One of the advantages of living in this part of Indian Country is the great diversity of wildlife and other resources that the land supports. Today, of course, it’s also great for recreation and relaxation, but when the People of Red Willow first decided to build a permanent village here, more than a thousand years ago, ready and abundant access to food and water and other resources no doubt factored into that decision significantly.
That access remains today, and is central to the people’s way of life. There are hunts (ceremonial and otherwise) for elk and rabbit, and agriculture has always played a major role. Individual families maintain gardens; many of those with lands outside the perimeter of the old village still plant crops of different varieties; and the Pueblo itself has an organic farming operation and greenhouse with a farmer’s market. This year has been unusual for us in that time constraints and other factors have kept us mostly out of the gardens, so this fall’s crop for us will be smaller than usual. In any given year, in addition to the fields’ worth of grass hay and alfalfa, we also have three or four gardens going strong: The Three Sisters, corn, beans, and squash, of course; lettuce and spinach; a wide variety of fruits and vegetables; and, of course, an herb garden.
But one of the things that most people don’t associate with a desert climate is the ability to go fishing. Yet it’s common here. We’re lucky enough to have a large and diverse array of bodies of water in the area: lakes and streams up in the mountains; the Wild Rivers Recreation Area just north of here, a part of the newly-designated Rio Grande del Norte National Monument; the Rio Pueblo that runs through the old village; the Rio Grande itself and its tributary, the Quartzite, that runs through the canyon south of town. And, of course, the use of the old system of irrigation, run by hand with ditches and shovels, the only real nod to modernity the occasional use of hand-filled sandbags to supplement the earthen dams as the water comes down from the mountain.
So there are plenty of available bodies of water — for now, at least. And fishing is a common activity in the warmer months of year, particularly up in the mountains where the Rocky Mountain Trout has been plentiful. Trout has long been a bit of a summer staple for many people here: readily accessible, easily prepared, both healthy and tasty. And anything that has fed the people for centuries is a suitable subject for art: a way to honor the spirit of the being that has kept the people, and The People, alive and thriving.
The photo above is one such example. It’s a sculpture by Ned Archuleta, who is one of Taos Pueblo’s master carvers, a man who knows the stone intimately and works with it, not against it, to coax spirit from it and give it form and being. Ned often leaves his works untitled, but not this piece: It is titled after its namesake, Taos Pueblo Mountain Trout. From the piece’s description in our Other Artists: Sculpture Gallery here on the site:
Master carver Ned Archuleta (Taos Pueblo) has brought a staple of Pueblo foodways into being, following the form and flow of a solid piece of Colorado alabaster. If you look closely, you can see the flowing lines of the matrix in the cool, silky stone, giving the appearance of scales and fins. The ebb and flow of the carving lends motion to the piece.
Pink alabaster on pink alabaster base
$375 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
Words really don’t do it justice. The stone is indeed both cool and silky, inviting the holder to stroke the surface. The lines in the alabaster resemble the lines and scales in the body of the actual fish — but they also evoke images and sensations of water, swirling, pooling, flowing past the trout’s body as it swims along. It’s an incredibly simple, yet brilliant in its execution.
People have asked me if it’s a salmon, which I have always taken to be a quick surface assumption based on the color of the stone itself. Answering requires an explanation not only of what it is (i.e., a trout), but of the Indian penchant for using materials readily at hand to give form to a given image. Yes, the color or texture of the medium may differ from the thing-on-itself being memorialized, but it’s no less recognizeable to the artist (or to the people for whom it is a cultural referent). Invariably, that leads to a discussion of alabaster itself.
I’ll cover alabaster as an artistic medium in greater depth in a future post. The thumbnail version is this: It’s a stone found in relative abundance in the Southwest, particularly in Colorado and Utah. People think of it as white, but that’s only one form; it comes in everything from blinding white to ivory to a putty shade; in a variety of pinks, some with a gray cast and some nearly maroon in color and matrix; in orange, which can range from a pale buttery shade to a deep brilliant hue the color of the fruit itself; and a beautiful, delicate form called spiderweb alabaster, white with a webbed matrix in shades of brown that range from golden tan to a deep chocolate shade.
Ned uses alabaster of all sorts, but his specialty is pink alabaster, which he gets from a source just north of here, in Colorado. It’s a complex stone, sturdy yet delicate, adaptive to form and shape and light, with widely variable matrices and lines that transect a given block of stone. Ned’s genius lies, in part, in taking the mostly-formless block and drawing life out of it: form, shape, spirit, and then infusing the spirit of the stone itself with that of the subject of his carving. I’ll highlight Ned’s other work, too, in a future post, to give you some idea of the breadth and depth of his talent in this regard.
For today, though, it’s Friday; the weekend is looming, and people are ready to go fishin’. Maybe some of you will.
Of course, maybe some of you will do as one of Wings’s longtime art buddies, an artisan from another Pueblo whose work we carry, did a couple of years ago:
He stopped by the house one morning, the back of his vehicle loaded with art in various stages of completion and a couple of rods and reels. He announced that he had been up the mountain in the public areas, fishing, and had caught one “THIS BIG!” [cue him holding his hands more than two feet apart ]. Wings calls me over, together, we peer into the back of his vehicle. Fishing poles? Check. Art supplies and materials? Check. Fish? Hmmm.
“So,” Wings says to him, “where’s the fish? Let’s see this monster.”
“Oh, I threw him back.”
Cue peals of laughter from the two of us, because there’s no way he ever would’ve thrown back such a trophy.
Moral of the story: Make sure your fish story fits your personality.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
