Navajo, Hopi, Zuni . . .

Life on the Papago Reservation --

Jewelry, Pottery, Basket-weaving,

Navajo Rugs

Conversation with
Tom Bahti
dialogue with a man who knows the Southwest Indians, their jewelry and other arts and crafts from experience and years of personal contact, contact that gives him a deep insight into today's American Indian

This interview, arranged and photographed by K.C. and conducted by his editor, Gaylord Staveley, appeared in

Western Gateways Magazine - Native American Indian Interview - November 1968

BACKGROUND BEFORE INTERVIEW:

Tom Bahti was born in Michigan where he developed a childhood interest in American Indians. His interest extended to jewelry, pottery, basket weaving and Navajo rugs. It didn't take him long to realize that most of the Indians left in the country lived in the Southwest. After the Navy, Tom graduated from the Anthropology Department of the University of New Mexico and became a dealer and collector of Indian art.

He found arts and crafts to be a good entre into other problems. He had been and still is actively involved with a number of projects concerned with social problems of the Indians, educational problems, and reservation life. He knows the tribes of he American Southwest--Zuni, Hopi, Navajo and others. Tom has many observations and ideas on the American Southwest Indian cultures as they are today, and he knows why he has them. When you talk with Tom, you get the feeling that he is not reciting textbooks or interpreting Indian life through some mysterious power which he has found here in the Southwest. He tells you this is what he sees and this is his version and that the Indian has his side of it too.

He owns and operates an Indian art and craft shop in Tucson, Arizona. he is the author of American Southwest Indian Arts and Crafts, and a new book, American Southwest Indian Tribes.

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WESTERN GATEWAYS: Tom, Indian arts and crafts are one of your main interests's, do you feel that the field of arts and crafts--jewlery, pottery, basket weaving, rug making--has a good future?

Tom Bahti: Arts and crafts among American Indians has exactly the same future that arts and crafts have in our own society. They are going to be in the realm of the specialist, the very serious artist, or the very serious craftsmen. The person who weaves the average Papago basket eventually will have to give it up simply because he can't afford time-wise to do this. Right now a Papago basket weaver at best earns about fifteen cents an hour.

Now this is alright in the reservation situation where it provides a supplementary income. It can be important to those individuals--persons who are unable to get any other work and can piece out their living on the reservation by making jewelry or other craft. Strangely enough even at fifteen cents an hour, craft work on the Papago Reservation has greatly increased in the past ten years or so. On the other hand, basketry has died out in other tribes where other work presents itself, either in industry on the reservation or proximity to an urban area where part-time jobs are available.

If we get into something like jewelry, a good silversmith can earn a living. Jewelry will continue longer than any other craft. Weaving, whether it is basketry or rugs, will die out fastest. When you think of the number of women in this country who still do hand weaving, it is very small. They do it as a hobby or they are very serious students of weaving who are top notch craftsmen and show at museums. Why knit a pair of socks that will take you a week to do when you can buy a pair for a dollar?

WESTERN GATEWAYS: There is no necessity for many of these arts in Indian culture today. What has perpetuated them?

Tom Bahti: Oh that's true.

Navajo weaving for instance. There is no reason they should have continued weaving after the time that commercial textiles were introduced.

But pride in craftsmanship, the fact that the time is available, and an interest on their own part have carried it on. When the Indian craftsmen get carried into our type of society where everything is figured in terms of time and money or both and you start thinking in those terms and realize you're getting fifteen or twenty-five cents an hour, it's simply not feasible to do it even if you enjoy it.

Now this is one of the things I think that most craft projects which are either financed publicly or privately fail to consider, you cannot raise the economic standard of any Indian group by promoting crafts. If you do you're getting into mass production and you destroy Indian crafts themselves.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: Didn't many of the early traders try to perpetuate rug weaving?

Tom Bahti: Well, they were trying to perpetuate a craft for the sole purpose of getting merchandise. This is quite different from perpetuating a craft for any esthetic purpose. However, this was also done at a time when labor was very, very cheap. Silverwork was paid for by the ounce and if the silver in a bracelet was worth a dollar then you figured a dollar's worth of labor. Well, this is way out of proportion.

This was the general attitude toward crafts on the reservation. It was the only thing the Indians had to trade and so they were encouraged to do rugs or silver.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: How long did this system remain as it was in the early trading days?

Tom Bahti: It started in the late 1800's and probably ran not much beyond World War I. There were a number of Indians leaving the reservation and taking jobs in town. Of course this means that they are no longer doing crafts. You have a different attitude expressed by a number of traders on the reservation who are sincerely interested in promoting fine merchandise, fine crafts which are still just as saleable but bring more money not just to the person who is handling them but to the person who is making them. They cater to the collector's market, a museum type market and many of the museums themselves are interested in revising and promoting old designs, fine crafts, so that the finished project is worth more because it has much greater appeal.

The traders interpreted quite accurately what the eastern market taste was going to be. The eastern market for Indian goods already knew what Indians should be doing. They knew that bright colors and geometric patterns were what the Indians would automatically do in spite of the fact that what they actually did in their early pieces of weaving was what we would regard as sophisticated.

The textbook is written by the Anglo. No one ever asks the Indian what he regards as a good piece of jewelry. Then of course you have to remember too that we don't have a single Anglo taste either.

We have people who shop in boutiques. We have people who shop in antique stores and people who go to Woolworth's. Sometimes you can find good design in Woolworth's and you can find the God--awfullest things in antiques. But because they are old and we have a certain reverence for them, we decide they must be good and they just don't build them like they used to. This is a very common attitude. We also have a number of these museum type people and collectors who will not consider anything new. They fight and kick and scream about anything new that is introduced, forgetting completely that change is constant. You simply can't get away from this in any craft tradition at all. Nothing was ever created in the vacuum or remained that way without stagnating.

You get collectors and museum people who will just practically fall on the floor and weep saying,

"Oh, why don't they make those nice old Navajo bridles any more!" Well, I'll tell you why. It's very simple. They're driving pick-up trucks now and it's hard as hell to fit a bridle for a horse on a pick-up truck.

I'm very much in favor of the fine old pieces, I'll pick them up anytime. I'm intrigued by them but not blinded by them.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: How do the traditionalists react to such craftsmen as Charles Loloma, Popo Vi Da, and Ottelie Loloma?

Tom Bahti: Well, Charles Loloma is a case in point. To me he is the finest contemporary craftsman in the United States today. He is so far ahead of the critics that they're not qualified to judge what he is really doing. What they don't understand about Charles's traditional type work--and I use traditional in the sense of Charles Loloma tradition. He is drawing on an Indian tradition which goes farther back than silver. And if you're looking only at silver started in the Spanish tradition then you're thinking in terms of a copied tradition.

No one says a squash blossom necklace isn't Indian because the pomegranate blossom and the naja are derived from Spanish tradition.

And yet because Loloma goes back to prehistoric times when bracelets were made by wrapping strings of turquoise beads around the wrist and interprets this in a piece of jewelry using silver as a vehicle, they don't understand what he is going. What they are saying is I don't understand it, therefore it's not Indian and I really know more about it than the craftsman does.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: We've been talking about all these things that govern art taste. What does the American government have to say about Indian life?

Tom Bahti: Well, unfortunately the government can't make up its mind. we've gone through just about every attitude towards American Indians, beginning with annihilation in the very early days. After we became stronger and were still dealing with them as individual nations, we made treaties. They were always sacred treaties, and they always contained the phrase "as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers run" and they were quite glorious. Then they decided the Indian was a nuisance and so tried annihilation and that proved too costly so they decoded on reservations and that wasn't too satisfactory.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs was always unpopular with Congress because it's suppose to be working itself out of a job and never seems to be able to. That's no particular criticism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs because I don't know of any bureaucracy anywhere that's interested in working itself out off a job. Money is a problem too. It's really unfortunate that the Bureau of Indian Affairs was moved to the Department of the Interior and not left under the Department of Defense or the War Department because I'm sure if it was under the War Department that they would get more funds than they ever asked for. The Department of Interior is always cut short. But that's only part of the problem.

No amount of money is going to be a substitute for imagination and this is really what they lack. Imagination and a consistent attitude or consistent program is what is needed. They simply cannot make up their minds to what they want to do with them. One year they're a nuisance and they're going to terminate. The next year they are going to start back in the early days of 40 acres of land and a mule. That was going to be freedom for everybody.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: Why hasn't a hundred years of education made much difference?

Tom Bahti: Well,

we haven't had a hundred years of Native American Indian education, we've had a hundred years of messing around with education but we haven't had a hundred years of education.

The Bureau pays, and has paid consistently very poor salaries and so you either get one extreme or the other. You get some one who is very dedicated and wants to work with the Indians and then he's hampered by the bureaucracy. Either on the national level or the local level everybody else knows what to do. It's like moving a freight train when it doesn't have an engine. You come up with an imaginative idea at any level, and you've got to push that train one direction or another and one person can't do it.

You get a lot of incompetent individuals who can't get jobs elsewhere who take them with the Bureau in their school system simply because it's a job that's available. As a result, education has suffered. Now I've known teachers who were so dedicated they lost their jobs with the Bureau and I've known people who were so undedicated that they remained there until retirement age and cranked out class after class of untaught children.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: Is there any change in the future?

Tom Bahti: One of the most encouraging things recently has been the . . .

Rough Rock Demonstration school on the Navajo Reservation. It is under the direction of Grant Russell from Arizona State University.

The Navajo Tribe is even interested in setting up a college. I think this indicates a grass roots desire to do something basic about education. As long as they don't bog down in bureaucracy and have a way of weeding out incompetents, well, I hope they'll make some headway.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: What obstacles face the Indian student leaving a Bureau school and going into a college or university?

Tom Bahti: Chances are even-steven that he's going to flunk out the first year because he was not prepared. when he comes to the University it doesn't mean that he's had a twelfth grade education. It means he's been in an Indian School perhaps twelve years and comes out with perhaps a 9th or 10th grade education. The first thing he hits up against is the fact that he is working in a second language which the University will not recognize or at least has not to date, and secondly his twelfth grade education is not the same as the non Indian students. He's got a tremendous gap and the mortality rate for beginning Indian students is 50%.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: Will an Indian college help this?

Tom Bahti: I think so because it will take into consideration these problems. That's why I see great hope for this Navajo College and I hope other tribes begin to follow suit.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: In the eastern part off the US there are specific schools set up for preparatory work between high school and college. In fact some schools even completely oriented to train students to get into one specific college. Would this sort of thing on the reservation, established for the Indian student, help bridge the gap?

Tom Bahti: Yes, this could be done. However, you have to remember that economically these people are very low on the totem pole and it would probably not be financially possible for them to take any longer than they do. The drop out rate now for high school students among Indians is very high, so if you decide when you get through high school that you're going to have another year or two years before you get to college, the financial burden is too great. What should be done immediately and every year we don't do it is just one more year, one more class lost - - is to overhaul our beginning grade schools and start them out with kindergartens. We should have a preschool, particularly for Indian children.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: A Head Start Program?

Tom Bahti: Something better than Head Start, better than Kindergarten. An honest to God full-fledged kindergarten which is going to start off using English and doing something. They have to be improved right from the first level. We ran a pilot project out on the Papago Reservation with the pre-school group and hired a teacher for two years. This was privately funded but at a Bureau school. It worked out very well, and no one disagreed about it but they say the funds are not available to do this. It's a curious thing, more funds are available to send an Indian to college than to keep him in high school.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: Well, it's obvious that the Reservation schools have their problems. what are the prospects for the Indian family that is living off the reservation while working at a part-time job?

Tom Bahti:

One of the biggest problems the Bureau is going to have to face eventually is the want of providing services to non-reservation Indians. There is a tremendous number, with something like 12,000 Papagos, about half of them live on the reservation. There are over 115,000 Navajos, 40 or 50,000 probably off the reservation a good time of the year, many of them permanently. They are entitled to no services from the Bureau unless they move back onto the reservation.

Our big problem in Tucson at the Indian Center is getting health, education, and welfare for non-reservation Indians in our local Welfare offices. The first thing they are told is go back to the reservation, we have too much of a case load, we don't want you.

When we take them down to the Pima County Hospital and after you wait there perhaps a day or two they'll say, "Well, why don't you go back out to Sells, that's 60 miles." If you are really sick,, they'll tell you very frankly, you can't go to the hospital because you'll collapse in the waiting room probably. I've waited there 8 and 10 hours with emergencies.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: Has the Bureau or other agencies provided any assistance for relocating and finding work?

Tom Bahti: The Bureau does have a program for Indians who want to relocate. If a Papago wants to go to Chicago or Los Angeles, they make arrangements for his transportation, some job counseling, find a job for him, nand there is a small amount of follow through.

Only about 25% find work and want to live there most of them have to live again in the lower income areas, slum areas. When they send out a promotion photograph showing a happy family sitting in front of its TV in a Chicago apartment and the man has a job as a sheet metal worker, they crop the photograph so they don't show the sink next to the TV, they don't tell you that the couch makes into a bed for four or five people. These are the sort of things they forget to mention.

So there is a lot of promotion and I don't know how good the job follow through is. They do have counseling and what-not but I do know that one of the biggest problems of privately operated Indian centers in urban areas has to do with people who have been relocated and are at loose ends.

The job hasn't worked out, they are unhappy about being there, and they are confused about the city.

WESTERN GATEWAYS:

There is talk off bringing industry onto the reservations to employ the Indians. But this is a poor situation that you are bringing in one piece of material to a reservation, into a foreign area so to speak, working with it and bringing it back off. It neither originates on the reservation or is consumed on the reservation.

Tom Bahti: It is a temporary solution. All we can do to contribute to an improvement of the current situation is provide a good basic education. After that it's an unknown. But we do have to provide that. We have to provide health services. Where they go from there I don't know because what the economic future of the country is I can't say. But it is a problem that has to be worked on and we might as well recognize it.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: What about increases in the area of tourism on the reservations?

Tom Bahti: This is a great possibility because off more leisure time in our society and more people traveling. A number of the tribes have programs for building lakes, and tourist facilities.

A number of prehistoric sites are being developed as Tribal Parks that you can visit. They are like our National Parks.

There's no reason why Papagos for instance couldn't become involved in an exotic animal program to bring animals from Africa that would be suited to the desert area and sell hunting licenses to go out and go on a safari.

WESTERN GATEWAYS: This type of thing means that an Indian is going to be employed on the reservation, showing off his country, his culture, his way of life, the things that he is proud of. isn't this a big step forward?

Tom Bahti: Sure. There are tremendous possibilities, but it takes imagination and it takes a follow through with a consistent program and a desire to start a program and say this is what we are going to do.