The Incredible Muttonman

When Things Go Awry, Relax Here Comes MUT MAN

The next time you visit the Navajo Indian Reservation, keep an eye out for Muttonman.

Muttonman is a very strange-looking Indian. He wears an old-fashioned football helmet adorned with a few eagle feathers, a bandanna around his neck, and a football-style jersey emblazoned with a capital "M." A concha belt holds up his pants. His feet are housed in moccasins.

Two of Muttonman's many unusual characteristics are: He has superhuman strength, and he can fly. How did he get so strong,and how is it he can fly? For the answer, we turn to Vincent Craig.

Like Muttonman, Craig is a Navajo of many talents. A former policeman and now the tribe's chief probation officer, he also is a singer, songwriter, humorist, and illustrator. In his latter role, he created Muttonman, a cartoon strip that appears weekly in the Navajo Times, the newspaper of the Navajo Nation. Muttonman before he was Muttonman was born in Lupton, a reservation. community near Interstate 40, which is good, and also near the Puerco River, which is bad. Why? Muttonman grew up like most Navajos, eating a lot of mutton stew, but the mutton he ate came from sheep that had drunk water from the Puerco River. Not a good thing to do because in 1979 a tailings pond at a uranium mine in New Mexico gave way, dumping 100 million gallons of radioactive waste into the Puerco River, all of which flowed downhill But what was bad for sheep and humans turned out to be good for this particular Navajo.

It turned him into Muttonman, the Navajos' Superman.

Certainly this is a little strange, but Indian humor tends to be that way. It should be when you consider that life on an Indian reservation is a little different from life elsewhere. Indian humor as illustrated by the adventures of Muttonman mixing fact (the contaminated river) with fantasy (the creation of a superman) reflects their deadpan reaction to the world in which they live. It's a world that has a lot to do with politics, bureaucracy, unemployment, poverty, and, occasionally, corruption. Craig doesn't waste much energy on the "Noble Savage" theme that so many others like to apply to modern Indians, nor does he ever place blame for the Indians' plight. "I always tell [white] people," said Craig, "when you look at any Native American, you tend to feel a little like they're over there, and I'm over here, that somehow we're unlike everybody else. My conviction is that if you look very closely and with objectivity, you're going to see yourself because nobody has a monopoly on hardship and the various maladies that affect mankind. You have to look at us like a mirror."

Like Superman and Vince Craig, Muttonman has moral authority and what is sometimes called a social conscience. He fights the good fight, which also is sometimes a funny fight. For example: When Navajos living in the Lupton chapter began wondering just where in the world all the forms that the Bureau of Indian Affairs requires them to fill out end up, they turned to Muttonman for the answer. It helps to know what most Indians know, which is that you can hardly burp on a reservation without filing something in triplicate with the BIA. Most Indian lands are actually federal trust lands, which means that much of what goes on is subject not only to the whims of tribal bureaucracy but the federal bureaucracy as well, the net result being that it takes forever to get anything accomplished. You can hear it in an old joke that Indians sometimes repeat: An outsider asks a Navajo: "How long does it take to get a business started on the reservation?"

The Indian replies: "Three years to life." To find out what happens to those piles of forms that get filed every year, Muttonman took to the sky and flew to BIA headquarters in Washington, or as Craig always spells it in the strip, imitating the Navajo dialect, "Washing-Dohn."

"So I had Muttonman flying through the sky to Washington," Craig explained, a mischievous smile tweaking the corners of his mouth, "and along the way he's going over Oklahoma, and there's two rednecks standing in a field looking up, and one of them says to the other, 'Boy, you give those Indians a little sovereignty, and they sure get uppity."

Muttonman gets to Washington and starts following clerks around the BIA building, and he notices they're very secretive. "Why is that?" he wonders. Eventually he discovers this army of clerks taking all the tribal paperwork down to the basement where there is a "time vortex."

"All of the paperwork just gets sucked up into the time vortex, and the truth is nobody knows where it ends up," Craig said, expressing a view that most Navajos have held for years.

Around the time Craig was working on this theme, the University of New Mexico was preparing an exhibit as part of the Smithsonian Institution's Columbus Quincentennial celebration in 1992. Craig was asked if it would be possible to get Muttonman involved in the celebration of Columbus' discovery of the New World so that his cartoon strip could be incorporated into the Smithsonian exhibit. As a man whose ear is always tuned to the

ear is always tuned to the

absurd, Craig felt this was an opportunity too rich with comic possibilities to pass up.

So Muttonman ends up in the basement of the BIA building, watching the paperwork get sucked up by this giant vacuum cleaner Craig calls a time vortex.

But he gets too close, and he too gets sucked into the time vortex. In a nanosecond, Muttonman is whisked through time and space until he suddenly makes a crash landing on the ship that Columbus is Navigating to the New World. But the story doesn't end there. In this strip (which remained on exhibit at the Smithsonian for two months), Muttonman inadvertently becomes responsible for the discovery of the New World. Craig explained:

MUTTON MAN

Like his comic strip character Muttonman, Vincent Craig also is a Navajo, and multitalented as well. A former policeman, he's now the tribe's chief probation officer, a singer, songwriter, and humorist. Behind Craig is Window Rock, the natural formation from which the capital of the Navajo Nation gets its name. DAN COOGAN "What happened is that after he crashlands on Columbus' ship, he tries to explain who he is. He says, 'I'm an Indian.' And Columbus gets all excited and starts shouting, 'I found it! I'm in India! I'm in India!' Muttonman says, 'No, I'm a Navajo, a Native American,' but Columbus can't understand what he's talking about. "In the meantime, Columbus' crew thinks Muttonman is a demon or a bad omen, and they want to get rid of him, and while they're arguing, they're not paying attention to where they're going. So the ship runs aground, and that's how they discover America."

Muttonman is not usually preoccupied with major historical events. Most of his energy is directed toward helping Navajos get out of sticky situations. In the process, he also gets to say what many Navajos would like to say if they weren't worried about losing their jobs. "That's exactly what he does," Craig agreed. "He's my alter ego."