Page 16 - the NOISE July 2014

MAPPING SHONTO BEGAY, HIS HOME & HIS HEART
Far up in the northeast corner of Arizona, on a desolate stretch of highway be- tween Tuba City and Kayenta, an offshoot of Navajo Road 98 cuts between a narrow, red walled canyon before dropping down to the Shonto Trading Post, where a sleepy conve- nience store, two ancient gas pumps, tiny elementary school, and a traditional hogan flicker in and out of the sunlit embrace of a shady grove. Under the breezy cottonwoods awaits artist Shonto Begay to give me a per- sonal tour of the map of his heart.
Fine, orange-brown dirt sweeps across the road like smoke as we begin to traverse the high Sonoran Desert of the Colorado Plateau, a crystalline landscape of cedar sandstone, blue sky, juniper, piñon and ponderosa pine; and blue-green sage.
We stop and walk out to the steep edge of a cliff. Below is his grandmother’s homestead, a lush, spring-fed flatland spilling out of two canyons that converge to form Shonto Can- yon, land ideal for farming, shepherding, and its abundance of shade. It is here that Mr. Be- gay remembers the first painter he ever saw, sitting under a cottonwood tree. “I peered over the shoulder of this plein air painter and I saw brilliant green,” he says. “I saw the red canyon wall; I saw the sunlight; I saw the deep shadows. The other kids scratched their heads and walked away. But I never forgot that interpretation of my canyon from under the cottonwood tree.”
Art-making was discouraged in the harsh environment of the US Government board- ing schools Mr. Begay and other Navajo (or Diné) children were forced to attend. Sur- rounded by barbed wire and guards, they were punished severely for speaking their native language, and assigned Christian religions based on their height. Mr. Begay would draw on the air if he had to, and was able to see the lines, suspended there, for as long as he liked.
“I started on the journey of creating art to stay alive,” he says. “It externalizes pain. It’s
finding a sense of pride, a sense of strength, a sense of godliness in creating, a sense of some power when all else was taken away from you. You still had the power of that gesture, that movement, that line, that great calligraphy to the spirit.”
Ironically, Mr. Begay credits those difficult boarding school years with the retainment of so much of his cultural heritage.
“It’s what made me, what tempered me,” he says. “When somebody approaches you roughly at a very early age, when you’re get- ting into your rebelliousness, telling you ‘this is not who you are,’‘we want you to be this,’ and they say this with fear in their eyes, and you wonder what it is, in who you are, that they fear. Those are things that you wrap up beautifully deep, carefully lovingly, and bury deep inside. And then you go play their game for the whole year, and have your hair cut, wear ties and shoes. And when you come home for the summer, you throw your shoes away, and run barefoot in ceremony all summer long.
“You never take it for granted, because you know each year it’s threatened. On the one hand, you’re in a beautiful place where your whole theology is of the earth. To be taught something in a very contradictory way makes you be very conscious of who you are every single day.”
Just a few miles down the road is Navajo National Monument, where Mr. Begay spent four of his 12 years working as a Forest Service Ranger, and where the main attrac- tion is the Betatikin, or “Ledge House” ruins. In the Visitor Center, Mr. Begay exchanges greetings with the ranger in the soft, rhyth- mic staccato of the Diné language.
“Ya’ateeh! Aa’ a’ II’ baa da ‘ha’ne”?” asks Mr. Begay.
“A’deneii’ Ch,aanaghaa’ha’de’ya,”responds the ranger.
Not for the first time, do I feel the limita- tions of the printed word, its inability to
convey the language’s poetic cadence or the lulling quality of Mr. Begay’s intonation; and the inaccessibility of its meaning, not only because of my ignorance, but because of its ultimately untranslatable nature.
We browse the exhibits of Anasazi arti- facts, some of which Mr. Begay helped cu- rate, construct and illustrate, stopping at the literature section, where two of the 13 chil- dren’s books that Mr. Begay has illustrated and/or authored are for sale, which combine paintings with stories, myths and poems of traditional Navajo life.
Walking the Sandal Trail, we stop to rub sage between our fingers, and for Mr. Begay to point out the revered Grandfather Tree, a Juniper Pine twisting up out of the earth before splaying out its gnarled branches (a frequent subject of his paintings); and the names and uses of various medicinal plants
— Silver Leaf Buffalo berry, Cliff Rose, Scarlet Penstemon, Amulet, Snakeweed, Rabbit- brush, Yarrow, Chickweed, Rocky Mountain Bee weed, and many others.
The path dead ends on the precipice of a gasp-eliciting chasm. Below, a verdant valley snakes its way toward the vanishing point in a maze of canyons that make up the larger Tsegi, terrain that Mr. Begay has explored extensively, on foot and horseback, as a park guide and on long solitary excursions. Di- rectly across are the ruins, a village-sized relic of an ancient civilization hugging the inside of a blind arch large enough to accommo- date Washington DC’s Capitol dome.
Back in the truck, as we make our way to- ward Mr. Begay’s home, he points out the houses of countless brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, Mr. Begay being one of 13 siblings.
Finally, a rough, rocky road crests a hill where, spread out like a blanket below, is the land rendered in Map of My Heart, the title piece of Mr. Begay’s solo retrospective show opening this month at the Museum of
Northern Arizona. In the distance, on the edge of a field, is his mother’s house, where the 93-year old matriarch still tends to her land and sheep, and where, the day prior, the family convened to plant corn, a Mother’s Day tradition. Nearby is the house of one of his brothers; and further out, amongst the sand dunes, the house of his aunt and sister. Beyond the flashing silver blade of a wind- mill, Highway 160 runs silently along the base of Black Mesa, or “Big Mountain,” as the Diné call it, sacred for its large underground aquifer that has sustained the Navajo and neighboring Hopi people for more than 600 years, and land that has been embroiled in controversy ever since coal mining opera- tions began in the 1960s.
“This whole terrain is the map of my heart,” says Mr. Begay. “This was my whole world. As a kid, running barefoot after sheep and looking for goats in the middle of the night, I stepped on every square yard of this land, and that’s what I’m trying to convey — a profound sense of place. And seeing it from another vantage point, kind of like looking at yourself, your own people, your own culture, from the outside, like living in a city some- where else and looking inward.”
I thought visiting the land would help put Map of My Heart, one of Mr. Begay’s more ab- stract paintings, into context, but found the opposite to be true — that I was reverting back to the painting to make sense of the land, precisely like a map.
“There are the water holes, stock ponds, water catches, cisterns, all the places where the water would be after the storm,” Mr. Be- gay had pointed out on the painting earlier, which provides an imagined aerial — and arterial — view of the land before us. “There is 160 in the distance, my mother’s hogan, the cornfield, the road going to my studio. Clouds passing over.”
Stepping back from the painting, a face coalesces out of areas of light, and the un-
16 • JUNE 2014 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us