adopted into a second clan - and born for Kiyaa'áanii (Towering House Clan).

Eventually, in quiet moments, strange characters started visiting Clark's imagination - his own personal ye'iis, if you will. His sand paintings - drizzled onto a glue-saturated background so they're permanent - are their portraits.

There's Rainmaker, for instance, with his fan for sending clouds scuttling across the sky, and Water Maiden, who looks more Hopi than Navajo with her butterfly hairstyle.

"I do borrow images from other tribes," Clark said. "I consider all Native Americans my brothers and sisters."

Clark even borrows a character from the Anasazi. A tiny Kokopelli dances in the right-hand corner of many of his works, as though trying to distract the serious-faced ye'ii.

"He's my merrymaker," Clark explained. "He reminds me to keep a positive, joyful spirit so my artwork will bring good things to the people who buy it."

The positive vibes must have influenced the Ceremonial committee, who chose Clark's sand painting "Spring Song" as the artwork for the Ceremonial poster this year.

"I've been working hard for this, and all of a sudden, it came true," Clark said. It can't hurt to have your own pantheon of Holy People.

The Very Able Artist

When a car accident left Dennis Arviso without the use of his arms or legs, he thought his life was over.

His first life, as a rodeo cowboy, was certainly over. But a second one was about to begin.

Like a lot of people with disabilities, Arviso often got left home with the kids and it was they who introduced him to his second career.

"My mom was an educator, so she always had paints around," Arviso recalled. "One day my nieces and nephews asked me, 'What do you do with these?' I said, 'Stick a paintbrush in my mouth and I'll show you.'"

To his surprise, Arviso found he could paint that way. Not only that, but he wasn't half bad.

"My accident was in 1986," said the Fort Wingate, N.M., resident. "By 1988, I was painting every day. In 1993, I entered an art contest and won first prize. After that I knew that if I could compete with artists who painted with their hands, I had something."

Arviso's work is carried by Wright's Indian Art in Albuquerque and other prestigious galleries, in addition to his own company, Arviso's Originals in Fort Wingate.

While he once rode horses, he now paints them - horses, people, hogans, imposing landscape - all part of the traditional Navajo experience.

"I pretty much stick to what I know," he said. "I could paint a feathered headdress, for example, but I'd probably get something wrong. I don't know those tribes, their ways or their symbols."

Arviso used to paint only miniatures, as he was limited by the range of motion in his neck. He recently obtained a special automatically rotating easel that allows him to work on larger canvasses.

Editor's note: A print version of this story ran in the Aug. 20, 2009, edition of the Times.

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