¡Colores!; 506; Golden Dawn: The Pueblo Paintings of Pablita Velarde

I was just determined that I was going to learn how to do this, and I was going to be going to learn how to do this and succeed in it, whatever anybody else thought about me didn't make any difference. I was just determined that I was going to learn how to do this and succeed in it, whatever anybody else thought about me

I was just determined that I was going to learn how to do this and succeed in it, whatever anybody else thought about me I was just determined that I was going to learn how to do this and succeed in it, whatever anybody else thought about me I was just determined that I was going to learn how to do this and succeed in it, whatever anybody else thought about me

I was just determined that I was going to learn how to do this and succeed in it, whatever anybody else thought about me I was just determined that I was going to learn how to do this and succeed in it, whatever anybody else thought about me I was just determined that I was going to learn how to do this and succeed in it, whatever anybody else thought about me I was just determined that I was going to learn how to do this and succeed in it, whatever anybody else thought about me I was just determined that I was going to learn how to do this and succeed in it, whatever anybody else thought about me I was just determined that I was going to learn how to do this and succeed in it, whatever anybody else thought about me

I was just determined that I was going to learn how to do this and succeed in it, whatever anybody else thought about me I do think Tableto is an individual with a very strong character who had a very strong sense of what she wanted to do and what she could do and was not willing to be constrained by the traditional role that her culture demanded Pueblo women were expected to be able to be good potters for example or good weavers or embroiderers those were the traditional things that Pueblo women artists did

there was painting in the Pueblos but it tended to be religious painting and therefore usually done exclusively by men and so the whole issue of painting for public consumption outside the Pueblo is sort of a difficult one and a woman doing it is even more difficult and I think that that has caused her problems throughout her life and career and it's a real tribute to her courage that she kept going and persisted in painting when it wasn't very easy for her to do them this is the rooster pool I used to watch this when I was a young person they don't do this ceremony anymore the poor rooster will get buried with just his head sticking out of the dirt and the competitors will be sitting on the horseback and they take turns running down the aisle and then they try to reach that rooster's head and then pull him out of the ground and if he does if he does pull it out then he becomes a winner

yeah it used to kind of take me back to my horse riding days when I was a very young person my dad used to make me go chase the cows home from from the fields every evening so I learned how to ride a horse really good I bet you didn't know that well I don't want to brag but I think I was better than the boys because I got thrown off a few times too but that didn't scare me I think that that one of the really interesting things to me about Pebbley's work is that she's a woman and she brings a different perspective and depicts different topics different subjects in her artwork than most of the other Pueblo painters because by and large the Pueblo painters are men and so other than Tonita Pena there really weren't women easel painters in the Pueblo's before that

my Indian name is Tatum that means golden dawn my grandmother was to meet with at my birth and after four days after I came into this world she took me outside and offered me to the spirit world and asked for my good life my good health and a happy life you know and a successful life and so after they got through with their Indian brain why they took me inside and put water in my mouth

and called me Tatum that was my name but that name even when I was small I used to kind of help brighten up even the bad times because those are happy colors warm colors and that they doesn't look beautiful unless there's a golden dawn everything starts with beauty I can remember all the times I think about my name and say I'm not supposed to be an unhappy person I'm supposed to be a happy person all the time so I try to live up to that if I don't paint then I get bored I really do but I don't paint I get bored and it's just something I have done for so many years that it's like eating

I used to be when I was starting to roll around in my artwork white I would get up in the morning and as soon as I fat the kids and took them to school I'd get in here and I'd work in a three I go pick them up forget them home and I come back in and work again and now I can't do that my eyeballs are getting unfocused I was born and raised in Santa Clara till I was about five years old and then I lost my mother sometime between two and three and so my dad packed three of us little girls to St. Catherine's Indian School in Santa Fe and turned us over to the nuns over there and that was my

first separation from my own people you know and I didn't know a word of English and it was it was sad and kind of lonely you know because not knowing the rest of the children there and a lot of us were very long time for home I think I was either in the fourth or fifth grade I was about maybe eight eight years old at that time and this crazy girl from Santa Clara she said oh I'm going to run away she said you want to go with me and I didn't know any better so I said sure but my dad that next day he put me back on the train and sent me back to St. Catherine's well I guess he always thought I was a big problem to him I guess because I was so strange I wasn't like my sisters you know they were all very obedient very quiet and and I was the routing way always getting into something you know and fight with the voice they would say

something nasty to me and then like go over there and box them I had that kind of a disposition where I was rough and kind of ordinary he wouldn't think that now he might all age so I was at St. Catherine's for six years and then after that my dad took us and put us at the Indian School in Santa Fe and so from seventh grade up to the time I graduated in 1936 I stayed at the Indian School that's where I learned how to draw and paint and I had a very good teacher a very loving person her name was Dorothy Dunn my sister Rosita and I were the first girl students that she had that first year there was about 38 boys and two girls and we were all crammed of 40 of us were

crammed into a little little room and we were all bumping into each other or spilling something then I get fight in fights with boys because they would tease me or pat me somewhere where I didn't like so I would slap them or pull their hair or kick them or something like that then I get in trouble and but she liked the kids including me and even though half the time I was too headstrong or she always put up with all my goofiness that I went through you know and we got along real good we became very good friends and we stayed good friends almost all through my adult life you know and she never make any direct suggestions to me she always just kind of

came to my my table and would say now publish it on what what would your problem be doing today or what would your grandmother be doing today or what would your dad be doing today because she wanted us to paint what we know best in our own world and I got in that habit of thinking back quite what my people be doing today if it was a feast day then I know they would be dancing and they would be feeding people everybody would be dressed up in their finest you know first lady that I met though was Tony Tapania she was from San Elefonso but she still spoke my

language you know the table language and she was the first woman painter that I ever met she gave me something that I guess no one has ever given me was to just go ahead and be like her if I want to be and she was a happy person too you know you could tell that she was happy with her life and she had a whole bunch of kids and still yet she painted maybe I was just lazy to do anything else and it was more fun to just sit and draw pictures at least that's what my dad said that I was cooking the head just wanting to sit around and draw pictures instead of working like a lady just look at him and see where the way I am

well after Dorothy Dunn's influence on me why it seemed like it was a force in me that just wanted to do painting because I couldn't sell too many pictures to survive with so I got other jobs because in the art wasn't even popular like it is today and then at the same time people like me the young ones that were just starting to push their work we didn't know how to communicate and we get in various and tongue tied and can't think of what to say you know so you stand there like a stupid Indian and just let the customer go by thinking well I don't want that

painting anywhere so after years of practice I learned how to sell my work I used to pedal my work all through Colorado Arizona and California taxes and Oklahoma and all over New Mexico and I visit all those darn shops you know and tell those dealers you better at this take one or two and get me home and they would but as the years went my reputation began to spread and I was getting ahead at home getting out of that and my kids were going through a good Catholic school and I was beginning to kind of relax from all the pressures you know where I used to go begging people to buy them they now come to the house and leave me orders to feel out and which they usually have to wait quite a while to get them even my dad was discouraging me not to become a painter he said I'd never make a living at it and because I was a woman that was

another thing that all that an Indian woman at that time should do was to be a mother a house wife and those are some of the things I didn't care about all this cleaning house spotlessly to me it's boring I like pictures hanging on my walls and that's enough beauty for me and raising kids all right but it's a lot of hard work and it takes too much time and I don't mind taking care of the grandkids now because they can go home but with my own I thought they were never going to grow up to be adults it looked like year after year they were they kept getting smaller and smaller you know but painting wise that was man's work and women had no business trying to horn in on that and I said well I don't care if that's where they feel I'm going to still be a painter I was just

determined that I was going to learn how to do this and succeed in it I love it and it gives me peace of mind I don't even worry about how the house looked I just see them paint pictures my world is right here just when I get tired or hungry then I get away from this world and go into this other kind of a world that that treats the body I guess and I take a break everyone's going to follow to stop them make dolls see I used to make dolls back in the 50s and then I quit because my paintings got so popular

and when my daughter got sick or I used to sit at her house with nothing to do so I started making dolls again they have got that off I made the first doll for for Helen when she was a little girl she named her chili poor chili she had her for a long time and then when Margaret was born she let her play with it and then that's thing we knew while Margaret was cutting her hair and doing all kinds of terrible things to poor chili I didn't have any dolls maybe that's why I like to play with them now I wrote the old father book and it has some of the old legends that the old man used to tell us when we were little kids because they old old kids like them too so

as I got older my own kids wanted to hear Indian stories and I couldn't think of which ones I could remember completely you know and when I tried I couldn't remember half of them so I got interested in finding out which parts I had missed probably fell asleep when they were telling them you know and every evening in the wintertime they would visit each other's homes you know and all the old people come in for a visit and pretty soon somebody would start a a storytelling session and then one storyteller would start a story and then if he didn't finish it he'll blow smoke at the next person and he has to continue it then if he gets tired he does the same to the third person and that's where he went around and run to the story and then they start a new one and then they do the same thing or and oh and most of us kids just fell down on the floor

and went to sleep and then way past midnight my poor dad would be waking up four girls you know shaking them and getting them white awake so we could walk home and I started going back to Santa Clara about a couple of weeks at a time you know I'm sitting under the tree with my old dad and he would get mad at me because at the beginning he didn't want me to write anything down he said absolutely not he says you're not gonna do that and I said how are my kids gonna ever read these stories if you don't like me write it and how are my grandchildren ever gonna hear them if I don't write it so he went along and helped me feel in a lot of the gaps that I couldn't remember I had kind of misgivings myself you know because I thought I don't want to break traditional rules and and if if a lot of the tribal members didn't want me to do it then I won't do it

but it turned out that none of them objected because they couldn't even remember the stories themselves and and nobody was telling these stories anymore that the young people then didn't even hear them and so it was something I want to give to all the children not just my Indian children or my own kids but to all these kids and I think I have made a lot of young people happy because they love those stories crazy I'm crazy I don't know as an idiot maybe well like if they see any of my works maybe they'll get to wondering what this woman was like and you asked the people of Santa Clara and they'll probably say oh she's just crazy she was all right but she's always

doing something that she's not supposed to be doing so maybe that's the way they're remembering me and I really don't care because I think that maybe I might be at least admired and be an inspiration to some some young people and hopefully that the children generations after generations that come will appreciate the old father legends and those legends have a lot of basics to them too you know of how to involve yourself with nature and I think that if they really absorb the story as well they'll all turn out all right somehow I did I don't know if any wiser or not but at least I feel a little bit more educated because I've had to learn the hard way mostly on my own you know

and and force myself to do the things I do and I raised my two kids myself and put them through good schools and they had a nice city life growing out and of course my Helen's gone now and she became a pretty well known artist before she died and her is now getting into the sculpture field and my grandson and granddaughter are both painting so I think we're gonna I'm gonna leave them all doing the kind of work I'd like so I'm happy the real old father could be my dad my grandfather my great-grandfather those are all my old fathers

I talked to them I just asked them how they're doing and then I pretend like they said they're doing fine and then sometimes when I have a problem I says what are to come and help me figure this out you know and it works for a copy of this colores program sent thirty five dollars which include shipping and handling to KNME TV 1200 University Boulevard Northeast Albuquerque New Mexico 8702 or call 1-800-328-5663