Program draws bead on jewelry, culture
Durango Herald, CO
April 19, 2006
By Thomas Munro | Herald Staff Writer
For a group of white pre-teens, it was an unusual argument.
REBECCA DROKE/Herald
Bennett Thompson, a Southern Ute tribal elder, talks about beading to a seventh-grade class at Bayfield Middle School on Friday. From left, the students are Ben Christner, 12, son of Becky Bauer and Tim Christner; Dwayne Lizer, 13, son of Byron and Dottie Lizer; and Caleb Rael, 12, son of Amy Daniels and David Rael.
“Males make (chokers) and they’re better than girls’,” Jimmy O’Brien said.
Some of the girls disagreed.
“It depends on the boy,” Kayla McCann argued.
“Boys are more into sports, and girls are more into jewelry,” Patty Powers insisted.
The children were participating in a new program at Bayfield Middle School, which invites the school’s largely white student body to learn methods and traditions of Southern Ute jewelry-making from some of the tribe’s most revered artists. The ties binding American Indians and Europeans have, from the earliest days, been strung with beads. This latest cultural exchange challenged white students’ ideas about who and what jewelry is for.
“I think it’s a really joyful way to learn across cultures,” said Scott Kuster, the sixth-grade Spanish teacher behind the cultural interchange, the first of its kind in the middle school.
Southern Ute Cultural Center and Museum Director Lynn Brittner, exhibit technician and artist Tim Ryder, education consultant Dan Cieloha and tribal elder Bennett Thompson converged on Kuster’s class Friday to teach several classes of 12-year-olds the basics of American Indian choker construction.
The choker is a necklace, broad as a belt, worn tightly around the neck. It is made of alternating white bones and colored beads strung on thin leather straps.
“The tying is complicated, but the rest is to enjoy,” said Morgan Box, daughter of Southern Ute Vice-Chairman Matthew Box and the only tribal member in the class.
Box said she was learning the skill, traditionally a male specialty, for the first time.
“I’m learning how to bead, and I’m also sharing about what I know,” Box said as she tightened a row of beads and bones under Thompson’s jovial eye.
Thompson, who has been a museum board member for 15 years, creates intricate beadwork, miniatures, tomahawks, pipes and bows and arrows. He regularly shares these art forms with students at high schools, Head Start classes and the Southern Ute Academy, all on a voluntary basis.
“I used to work with medicine men,” Thompson said. “They told me never ask for any money.”
While Thompson said he gladly teaches beading to anyone, male or female, the differences between traditional gender roles in Ute and non-Indian societies made the jewelry-making project an interesting departure for some of the students.
But with the way perhaps blazed by the popularity of men’s puka shell necklaces, several boys in the class proudly donned their finished chokers, seeming to appreciate the masculine force of the traditional ornament.
To others, the jewelry may simply have been pretty. McCann said she already had an outfit in mind to go with her choker.
Kuster has been spearheading the effort to develop a curriculum for culture instruction at the middle school. In one project, he asks students to write out their own cultural history.
For 12-year-old Powers, that cultural history might include the different tradition of beading she learned from her grandmother. Box’s cultural history would be more difficult to write at a time when the danger is growing increasingly real that traditions like Southern Ute beadwork will become confined to museums.
Cieloha, among those working on the design of a new Southern Ute cultural center and museum, said his educational mandate now includes teaching Southern Ute children to be conservators of their own cultural traditions, even while he continues to reach out to non-Indians.
“The contact is positive – it builds a foundation,” Cieloha said.
Kuster was pleased with his first effort.
“The kids loved it and appreciated it,” he said as class ended and white boys wearing elaborate chokers walked proudly out, into the judgmental halls of middle school.
tmunro@durangoherald.com
