50 Years Ago: Ceremonial paintings found; trusted aide returns

Fifty years ago this week, archaeologists had found paintings that they thought may provide some clues about changes over the centuries in Navajo ceremonies.

The sandstone paintings were found several months earlier in a remote canyon south of the Navajo Reservoir in an area where companies were doing some natural gas drilling. The paintings dated from just after the Spanish reconquest of New Mexico’s rebellious Pueblo Indians in 1692.

The sandstone slab measured 10 feet by five feet by two-and-a-half feet and was considered one of the major archaeological finds of the decade.

Archaeologists worked for four days — very carefully, they say — to remove the panel from a section of a fallen sandstone cliff wall in a tributary of Largo Canyon just inside Rio Arriba County.

Dr. Bertha Dutton, who is director of the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe — which is researching the paintings — said it was during the late 1600s that Pueblo Indians from the Rio Grande Valley and western villages lived as temporary refugees in the ancestral homelands of the Navajos.

The two Indian groups, she said, lived closely and exchanged cultural values.

The paintings depict a procession of Navajo deities and other ceremonial designs in multi-colored paints and incised carvings.

Their value, she said, is priceless since they provide modern-day archaeologists a link between contemporary Navajo ceremonies as performed by modern-day medicine men with ceremonies that were performed by their counterparts more than 250 years before they migrated to the Four Corners region where they live today.

In other news 50 years ago, the members of the Gallup-McKinley County School Board learned the bad news about Ramah High School.

The building being used to teach 300 students was no longer fit to be used as a school.

The situation was so bad that a citizens’ committee created to look into problems had strongly recommended that arrangement be made to transfer the students to a school “where more and better educational facilities are available.”

The problem was that there was no school in the area that was big enough or empty enough to house an extra 300 students, even if the school board was agreeable to the transfer.

But the committee report wasn’t the only bad news.

The New Mexico State Department of Education issued a warning that if something wasn’t done to improve the building enough to make it usable, the school could lose its accreditation.

With no other place to move the students, the committee said the district’s only option was to find the money to keep the school open.

The school board agreed to come up with a plan that would modernize the facility within the next three years, adding that students would just have to put up with the renovation efforts that would go on as classes continued.

And finally, there was some good news for Leo Denetsone.

Denetsone was the aid to Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai who was fired unexpectedly in mid-February as one of Nakai’s administrative assistants.

The firing was totally unexpected because, as the Times reported, Denetsone was one of Nakai’s most trusted aides who had been with him from the early days of his campaign. He was loyal to the point that when he was fired, he still had no bad words to say about Nakai and while he wasn’t quite sure why the action was taken, he felt that if Nakai felt it was necessary, he would go along with it.

Less than a month from the day he was fired came word that he had been rehired by Nakai and once again would serve as Nakai’s administrative assistant.

Of course, this being Nakai, he refused to give the press a simple yes or no when he was asked if the report of Denetsone coming back was true.

“I’m in a hurry to get out of town and I haven’t time to talk to you. Why don’t you talk to Perry Allen?” he said.

Allen was another administrative assistant and when he was asked, said, yes, the report was true.

Still, neither he nor Denetsone would comment on why he was rehired or why he was fired. It was just marked down as another of the strange things that Nakai did that made no sense to anyone but him.

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