Bone

Yesterday morning on KUNM, the invaluable National Public Radio Station where five days a week I listen to “Native America Calling,” the only program in the country to showcase the tribes, I heard about a business in Arizona that makes prosthetic devices—arms, hands, partial hands and legs.

Not a topic I would usually find interesting, but then I heard about the Hopi leg, a prosthetic leg decorated with traditional Hopi designs drawn by a young Hopi artist.

It seems to me this is one of the small indications we need so badly. The artist and the manufacturer replied to questions about a non-Native ordering this device; they were delighted to collaborate. The other prosthetic legs are either white, black, or in camouflage, reminding me of the soldiers losing limbs in our endless wars.)

To me, it’s a small indication of hope that this could even be a subject for discussion on the radio. For so long, any physical disability was cloaked with what seemed like shame, as though the inflicted person had, as the older generation had it, “brought it on on him/herself” through some form of recklessness. It would be hard to argue in this country that serving in the military is reckless although the disastrous results for so many make that conclusion seem inevitable.

But that is not my concern here. I was surprised and delighted to discover that a Hopi artist, from a tribe that keeps to its high dry mesas in Arizona and is seldom seen by visitors, was willing to share these designs. This is what we need: collaboration on the deepest level, led by artists with their community behind them.

Oddly enough, yesterday’s Santa Fe New Mexican ran an item on a back page about a small arm bone discovered in the pit left after last week’s high winds overthrew one of two Norway spruces planted eighty years ago in front of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis a block from the Plaza here.

Before the cathedral was built, there were burials on the site. No one knew about them, apparently, as no one knew about the hundreds of burials of Native American children near the notorious boarding schools that dot this country. The grounds of the two here in Santa Fe, one still standing, have never been explored; perhaps we prefer not to know.

But this small bone and its piteous story of eras when many—if not most—infants died before their first birthday brings my attention to the dark past while the Hopi prothesis leg with its beautiful designs, to be shared with many, shines a small bright light into the future.

[For more, listen to this “Native America Calling” podcast, or read articles in the Arizona Daily Sun or the Navajo-Hopi Observer.]

In New Mexico kunm Native America Calling