I worked for a year as an Americorps Volunteer at the Kha’Po Community School at Santa Clara Pueblo. The school had just changed its name to the pueblo’s Tewa title, which reflected the recent change in their funding and governing structure. Instead of BIA administration, a tribal board was now guiding the school. The question they were asking through this process was, “can we use the tools of the colonizers (i.e. the public education system) to assert our own sovereignty?”
There was a Pablita Velarde mural in the office of the school, of the same deer dance I had the privilege of helping my students prepare for, later in the year. Just after she graduated high school, eighty years ago, Velarde worked as an art teacher at that school. Her next job was a commissioned mural in Albuquerque, and then Bandolier National Monument, and so on for hundreds of paintings.
It’s tempting, now, for me to draw a parallel between the artist’s defiant journey from this school into the echelons New Mexico’s art scene, and the school’s present ideological reshuffling. It’s also tempting to add an additional layer of politicization, focusing on her womanhood, how she bucked patriarchal expectations that she become a potter, made her own way as a painter.
However, this has been the story told of her for a long time. A nice story, but it confines her work to that sociopolitical context. Pueblo Beach isn’t about staying in the box; it’s about going outside. Last time we hung out Helen told me, “I want the focus on her strength. There’s more than her identity as an indigenous woman.”
This is the difficult thing with art. It can, and should, mean a lot to a lot of people and causes. But if it becomes straight activism, straight signifying for a cause, then it loses holism. Pueblo Beach prioritizes the strength—of one midcentury Santa Claran (Kh’a P’o) woman, but let’s not let context let us off the hook. Strength applies to all.