New Mexico Masterpieces

>>Funding for the production of New Mexico Masterpieces was provided by Frederick Hammersley Foundation, Nellita E. Walker Fund, KNME-TV Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund, >>Narrator: What makes a masterpiece? Is it made by the wind or a paintbrush? Is it made by the rains that carve mountains or hands that build a wall? New Mexico has been an inspiration for centuries as artists express their place and time. These works have become part of the fabrics of our lives, culture, and history. Singularly or all at once provocative, pivotal, poignant, and beautiful, the following are eight masterpieces that begin to tell New Mexico's story.

>>Narrator: As winter gave way

to spring in Taos in 1929, something remarkable happened that left anenduring mark on New Mexico art. When Georgia O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico at the end of Aprilthat year, she fell in love. The landscape and the cultures of New Mexico changed Georgia >>O'Keeffe was looking for an escape. So she found that thing that so many people in the 1920's. She found an America that could not be confused for Europe or any other place in the world. She found something that was truly original and she felt that this place gave her her voice. >>Narrator: The impact was immediate. One of her first New Mexico paintings, "Grey Cross with Blue,"painted that same year is a powerful symbol

of the inspiration that transformed her work. >>Kastner: O'Keeffe was exposed to many new cultural by sound, the music, the chanting of the dances that she experienced and that all came through in her artwork. >>Andrew Connors: Most of her powerful paintings that summer really had to do with how human beings,over the centuries, had impacted New Mexico and she reflected that in an astounding, >>Kastner: She painted 24 new paintings during that summer and half of them were new subjects. And each of these is an exploration of the idea of modernism, of the idea of abstraction, but it's by looking at this new subject matter and understanding it as distinctly American. >>Connors: She discovered in New Mexico an American-ness that nobody else was tellling the story of.Of course there were the artists in Taos that had been here since the 1890's

and had established the Taos Society of Artists, but those artists were really almost making illustrations of what was here and O'Keeffe discovered in New Mexico an opportunity to react to a Western-ness and not >>Narrator: Visiting the Abiquiu area in 1934, she immediately decided to live there. O'Keeffe wouldindeed make New Mexico her own. arrived in New Mexico, she was in her early forties and her art practice was well established and had been since 1916. >>Connors: O'Keeffe saw New Mexico as an opportunity to reduce and to simplify and to find that baseessence. >>Kastner: Her drawing

practice drove her creative life, and in fact I think of her notebooks as a kind of journal that she experienced life visually through these notebooks that she took out into thefield with her and drew things that she felt. And she draws some contour lines and some shapes thatare in the field when she's there, but she always leaves out the things that aren't interesting to her. So those drawings then become her first recognition of this will become a flat two-dimensional painting. What she's really looking at is how to get the viewer's eye to cross from right to left orleft to right without being involved in depth. How to keep her painting on the surface of the canvas because that was of an abstraction and a modernism. >>Narrator: O'Keeffe was

in New York City. The complexity of her artistic life and her personal relationships sent her into a depression. She and her friend Beck Strand decided to go to New Mexico. Arriving in Santa Fe, she immediately received an invitation from Mabel Dodge Lujan, who insisted theystay with her in Taos. It was a turning point in O'Keeffe's life. >>Kastner: She stayed for four months at Mabel Dodge Lujan's house and out back is a cross, and thatcross was something about, it was something very interesting to her. Of course, it's something that we know, living here in New Mexico, as a penitente cross. She painted the crosses several times and one is an entire black cross with stars and blue. What's interesting aboutthat is the Taos mountain looms around that cross and in that, she places us in this environment that she loved. She was out walking every

night. One of the first crosses she painted was Grey Cross with Blue. It's a very is exactly her working method to be expressive. She's not presenting to you what she saw, she's presenting to you what she felt. >>Connors: And so it really becomes, in essence, a statement about how Modernism can work in this landscape because it doesn't tell you what to think, but it tells you to think. So this painting becomes a symbol for where New Mexico can go in the future. Great art allows us to see the world around us differently. This painting gives us the opportunity to see New Mexico in an entirely different way because it reduces the essence

of what this place is all about and that vocabulary of stripping away and reducing of details and simply finding the bold geometries, the bold statement that comes from New Mexico. She really established a new voice and this painting, sort of, is that marker, is that turning point between representation, being the illustrative notion of New Mexico, and modernism as being >>Narrator: Visiting Taos

in 1918 was a life changing experience for Victor Higgins. >>Dean A. Porter: Great art doesn't always come out and hit you between the eyes. It lies in wait. It waits for you to walk up there and to unravel some of its mysteries. >>Narrator: In 1932, he painted Winter Funeral. >>Porter: Interesting thing is, the painting doesn't come out and just smack you and say "Here I am.I'm a masterpiece." of paintings take more time, the great ones are the ones that lie there and wait. This is a moment in history of this important to a family and maybe the greater family

of Taos. >>Rena Rosequist: You look at this funeral and you think there is probably an elegant simplicity to it all. Everything is beautiful in this painting, these bare trees, it's going to be to melt, the trees are going to bud out. Maybe I'll come look at the painting one day and there will be green leaves and apples on the tree, who knows, but it's a living painting. >>Dean A. Porter: He was brilliant when it came to painting landscapes. He kept the very essence. Hetakes what may seem to most people to be a sight that is not terribly important and makes an exciting picture. >>Narrator: Higgins left behind his Paris art training. He was seeking a new way Porter: He could take that brush of payne's gray, and lay

out a cloud with one dense beautiful stroke and create the most exciting skies. >>David L. Witt: The purpose of art is to show us new ways of seeing something, or make us see something that was there all along that we didn't realize was there. >>Rena Rosequist: Art has always been in the service of existential questions like who are we? Wherehave we come from? Where are we going? I think that was certainly on Higgins mind when he was painting this painting. >>We have to burrow into the painting to begin to get the immensity of what I think is in it. It tells you what life was like in 1932. John Nichols in one

paragraph explained how life went from an agrarian to people suddenly getting electric bills every month. Not being able to pay them with corn orbeef. I would say that this is probably right about this time when life was still agrarian and simple. >>Dean A. Porter: I think the most exciting thing about Winter Funeral is in a sense it's a partnership that the artist forms with the time and history. Victor had to be in Taos, New Mexico to paint this picture, he had to have come from his mother's funeral, he had to be a painter of landscapes, hehad to know the people who mourned. All this had to come together in this picture and he had off. >>Narrator: Initially a member

of the Taos Society of Artists, Higgins work soon transcended a romantic interpretation of the exotic. The land would dominate his paintings. They are a fusion of modernist influence and his intuitive American place. Winter Funeral received the Altman prize in The National Academy of Designs 107th annual exhibition, the highest award for painting at that time, but the painting never sold. Perhaps it was because of the depression era economy or perhaps it was because it depicted a funeral. Knowing the value of the painting, Higgins walked into the Taos' Harwood Museum of Art and personally hung the painting above the fireplace, where it still hangs today. >>Rena Rosequist: Was he thinking about the immensity of the world that this little valley stands infor humanity and these people stand in for the rest

of the world not just this little Taos Valley. >>Dean A. Porter: Victor Higgins, the master, brought the partnership of all of these different kinds of situations, together in one great picture. One that we can easily say is one of America's >>Woman in Gallery: When you have a blank canvas and it's this big, and you know you're doing scenery, but also close ups. Where do you start? Do, you know, start in the back....? >>Liz Cunningham: Blumey is the first one that has an Indian person, staring

at you. And to stare inpueblo language is impolite and if you're staring you're saying to somebody, I accuse you of your wrongdoing. I accuse you of taking away my right which is guaranteed by the constitution, to practicereligion in any way that I see fit. And Blumenschein is defending that. (Baby saying "mama" and other words in the gallery) >>Narrator: Ernest L. Blumenschein had a long history exploring the west. A founding member of the Taos Society of Artists formed in 1915. He moved permanently his work appears like a romanticized view in keeping with the times. Yet looking more closely, his paintings have a complexity. Through his work he sought to change perceptions about the native cultures and the peoples of the area. >>Andrew Connors: Look

at the brushstrokes, look at the hand. When you look at this Blumenschein painting, look at the way there are these purples and lavenders in the reflected light in his face. Look at the way color comes in so many different ranges and so many different personalities of the brush strokes. >>Cunningham: This painting, Star Road and White Sun, actually is the culmination of everything thatBlumenschein was putting together to come into what is known as his signature style. The patterning that he saw in the landscape comes through in that. We have a very unusualharsh bright light, he has mastered that. He has mastered his color which he was always talking about building color muscle, and he has done that. He is also showing us his relationship with the TaosPueblo people.

And so this story, with this beautiful landscape that he's been absorbing since 1898, everything that he's read, everything that he's heard from anthropologists, everything that he's heard from Indian people themselves, goes into this painting. He just comes completely into his own in the crucible of the landscape and people >>One of the things that goes into this painting at this time too is his emotions. He felt very strongly about the wrongs that were being committed against Indian people and I think that this himself in his paintings. Star Road and White Sun

and Superstition were the two volleys that Blumenschein fired against the government oppression of Indian people. But he was joined during that time period by many artists and writers of Santa Fe and Taos including D.H. Lawrence, Mary Austin, Mabel Dodge Lujan and many others who signed a protest of artists and writers againstthe Bursum Bill which would have taken away water rights and land from the Pueblo people. >>Narrator: Star Road, on the left was Geronimo Gomez. He and Blumenschein knew each other well at the time when this work was painted. >>Cunningham: He would've told Blumenschein about his dilemma. That he could neither practice the ways of Taos Pueblo, the traditional ways because he was denied Kiva, nor could he practice Catholicism because that was the White Man's religion,

and so the one that he could practice, he was denied. From the time it was painted, Blumenschein was trying to find a home for it and nobody ever purchased it until, in 1943, a man from Albuquerque High School approached him and said "We'd like to purchase a painting from you." And so it was saved by the Albuquerque Public School collection and in his ledgers, Blumenschein said - sold for 250 dollars and the price that he put on it was at least ten times that, but because it was a difficult painting it almost didn't ever get a home. >>Narrator: Throughout his life Blumenschein was passionate about telling the story of the land and the people. His paintings are more than just >>Cunningham: I think this is one thing that comes through in his paintings, is his deep respect forthe

culture and landscape and the light of Northern New Mexico, captured by it, and then him givinghis very best back to us. Saying we live in a very special >>Something in great art just speaks to us on a level so deeply, that maybe we can't respond in words. When someone they are good at, at what they have mastered and give itto the world and you look at it and it almost takes your breath away because you know it when you see it or hear it. We feel it in our bones. It tells us who we are and it tells us who

>>Frederico Vigil: I was always wondering when it was gonna finish. Or if I was gonna be able to. When I walked into this space and they said - here is the wall for you - I felt like in the world. The fresco is over 4000 square

feet of concave wall. Little did we realize, upon the completion of it, that we were gonna create the largest concave fresco From start to finish, the painting process took about 8 years. Seeing it

completed, it's like a dream. Chocmul stayed, Wedarocha , the Inca, I moved over here. Pyramids, and I took Cortez off. You cansee here, Father Martinez stayed, Maleecha and Montezuma. I think, the idea and the vision was to figure out the mixture genetically through civilization and through cultures. Every image on this fresco is true history, facts. There were seven scholars, PhDs, and they would sit down in the conference room and dialogue. So I would take notes and from there,something

hit me that I think I would like, or there was a vision that I would like to pursue, I would research more. Fresco, to me, is one of the most noble of the painting techniques. Fresco is durable and it's gonnalast. Each section has five coats of plaster. The wall is craving water and you're bringing a pigment with water and it's pulling the water in. Bon fresco is a chemical interaction between inorganic pigments and lime. We are creating limestone with color, a rock with color. To paint fresco demands hours and hours and hours

of painting because if the wall dries, you cannot paint anymore. Once you have a feeling and taste of painting fresco, it's a passion, it's a craving that I seek. It is public art and that's a blessing. To let people come in and look at it, critique it, enjoy it, and learn from it. The people that do come in here to see their part of their history from this area, in the Southwest,see the wars that occurred and also the positive things that have developed - the intermingling of Compadrasco, compadre, which is one of the most important and sacred components of what was brought

over here. Where I become a compadre. The event happened in 1692, the reenter of the European Spanish of De Vargas moving into Pecos, a pueblo of Pecos, and De Vargas made that decision - do I fight or do I become a compadre to the Chief, which in turn, developed the concept of conpadrasco here in New Mexico. What I've tried to leave is true, historical imagery, and facts, so that when an individual will come in here, they hopefully will understand who they are if they're from here, and if they're not, maybe here. And for those that do not know their history that are from here, to maybe be

proud of what has occurred >>John Nichols: I wrote Milagro basically to try and address all the social injustice, the cultural injustice, the economic injustice, the environmental destroying the planet. I mean I thought of the book as universal statement. (Singing: I woke up this morning, I don't know what to do, developers want my water and I'm feeling mighty blue. I got those

Milagros those terrible Milagros blues.) >>Narrator: First published in 1974 the book is on its 18th printing and translated into 9 languagesand made into a feature film for which he co-wrote the screen play. >>John Nichols: Of course the final consensus of opinion arrived at by both those who were for Joe Mondragon and those who were against him was that in order for him to do what he did and thus precipitate the war that was bound to follow, Joe had to be crazy people also figured only a miracle couldsave Joe from his fool hearty suicidal gesture. Yet Milagro was a town whose citizen's had a pension for not only going crazy but also for precipitating miracles.

>>John Nichols: Most of the characters in the Milagro bean field war are archetypes and you can findthese archetypes everywhere I would hope that people reading this book in France could identify with the people reading this book in Nicaragua who identify with it. In every story you've got the good apples you got the bad apples In the Milagro bean field war there's a struggle between the good apples and the bad apples. The good apples in Milagro manage to defeat all the bad apples and it's as simple as that. [Singing in Spanish] >>John Nichols: If you're

going to write about cultural Genocide, if you're gonna write about the kind of development in economic systems that destroys a wide range of the population that's lived here for 400 years, right. See if you can make it somehow humorous enough so that people actually read it. About fifteen and a half minutes after Joe Mondragon first diverted water from Indian Creek into hisparents old beanfield most of Milagro knew what he had done. Fifteen and a half minutes being as long as it took immortal, ninety three year old Amarante Cordova to travel from a point on the MilagroGarcia highway spur next to Joe's outlaw bean field to the frontier bar across from the highway, cattycorner to the Rael's General store. The Milagro Beanfield War is about a little struggle over water in a taxation district to exploit the water

right in northern New Mexico. It's basically infinity It's a struggle for how the town will develop or will it not develop. It's a struggle for will a sustainable agricultural economy survive in the area or will it become various corporations get all thewater. Most people strive mightily to survive and it's really important you know to give the message you know that even though doom is ultimately our lot that life is really worth living and really fun. Obviously the Milagro Beanfield War tries to give that message at the same time that it tries togive that important message about what's right and what's wrong.

These are the scales of justice. And when I write I want to make sure that the scales of justice onthe correct historical side are much heavier than the scales of justice on the wrong historical side. New Mexico is a part of the whole. When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. Great art can take a bite out of the bad apple. And Pacheco, asleep, laboring for his life, breathing stertorously dreamed. It was 5 o'clock on a summer evening. Bees simmered; a lush apricot swoon weighted the air. His wife was playing the piano; Chopin, a prelude. Men irrigating in the silver

fields, paused, leaning contemplatively on their shovels to listen. A deep bell clanked... animals lazing home. Dust, stirred up by the day's traffic onthe roads, hung softly, a beige mist across the fields. Melvin who died later on in Korea, caressedthe slow August landscape, chasing butterflies. The laughter of children a half-mile away carried clearly across the fields, somehow releasing memories of making love early on a frosty autumn morning, when people could hear the ax blows of their neighbors chopping wood all across the small valley. Then Death, decked out in a sombrero a serape and shiny silver spurs, a spicy carnival apparition, dancing over the little village, chuckled like a dove, winked in a joking, comradely fashion at Pacheco, and jitterbugged

quietly on into the resplendent and remarkably >>Godfrey Reggio: If there's any shock and awe in the world, it should come I wanted to find a word that had no cultural baggage. I found this word - Koyaanisqatsi - it's an ancient word, it's a compound word. Qatsi means life. Koyaanis means crazy, turmoil, in conflict. Fundamentally, what that word calls for another way of living. And Napoleon has

this great dictum - a picture is worth a thousand words, so I tried to take a thousand pictures,metaphorically as it were, turn that statement on its head and offer you a thousand pictures that can give you the power of one Time is the essence of cinema. The great Russian filmmaker Tarkovsky has a great book called Sculpting in Time, which is what motion image is. So, if you're doing a film that is involved with creating, hopefully, not a story to be told, but a story to behold, then time plays a much more essential, visual role

because you don't have a voice that is going to be telling you what the image says. Because of the subject matter of Koyaanisqatsi, seeing the ordinary from an extraordinary point of view, getting rid of all of the convention of characterization and plot and making the background, which in normal movies becomes the characterization and plot, then you're looking for something that can be different, something that'll allow people the opportunity for their own response to the material. So, these films ask the viewer to swim as far away from the shore of contemporary cinema as theyfeel comfortable. So that they might, perhaps, >>Reggio: We live in a world

where we have an infinite tool that's operating on a finite planet. Technology is reproducing the world in its own image and likeness. Technology in its truth, is becomingthe truth. To me this is beyond an awesome tragedy, unspeakable, unsayable, almost without the words to even describe because of the completeness of it. If we were dealing with Hitler or Mussolini orgod knows who, these are bad guys, but technology is something everyone wants, that everyone needs.It's not something we use either, it's not TV, it's not a car, it's something we live. We are technology, because we are sensate beings, we become the environment

we live in. The environment we live in is technology. It's not that it's an effective technology on everyone - the environment, on the economy, on war, it's that we live in a technological environment, the most misunderstood and least seen event So in that sense, it is divine, it is the new sun, and that's why I think we're all blind. If we go outside right now or tomorrow morning and look at the sun for a few minutes, you're not gonna be able to see for the rest of your life. The new sun, for me, is technology. It's blinding us. Art, in its beauty, should

provoke us to something where it can have its own narrative face to face with those that see it. It speaks to that, beyond which, our social languages cannot speak. So some can make you question the very timber of your soul, some can make you laugh, some can bring a big question to you, some are beyond any words to express, it's like - it's speaking to me in a language I've never heard before. And so, in the case ofKoyaanisqatsi, the point of view of the film is that, which is most present is that which is the least seen. We've all seen traffic, but if you see traffic in a way that gives you another perspectiveon it, this is what art can help

you do, change your perspective. I don't wanna appear like I'm off my trolley here, but I want to roar like a lion. There's a story, in animal ontology, which I love, that when the female lion has her babies, she roars them into life, provokes them into living. I think that's >>Jim Rivera: This is one of the pieces that we'd walk by in the museum and just stop and (gasp), just look at that he thinking, how did he get there, how did he get from nothing to something? (TC Cannon singing Mama and Papa Having the Shiprock

Blues) >>Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer: a story to tell, has a connection to TC, has a realization of his contribution to art. >>Ryan Flahive: That was really a revolutionary thing for people to come in from all around the country else with their own culture.

>>Linda Lomahaftewa: And we were all in the studio at the same time and so we all kind of fed off of each other and it was a really exciting time. >>Joseph M. Sanchez: He did, he created a myth within IAIA, he was like a star, he gave a direction.He was able to absorb the abstract expressionist ideas and still paint about cultural images. >>Darren Vigil Gray: Overall I thought his painting style just opened up a floodgate for me and an understanding of how we, as Native people, artistic creative Native people, have the ability to bridge modern thought, modern history. I think his work captured everything that was happening during thelate 60s, early 70s. He planted his staff, like they do, and he was a warrior through his work, through his words.

(Cannon singing). >>Narrator: Mama and Papa paved the way for TC's defining work. >>Joan Frederick: Nobody had done Native American art like that before. Nothing was >>Joyce Cannon Yi: Who knows what motivates an artist? It's just there. They're born with it. They see things that we cannot see. His style of art came from within him, his soul. He could do just about anything. >>Joan Frederick: This is about where the heart is and why some people never find their own and you see them walking around, humiliating themselves and their hearts. And you see them rustling the leaves of their forests and burning. You see their flaming selves turn

to ashes as a shooting star's death and they are no longer a part of the cosmos but merely dust on your brow to dust away and vacuum from the rug like the dust of all people who never find their own hearts. >>Joyce Cannon Yi: Charismatic, that's the word that best describes him. He could come into a room,sit down, and after a while, the guys would all be standing around him, talking to him. The girls would all want to be with him and that's the way he was in life - he just stood >>Joan Frederick: He was always saying - I'm not just an Indian artist. And knew also that the things he was saying were universal things. He envisioned that, eventually, that would be the most important part of his work. And he felt like his family, his father,

and therefore him, and many of the other modern Native Americans in today's society were stuck in this transition between the past and the future. He was really good at capturing the human condition and he also wanted to talk about his world, it was very important to him to get ideas across world. He's brave. The subjects that he tackles, the way he puts it out there is very sophisticated. At first, you don't realize he's actually saying that. Guess what, that's what happened. Hemade people look at it. unfortunately, was very short and he said I'm going to die when I'm 31.And he did die when he was 31. The pressure

it put on him was to live very fast. >>Joan Frederick: Five years before he passed away, he was hitting all cylinders, and doing his absolute best work. Collection number five was done during that period, at his residency at Dartmouth. It's huge, it's a big painting. It's the quintessence of all the images that he did. Where he positioned this transitional Native American that looks like he's an old time warrior coming off attention, you realize he's in the modern world because there are modern things such as the Van Gogh paintings on the wall, the windows, the wallpaper, ka ching, you wake up and pay attention and realize this person that's stuck between those periods in history. They know they're inthe modern world, they have this very, very intense core traditional culture that they're proud

of,and that's a big part of their world. Probably the most important thing that he gave us was that he allowed us a view into the Native American world, that most people don't see, and the humanity there and the grandeur of what it's all about. The history and the tradition, the beauty, and because you're attracted to the techniques that he used he then takes you through that The Logical Lunatic - With the madness of a logical lunatic, I will challenge the world to a winner-take-all wrestling match and while we're rolling and grunting over and around hemispheres, and a little bolder, and a little boogie-woogiesh

in my own personal way. And thensomeday soon, I will hang one last feather in my hair and rouge my forehead, and run faster >>Narrator: Hidden by its remote location is one

of New Mexico's great works of architecture and oneof the most enduring. More a monument than ruin, Pueblo Bonito reaches out over the centuries. the compelling motivation to make that building? That one place was that important to the ancient people of Chaco. And not just a group, but all of these groups over 250 years. >>Rina Swentzell: The fact at once makes it even more exciting for me. It's as if somebody started a piece of artwork and expanded on it. >>Anna Sofaer: Some people say that the bottom level is

basketmaker and that's 600s and then you have the beginning structure of it, about 850. And layer after layer, five major stages, and by 1120, it's sealed off. >>Rina Swentzell: People's lives, people's fingers, people's touches, people's minds, people's emotions are all in it. When you haul rock from on top of the cliffs, all the way down, you go cut them up and you've cut your finger in the meantime. The kids are screaming and it's in that place. Just Bonito alone, not all of the other Chaco sites, it's just incredible. >>Anna Sofaer: It's over three acres, it had over 36 kivas through time. It was four stories high, had over 700

rooms and then it had precise orientation to the keypoints of the sun. The midday position, solar noon every day, no shadow on the big wall. And the other major axis is the east-west wall,which is exactly to the equinox, that's the middle of the year. >>Rina Swentzell: If we allow ourselves, even a little bit, to feel where we are and feel a kind of relationship in terms of that line and this line, that form or this form, myself within it. Day after day, night after night, year after year, watching the drama in the sky happening, watching drama in the land happen and seeing what the points are around there. It's all there,

what we think about the world is all encoded in those walls. >>Anna Sofaer: I think you are not just in that building, you are part of the cycles of the sky, thecosmos. >>Rina Swentzell: For me, it was not probably built by one person with a big dream, but something that happened over time, people were moving around that land, knowing it so well, and becoming part ofthat place. >>Anna Sofaer: Looking at Bonito as a work of art is fascinating. Where in the world do you find a structure built with that beautiful curve? I think that was an aesthetic act. Combined with that is the right angle of the cardinal directions. >>Rina Swentzell: There was a lot of feeling rightness

about it - the sun comes up there, of course it does, and this line feels like - yes we're going to catch at this point, we know this is how it happens. >>Anna Sofaer: That combination of the rigor of those alignments that are perpendicular and that beautiful sweep of the curve is very stunning. >>Rina Swentzell: We so tend to pull form and function apart, but I think if you're doing things unconsciously, you're just letting the flow come through, that's what the spiral is about - just letting the energy come through. Then you do something as eloquent as that? >>Anna Sofaer: How do you tell the story of such enigmatic stuff? The only thing to do is go back towhat's there. It's still talking to us. It's still alive.

>>Rina Swentzell: I think for a lot of people, including modern Pueblo people, it's like a reminder of what we used to know and how we used to live and what we used to acknowledge in the world that wedon't anymore. That we are a part of the natural order and also part of a natural structure. We never had a god, we never had a super human, we never went that direction. It was always the natural world around us. We're aware of all of the movements in the sky and the changes in the wind, when the sun is coming. If you have to live in it, you are intensely aware of it.

One of the big things aboutwhat we got in terms of philosophy, modern Pueblo people, from Chaco times is that the world is about movement and people on this whole continent had the idea that our relationship with the natural world with the sky, with the earth, with the landforms, was the most important thing that