¡Colores!; Pablita Velarde: An Artist and Her People; 506; Golden Dawn: The Pueblo Paintings of Pablita Velarde

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. . This is a portrait of an artist. A portrait which began on September 19, 1918, with the birth of a little Indian girl named Ableeta Valardi. She was born to Maranita and Herman Valardi, and the Tehua-speaking Pueblo of Santa Clara, near Santa Fe, New Mexico. When Ableeta was only three years old, her mother died, and Herman Valardi was left with four little girls. After my mother died, my dad somehow managed to have the sisters from St. Catherine in Santa Fe, take us in and board us there through the winter months.

And that's where my life into the outside world began. The outside world she entered was a world quite different from her own Santa Clara, a world where she would be educated in the ways of the Anglo people, a world where she would travel many miles and live in large cities. She would meet Dorothy Dunn at the Indian School, and this very first art teacher would send Ableeta on a road which would in time lead her to international fame as an Indian artist. A profession where only one Indian woman had gone before her. Well, in any other kind of work besides women's work, they weren't allowed to participate as that propotary making. But, paining wise, there was only Tony Tapania ahead of me. She was the rebellion way back in the early 20s. And she was really the one that gave me the strength, the inner strength that I needed to dare, dare the man to put me in my own place

or let me go, you know one or the other way. But eventually one year, much to my surprise, I did win the grand award in Tulsa, and that was my breaking point. After that, the boys didn't think I belonged in the kitchen anymore because I was on their level. In 1939, Ableeta was hired by Dale King to paint a series of exhibits for the Museum at Banda Lear National Monument, a great challenge for the 20-year-old. But in typical Pableta styles, she accepted the challenge and for the next five years dedicated herself to the work of hand. And so through these paintings, Ableeta lends a glimpse of her people and their way of life. What we were trying to show here was part of a structure of building living quarters and then a ceremonial building in front.

We used to have at least a three-story building in Santa Clara when I was a kid and I think that's where I remember trying to visualize that old house. And then there's Indian oven that was more or less introduced by the early Spaniards and a woman baking bread in it. And then the kiva is in the foreground with a ladder coming up from the rooftop because that was the only way to get into the kiva. It looked like they're having some kind of a council and then a court case where there's one man that's bowed down and he's been lectured too or he's given punishment of some kind. He had committed some wrong towards the tribe or towards another person in the village and this is a trial for him. And here's our old lady grinding here, probably making cornmeal. And the man is there singing to her

so that she keeps in rhythm with the grinding. They used to tease us when we were small. That's the way they used to do that. Make the old ladies work. They start with a slow rhythm and then they make them go a little faster and then pretty soon they're really going to town grinding the corn to a powder. This is a rabbit hunt scene of the old days when they used to have community rabbit hunt. This one shows you what they're doing to the rabbit now. Community wise, back in the old times, people were more helpful to one another. They saw to the needs of others and when somebody was butchering, a lot of people will come to help. Maybe relatives and neighbors and they all take a little piece of meat home as a reward or as a payment for their labor. This is, I think, a scene where people are either in the fields

and in the hills gathering food here and they look like they might be gathering pion nuts. There's a little boy pooling yucca fruit. I remember when I was a kid, I used to look forward to those times when the yucca fruit would get ripe and we'd go out there and check those things every day. See how they used to poop bet rolls every night they'd spread them out and then in the morning while they'd roll them back up and time together and push them against the wall and then use them for chairs to sit on during the daytime. And at that time, I remember very few people had tables that you could sit up at and eat most of them eight on the floor. This one is showing a game of shini. It was good exercise as well as a little bit of a prayer at the same time.

This was a scene that we did to show the different activities that men usually participate in. This is when they're gathering up the wild horses and they're going to bring them all into tame them then they'll be distributed to the ones that work the hardest or stop they earn them. The sheriff is stopping the visiting tourists in this car and telling them they were not allowed to come in that day because whatever is going on is just for the Indians to observe and so I guess they were disappointed but they had to leave anyway. I think that a lot of me went into those things and the way I remember the performing of this thing that's happening in the village in my time I can't prove to the world that it happened

just exactly because I was a young person then and it might have been a little different earlier or it might be a little different now. And some of these scenes are seen outdoors and the buffalo dance is one of the most popular I think in all the villages and it is exposed to the public. The corn dance is being performed here. A scene of another dance of early spring and a scene of the Cosharis at Taos and a pole climb on San Geronimo Day. This church has changed since I used this picture but it's the old Santa Clara church

the front view of it with the Hancock old-time doors and in the old days they used to take the Hancock Saints that the early Spaniards left each little mission and they would go around the village and sing and pray. Eventually they would return the statues back to the church but on feast days like Santa Anthony and Santa Clara Day they would leave the Saints under this little homemade shade and then leave them there all day and then in the meantime during the day the dancers would dance in front as an honor and then they would go single-file in there and ask for blessing and come up again and then they would go on with their Indian dance and again in other areas. This is a combination of the Indian worship and the Christian worship. Many of the traditional ceremonies are still practiced

but very young are taught by the older ones just as they were taught by their ancestors. I worship and perform the overwhelming prayer for all the Indian dancers. I do have the biggest prayer but I worship and I cheer up and open my heart being all aware about the event of its progress Much of what we see today at living forueblos, such as Kublita Santa Clara, represents a continuity

of culture with the Pueblo people who once lived at Bandelier. Although it has been influenced by both Spanish and Anglo traditions, it is a culture that has remained remarkably intact for more than 800 years. That's where turkey girls used to leave long time ago, even before I was born and I'm an old lady now. Their traditions, customs and values have been kept alive by the stories that have passed down from generation to generation. When I came around turkey girl and they started to clean her hair, they pulled out all the bugs that were crawling on her hair and pulled out all the tangerines. But one of the Indian legends, Puebloita heard as a child from her grandfather and great

grandfather. The old storyteller sitting in the plaza with the children gathered around is a memory she treasures. In 1960 she wrote an illustrator to book, Old Father the Storyteller, so their future generations might have a glimpse of what used to be. Their rose is huge, turkey wing, it just stood up like this one side, just long enough to hide turkey girl and the turkeys. So they could enter this cave and so when those mean ones were come over there, they found the tracks, but they couldn't find turkey girl or the turkeys no more. I know she still lives up there in the mountain complex. You could like it. Above all, Puebloita is an artist. Her early paintings depict Pueblo life for watercolors. But in striving to capture her culture in paint, she forges another link to the ancient

past by using the traditional earth color techniques of her ancestors. The paintings, just as the ancient ones, are born with the gathering of rocks and dirt. That basic idea for use of earth pigment came from this ancient artist that had painted on keyboard walls. If the sun and the rain hasn't faded them through all this, how many million years why I don't know why they should paint them. But my basic idea of using earth pigment took quite a while because at the beginning I really didn't know what kind of pigments worked and which ones didn't. But as time went on, I ground everything inside heart, rock, soft rocks, loose earth, sand,

and clay. I used a matadi to this day, I still grind my dirt on that in rocks and whatever. You know, I have to grind it so that it would be very fine. And what's enough while it's still a little grainy, but I can always brush that off so it'll look real nice. She must reduce the earth materials to powder so that the painting will have the velvet appearance, characteristic of probably this work. With the grinding finished, she begins a piece of art which will differ from all others she has created before. So

I later each painting is a labor of love, but more than that it represents a bond with our ancestors and the teachings of her people. The layer upon layer of the paint is added, often as many as seven layers, before Publita

is satisfied that the painting bears the quality worthy of her signature. For more than 40 years, Publita has through her art provided a link, a link not only to the past, but a link between two very different cultures. When I started to feed my soul with the old teachings, the old legends and the old hearsays and all the things that I learned at Bender Lear, then I began to balance the two worlds a little bit more easy, because I found that the world on my other side, the one that I was living in today, the city world, were just as interested in wanting to know how life is over there, and the ones over here wanted to know how life was over here.

So I was kind of a goal between telling one side this life and then telling this side, the other life. And I balanced it somehow, but now I think I'm at a point where I can pass some of my own experience and some of my learning and my own feeling, so that the people in the future, if they ever hear me or read something about me, know that it's something that comes from my heart and from my own belief that I have accepted because the ancestors have taught it. I think that I have accomplished what God put me here on earth for, and I'm satisfied with the work that I have done so far.

And this is the way I want to leave my world when I go back to send the lake and become a cloud persists. I want the earth to remember me through my work. I want the earth to remember me through my own belief that I have accepted because of my own belief that I have accepted because of my own belief that I have accepted.

I want the earth to remember me through my own belief that I have accepted because of my own belief that I have accepted because of my own belief that I have accepted.