To the Navajo, the Mountain Is God

To the Navajo, the mountain is God. Everything about his land is pure and holy. His deep reverence is inspired by the glory of the landscape, and the nobility of his racial traditions. His home is made of earth things. Here man is not himself only. He is all the things he sees. He is all the things that flow to him from a thousand sources. He is the land, the lift of the mountain, the reach of the valleys - original paths of creative living, inspired by our forests, streams, prairies and mountains. No wonder that yearly the young men go out from their hogans singing toward the source of their strength; Lo, yonder the holy places. Swift and far I journey, To life unending, and beyond it... To joy unchanging, and beyond it. Yea, swift and far I journey. This is the immemorial use of mountains which does not wear out with using.

after Mary Austin - Land of Journey's End.

FILM MAKERS' REFLECTIONS

But there are less obvious battles, ones that deal with the balancing of tensions between an Indian and an Anglo mind sharing the same space. And living this delicate balance is a Navajo-once a sheepherder-now the urbane paradox known as R. C. Gorman. We waited for him on the concrete apron of a Taos airstrip. The April sun had grudgingly given way to clouds and small swirling pellets of snow. A brown Continental Mark IV coasted up to us noiselessly. Out stepped R. C. Gorman in a black leather trench coat looking like a "godfather" with a headband. A wide grin stretched across his very round face. He took a few broad theatrical strides and faked a Jewish accent, "Well, gentlemen, are we ready, already?" In minutes we were airborne over the Rio Grande Gorge, climbing steadily into the clouds. Gorman was not talkative as he looked out the window, then at the instrument panel, then the pilot, and smiled occasionally back at us. He was nervous about flying. Not far off our left wing was Waterless Mountain, Gorman's boyhood home. He had lived there in a traditional mud-and-log hogan, herded sheep with his cousins, and listened to stories told by his grandmother while she made goat cheese in the shade. We had been there a week earlier with our cameras. The hogan had ben replaced by a simple frame house with a wood stove, but the sheep pens were unchanged and Gorman's nephews were out with the flock. His Aunt Tsosie sat by a window in her long velvet dress and told us a story in Navajo about Gorman's childhood. She looked shyly down to one side and her expression remained the same as she spoke. Cousin Elaine snickered a couple oftimes but Aunt Tsosie continued in her monotone. R. C. translated: "She said when I was a young boy a man caught me riding a horse in the nude. He said, 'What are you doing without your clothes?' And I said, 'It's too warm.' And he said, 'Well, it's not proper. The only time you're supposed to be without your clothes is when you're having a ceremony performed over you. So it's not proper." Gorman laughed heartily and remembered with fondness some of the Navajo ways the ceremonies, the superstitions, his grandmother's folklore he had left far behind.

Yet how far behind have these artists really left their mysteries? Or have they created their own? How have they dealt with the paradox of their own lives only a generation removed from the pueblos and hogans? Caught like travelers between two passing trains, they stand on the platform between two cultures, objects of curiosity for the passengers on either side. They are intermediaries, translating into imagery that wordless part of themselves that is Indian. Above all they are individuals, and we may group them together in a series on Indian art only on the thinnest excuse that their themes recall images of buffalo, kachina dancers, or people with blankets and feathers. They have taken into account their Indianness and gone beyond it into deeper regions of self-discovery. Their works are symbols of what they found within, and examples of the will of the individual to express himself in ways uniquely his own.

Charles Loloma, first in art, first in film series, and first in the hearts of his people.

He traces his ancestry in the mysterious petroglyphs. Over a crudely formed hand in the rock, Charles Loloma places his own hand, then hoists up his nephew Bryson to put his hand where centuries ago other wanderers had scratched a record of their mysteries and their travels. Charles walks Bryson back through the low underbrush full of crickets and butterflies. A car door clicks shut and Charles' bright yellow V-12 Jaguar purrs. This is Loloma, the Indian, the artist, the paradox. A Hopi of the Badger Clan steeped in the mysteries of ancient ceremonies, an artist with a unique vision, and a man with a great zest for the finest life has to offer.

The film follows the artist and his nephew into his cornfield, the same one that has been in his family for generations. Beside a busy ant hill, Charles instructs Bryson to respect all living creatures because they too have a place in this world. In the distance, the snow-capped San Francisco Peaks shimmer in the sunlight. This is the legendary home of the Kachinas, the Hopi spirits that bring rain down from the mountain. The mountain appears briefly and dissolves into scenes of magnificent Loloma jewelry: rings, bracelets, necklaces of turquoise, gold, silver, ivory, ironwood.

In his studio, Charles is at work on a bracelet. He melts the silver with a torch and pours it into a sandstone mold. He then hammers it into bracelet form and sets it with ivory and ironwood. A bead of turquoise on the inside symbolizes the hidden beauty of the wearer.

A dinner at the Loloma home is a feast of fresh corn from the field, home-baked bread, and wild spinach from the claysand soil. The hospitality is generous and with some of his friends Charles talks about his travels in Europe, his pleasure in meeting some of the great contemporary artists, his delight in frequenting the finest restaurants. But he chooses to live here in the land of the Hopi where his life has meaning and coherence.

Here Charles is a member of the Bad-nger Clan. Here he is part of the great Hopi mystery and legend that has lived for generations in the ceremonies of the villages. Deep inside the kivas, from the belly of the earth come whispered prayers and muffled songs that float like feathers to the mountaintops, to other worlds. The kachinas hear them and from out of the north a crowd of white tufted clouds float over their land. The sun is dimmed and the clouds let down their long hair trail-ing it along the sandy soil, leaving pre-cious drops of rain. The music of raindrops drumming on the earth coaxes up the tiny sprouts of corn sleeping in The inner light of the night changes its form as it moves across the earth just before sunrise - Changes Into first a gray fox then a yellow fox and emerges as the sun The land of the Hopi comes alive to the warming of the sun. The busy ants scramble out of the underworld and the spider, the master weaver, glides across the silken sand. High on the mesa's red cliffs, the sun's shadow moves across ancient drawings chipped into the rock by the ancestors of the Hopi.

Rod McKuen narrates this film about Charles Loloma, the Hopi Indian artist. The film is set in the oldest continuouslyinhabited community in the United States, where life still centers around the raising of corn and the ceremonies in the kiva that bring rain to this dry corner of the Southwest. The film follows Charles as the clay. Corn means life. Corn is life. Corn is their mother. Another cycle has begun in another's ending in the land of the Hopi. The families will go into their fields to harvest the corn they will eat and it will become their bodies. And in their ceremonies they will sprinkle the dry corn meal around them.

One day I shall be a cloud and I shall bring you the storm who is energy and song and dance and growth and creativity.

I shall cross the sky and I shall cross the earth I shall pause with you.

I shall sing and dance and grow forever. and in that myth I shall return again and again to earth to myself and continue in the myth that is the gray fox then the yellow fox and that is the sun. and that is love.

Special Credit: Charles Loloma's "Rainbow Bracelet," front cover, and bracelets, page 24, lower, were photographed by Jerry Jacka and are reproduced by special permission from the book Turquoise Treasures Graphic Art Center, publishers.