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purejuiceI've been derelict on my Macondo posts lately, though there have been many stories I flagged for the file.
My new BFF, the CEO of KWRK, is foaming-at-the-mouth mad at the former Mayor, Marty Chavez. For beating his wife. For driving a highway through Petroglyphs national monument to access property owned by him, and, I believe, Domenici, which would otherwise be undevelopable. For peddling himself as an hidalgo descendent of the vicious Spanish colonial Onate, who was sent back to Spain IN CHAINS, thunders the CEO, for chopping off the feet of all the Acoma pueblo Indian men for one teeny little uprising. S, the CEO, claims that Chavez lobbied unsuccessfully for 10 years to have a statue of himself and/or Onate erected at public expense -- and finally succeeded in getting a bronze conquistador on a horse erected in front of the art museum with Mayor Marty's own face implanted. Mayor Marty was calling it a statue of Onate -- WHO WAS SENT BACK TO SPAIN IN CHAINS -- but the city council wouldn't let him label it such. So it's just a conquistador with Marty's face on it.
Very Macondo, very megalo fascist art, actually -- I'm thinking of the victory arches Saddam had made from a cast of his right arm, holding a sword. Probably the kitschiest -- with the possible exception of the human skin lamp shade -- artifact of fascist art there is. (Fascist art and kitsch have many interfaces worth pondering.)
This piece from the ABQ Journal touches on several Macondo themes, among them that caudillismo and hidalgo pendejismo are not limited to the politicians. It extends to any number of Taos/Fanta Se institutions and indeed the whole Fanta Se phenom is very, very Macondo. In this case the wannabee hidalgo pendejos are not the Sons of Onate but the Daughters of O'Keeffe, herself a bit of a poseur. Her legatees are fixing to chop feet because, you know, Dios y mi derecho. Old times there are not forgotten.
Publication: Jnl Final Edition 8/2005-today; Date: Jan 28, 2010; Section: Front Page; Page: A1
UPFRONT
Smoothing Things Over With Pastels
Leslie Linthicum
It’s been a few months since a tempest in an ink pot blew ill winds back and forth between the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and the Georgia O’Keeffe Elementary School in Albuquerque.
You might remember the tiff: The museum, which owns the rights to the iconic artist’s name, likeness and body of work, sent a letter to the school, warning that it would be diligent in protecting its copyrights from being infringed upon.
The offending items were a T-shirt that said “Georgia O’Keeffe Kindergarten” and the large initials “GOK” on an architectural rendering of a planned new school building.
Parents and teachers at the school felt slighted, people in the community called the museum a bully and the whole thing blew over in a few weeks. The school dropped the idea of a big “GOK” sign out front and the museum dropped its lawyerly stance.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
Last week, artist and art teacher Janine Al-Bayati was standing at the head of a long table in the workroom at Georgia O’Keeffe Elementary as 18 second-graders eagerly eyed piles of oil pastel sticks and sheets of clean white paper.
Al-Bayati was borrowing from the “Teaching with O’Keeffe” curriculum, developed by the O’Keeffe Museum and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Al-Bayati managed to translate the concept of O’Keeffe’s personalized “vocabulary” of colors and shapes into something that made sense to antsy 7-and 8-year-olds.
She is teaching art to a dozen and a half classes at the school over a couple of weeks, filling a gap in the curriculum left by the absence of an art teacher — and the museum’s education department is footing the bill.
I used to think there was nothing more fun than reporting on a goofy hubbub, especially one that pits stuffed suits against frecklefaced children. But checking back in and finding that the hubbub has worked itself out to everyone’s benefit turns out to be just as fun — especially when it involves kids furiously making art.
The energetic Al-Bayati got things started by asking the students what they know about O’Keeffe and what she drew and painted.
“She painted bones,” offered Reese Tate.
“She painted flowers,” said Carissa Ekhaguere.
Ainsley Hutchinson said, “She was a great artist.”
“She painted pictures of New York,” added Micky Dzur.
Georgia O’Keeffe principal Lucinda Sanchez told me that one of the most troubling aspects of the dispute with the museum last summer was that it questioned the school’s devotion to and respect for the artist.
“We talk about her a lot,” Sanchez said. “Our kids are really, really proud, and I’m proud. This school really is about her spirit and her art.”
The use of “GOK” was a shorthand that helped little kids pronounce a school name that is a mouthful, Sanchez said. It was never meant to disrespect one of America’s best-known artists.
Ryan Stark, who came on as the museum’s public relations manager in the middle of the kerfuffle, inherited what could be called with great understatement a public relations problem.
He calls the stormy events of the summer “a monumental miscommunication and misunderstanding.”
To assuage hurt feelings, the museum asked the school what the museum could offer, and the teachers asked for art teachers.
The first round of art lessons came in November, and Al-Bayati’s classes are the second phase. Everyone involved hopes the relationships will continue so the students who wear Georgia O’Keeffe’s name on their T-shirts will have even more chances to experience, with their own oils and pastels, the way she translated her world.
Because this involves an elementary school, it’s especially appropriate that some basic lessons have been learned.
“For us,” the museum’s Stark says, “it is obviously a very, very, very positive thing to have an elementary school named after Miss O’Keeffe. Hopefully one of the things that can come out of it is these young people here at the school having a personal connection with her.”
From the school’s perspective, Sanchez says, “It wasn’t ‘Take your ball and leave the playground.’ We talked about it and worked it through. It’s a lesson for our families, and it’s a lesson for our kids. You can really team and resolve and partner with people in a good, healthy way without it being a fight.”
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. You can reach Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@ abqjournal.com.
Publication: Jnl Legacy 1995 to July 2005; Date: Mar 23, 2001; Section: Journal North Venue; Page: 1
Edition--Journal North Venue Date--03/23/2001 Page-- 1
Onate's foot a legend grows
Story by Morgan Lee * Journal Staff Writer
Memoir includes story of 1998 'vigilante attack' on statue of Spanish conquistador
We now have a new and detailed account of how vandals severed a foot from Alcalde's statue of Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Onate although it may be as much legend as fact.
An anonymous group claiming to be "Native Americans and Native New Mexicans" took credit for the January 1998 surgery on the huge, heroic statue at the Onate Monument and Visitors Center at Alcalde north of Espanola.
The vandalism was a protest against 400th anniversary or Cuarto Centenario celebrations of the Spanish colonization of what is now New Mexico.
But no one has ever been identified, by name, as being responsible for the statue's disfigurement a delayed vigilante response to Onate's amputation of the feet of Acoma Pueblo men in the 16th century.
Now, the story of how Onate lost his foot has been described in "The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams," a memoir published under the name Nasdijj, which means "to become again" in Athabaskan (Navajo is an Athabaskan language). The author of the book, issued by Houghton Mifflin Co., has not been otherwise identified, and Nasdijj declines to say more about who he is.
Nasdijj's book has garnered critical acclaim, winning an award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association. The author will speak at the association's awards ceremony in Santa Fe on Saturday.
In Chapter 14, he tells the story of an unusual tourist trip to the Onate Center at Alcalde that he says starts before dawn on the Navajo Reservation, where three men and a dog set out in a pickup truck. They stop at Acoma Pueblo to squeeze in another friend and his hacksaw.
Nasdijj's written account has a lighthearted flavor, despite the grisly backdrop of Onate's military exploits.
The region's first colonial governor, Onate laid siege in 1599 to the sky city of Acoma Pueblo. Triumphant, Onate ordered young pueblo men punished by cutting off their right feet.
In Nasdijj's account of the assault on Onate's statue, the reader meets Roy Laughter, who picks up after his dog in public parks, worries about an old speeding ticket and, nevertheless, leads the expedition to Alcalde.
Ray Redshoes of Acoma brings sandwiches and the hacksaw, and the men are surprised to find the statue is hollow.
"The Indian men do not celebrate what they do," Nasdijj writes. "They don't feel good about it. They know this: It's way past time for something to be said. The romanticizing of such men as the conquistadors must end here."
Then it was back to Acoma, with the foot rolling around in the back of the pickup.
There's a curious shift from the third-person to the first-person as Nasdijj talks about protagonist Roy Laughter.
"Roy Laughter sort of likes being denounced as a vandal," Nasdijj writes. "Vandal is better than writer."
Contacted by e-mail and telephone, Nasdijj stressed that the chapter titled "Onate's Foot" is a story to be read as entertainment and legend.
"There's a new story being told among the Indians," Nasdijj writes in the memoir. "I cannot testify that the story is wholly accurate, only that it's being told, embellished with flourishes perhaps as the story is explained to children. House to house. Family to family. Cooking fire to cooking fire. Bar to bar. Powwow to powwow."
The disclaimers extend beyond the chapter to the entire book, starting with an author's note inside the cover that says, "I have attempted to protect the privacy of people through the editorial decision to frequently change names, appearances, and locations, as these are not relevant to the focus of the work or the issues the work strives to deal with."
Contacted for this article, Nasdijj declined to reveal more about the facts behind the Onate chapter and the location of the severed foot.
"I can't talk about the foot," said Nasdijj, who lives in Hillsboro, N.C., and was driving to Santa Fe this week with his dog, Navajo, to avoid air travel. "I plead ignorance. I have said everything I can say. Read carefully."
Although whimsical in places, the Onate chapter also contains some serious reflection on law and order.
"Writing this confessing to knowledge of a crime scares the hell out of me," Nasdijj writes.
The missing foot on the Onate statue in Alcalde was quickly recast in 1998 and law enforcement officials pledged to investigate. But details about who was behind the caper never surfaced, beyond an anonymous note to an Albuquerque Journal columnist and photos of the severed foot delivered to television stations.
Finding that foot, Nasdijj now says, "would be like getting into a Hopi Kiva it ain't going to happen."
Nasdijj declined to provide his full legal name, information he also has refused to reveal to other news publications.
"I have to stick with that," Nasdijj said. "That's the name my mother called me, that's the name I go by, even if the New York Times didn't like it."
Nasdijj's editor at Houghton Mifflin, Anton Mueller, said he knows the author's full name but that it was up to Nasdijj to share it.
Nasdijj has worked at small newspapers and written pornography to support his more serious writing. He has been published under different names that sometimes incorporate Nasdijj, Mueller said.
The book includes many harrowing chapters from the author's life, which he says started on the Navajo Reservation in 1950 and extended through an impoverished childhood of migratory labor camps, homelessness and dogged efforts to continue writing.
A chapter about Nasdijj's adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, and the young boy's ultimately fatal struggle with fetal alcohol syndrome was published in 1999 in Esquire magazine. Houghton Mifflin plans to publish another book by Nasdijj that focuses on his early life as a migrant worker.
Mueller said none of the facts in the Onate chapter were checked by the publisher.
"There wouldn't be anything we could fact check because it's always been presented as a story as told to me" by other people, Mueller said. "One of the points is this was a story in circulation on the reservation and there was probably a certain amount of exaggeration."
Nasdijj said he hasn't kept up with New Mexico news and the controversy over a second Onate statue planned in Albuquerque. (Ciudad Juarez also has a public statue of Onate.)
"I know this: It's a cultural war out there and it is filled with the mine fields of symbolism," Nasdijj said. "It will not go away. Certainly, not in New Mexico. It is more than a matter of taste. What some people see as symbols of their pride, other people see as violence and oppression."
Nasdijj's writing is steeped in Indian tradition and he uses the words "we" and "Navajo" interchangeably. But according to his book, his father is white and the ancestry of his mother is not made completely clear.
"My mother was a Navajo," Nasdijj writes. "Or so she claimed."
The author said he is looking forward to his return to northern New Mexico. Nasdijj said he once worked at Taos Pueblo as a counselor for young people with fetal alcohol syndrome, a condition Nasdijj has and talks about in his book.
He left the high desert for the Southeast because it was too expensive and too cold.
"I'm really looking forward to coming back because New Mexico is always again and again (returning to) me," he said. "For a lot of people that are connected to any reservation, it's always a thing of on again, off again, and always coming home."
If you go
WHAT: Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association banquet honoring Regional Book Award winners. "The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams," by Nasdijj, won the nonfiction 2001 Regional Book Award.
WHERE: La Fonda
WHEN: 6:30 p.m. Saturday
HOW MUCH: $40 includes dinner
PHOTO: Color
MYSTERY AUTHOR: Nasdijj, the only name he will give, has won critical acclaim for his memoir "The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams." The mystery author is shown with his dog, Navajo.
PHOTO: JOURNAL FILE
PHOTO: Color
PAYBACK? In 1998 someone cut off the right foot of the statue at the Onate Monument and Visitors Center at Alcalde north of Espanola.
My new BFF, the CEO of KWRK, is foaming-at-the-mouth mad at the former Mayor, Marty Chavez. For beating his wife. For driving a highway through Petroglyphs national monument to access property owned by him, and, I believe, Domenici, which would otherwise be undevelopable. For peddling himself as an hidalgo descendent of the vicious Spanish colonial Onate, who was sent back to Spain IN CHAINS, thunders the CEO, for chopping off the feet of all the Acoma pueblo Indian men for one teeny little uprising. S, the CEO, claims that Chavez lobbied unsuccessfully for 10 years to have a statue of himself and/or Onate erected at public expense -- and finally succeeded in getting a bronze conquistador on a horse erected in front of the art museum with Mayor Marty's own face implanted. Mayor Marty was calling it a statue of Onate -- WHO WAS SENT BACK TO SPAIN IN CHAINS -- but the city council wouldn't let him label it such. So it's just a conquistador with Marty's face on it.
Very Macondo, very megalo fascist art, actually -- I'm thinking of the victory arches Saddam had made from a cast of his right arm, holding a sword. Probably the kitschiest -- with the possible exception of the human skin lamp shade -- artifact of fascist art there is. (Fascist art and kitsch have many interfaces worth pondering.)
This piece from the ABQ Journal touches on several Macondo themes, among them that caudillismo and hidalgo pendejismo are not limited to the politicians. It extends to any number of Taos/Fanta Se institutions and indeed the whole Fanta Se phenom is very, very Macondo. In this case the wannabee hidalgo pendejos are not the Sons of Onate but the Daughters of O'Keeffe, herself a bit of a poseur. Her legatees are fixing to chop feet because, you know, Dios y mi derecho. Old times there are not forgotten.
Publication: Jnl Final Edition 8/2005-today; Date: Jan 28, 2010; Section: Front Page; Page: A1
UPFRONT
Smoothing Things Over With Pastels
Leslie Linthicum
It’s been a few months since a tempest in an ink pot blew ill winds back and forth between the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and the Georgia O’Keeffe Elementary School in Albuquerque.
You might remember the tiff: The museum, which owns the rights to the iconic artist’s name, likeness and body of work, sent a letter to the school, warning that it would be diligent in protecting its copyrights from being infringed upon.
The offending items were a T-shirt that said “Georgia O’Keeffe Kindergarten” and the large initials “GOK” on an architectural rendering of a planned new school building.
Parents and teachers at the school felt slighted, people in the community called the museum a bully and the whole thing blew over in a few weeks. The school dropped the idea of a big “GOK” sign out front and the museum dropped its lawyerly stance.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
Last week, artist and art teacher Janine Al-Bayati was standing at the head of a long table in the workroom at Georgia O’Keeffe Elementary as 18 second-graders eagerly eyed piles of oil pastel sticks and sheets of clean white paper.
Al-Bayati was borrowing from the “Teaching with O’Keeffe” curriculum, developed by the O’Keeffe Museum and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Al-Bayati managed to translate the concept of O’Keeffe’s personalized “vocabulary” of colors and shapes into something that made sense to antsy 7-and 8-year-olds.
She is teaching art to a dozen and a half classes at the school over a couple of weeks, filling a gap in the curriculum left by the absence of an art teacher — and the museum’s education department is footing the bill.
I used to think there was nothing more fun than reporting on a goofy hubbub, especially one that pits stuffed suits against frecklefaced children. But checking back in and finding that the hubbub has worked itself out to everyone’s benefit turns out to be just as fun — especially when it involves kids furiously making art.
The energetic Al-Bayati got things started by asking the students what they know about O’Keeffe and what she drew and painted.
“She painted bones,” offered Reese Tate.
“She painted flowers,” said Carissa Ekhaguere.
Ainsley Hutchinson said, “She was a great artist.”
“She painted pictures of New York,” added Micky Dzur.
Georgia O’Keeffe principal Lucinda Sanchez told me that one of the most troubling aspects of the dispute with the museum last summer was that it questioned the school’s devotion to and respect for the artist.
“We talk about her a lot,” Sanchez said. “Our kids are really, really proud, and I’m proud. This school really is about her spirit and her art.”
The use of “GOK” was a shorthand that helped little kids pronounce a school name that is a mouthful, Sanchez said. It was never meant to disrespect one of America’s best-known artists.
Ryan Stark, who came on as the museum’s public relations manager in the middle of the kerfuffle, inherited what could be called with great understatement a public relations problem.
He calls the stormy events of the summer “a monumental miscommunication and misunderstanding.”
To assuage hurt feelings, the museum asked the school what the museum could offer, and the teachers asked for art teachers.
The first round of art lessons came in November, and Al-Bayati’s classes are the second phase. Everyone involved hopes the relationships will continue so the students who wear Georgia O’Keeffe’s name on their T-shirts will have even more chances to experience, with their own oils and pastels, the way she translated her world.
Because this involves an elementary school, it’s especially appropriate that some basic lessons have been learned.
“For us,” the museum’s Stark says, “it is obviously a very, very, very positive thing to have an elementary school named after Miss O’Keeffe. Hopefully one of the things that can come out of it is these young people here at the school having a personal connection with her.”
From the school’s perspective, Sanchez says, “It wasn’t ‘Take your ball and leave the playground.’ We talked about it and worked it through. It’s a lesson for our families, and it’s a lesson for our kids. You can really team and resolve and partner with people in a good, healthy way without it being a fight.”
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. You can reach Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@ abqjournal.com.
Publication: Jnl Legacy 1995 to July 2005; Date: Mar 23, 2001; Section: Journal North Venue; Page: 1
Edition--Journal North Venue Date--03/23/2001 Page-- 1
Onate's foot a legend grows
Story by Morgan Lee * Journal Staff Writer
Memoir includes story of 1998 'vigilante attack' on statue of Spanish conquistador
We now have a new and detailed account of how vandals severed a foot from Alcalde's statue of Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Onate although it may be as much legend as fact.
An anonymous group claiming to be "Native Americans and Native New Mexicans" took credit for the January 1998 surgery on the huge, heroic statue at the Onate Monument and Visitors Center at Alcalde north of Espanola.
The vandalism was a protest against 400th anniversary or Cuarto Centenario celebrations of the Spanish colonization of what is now New Mexico.
But no one has ever been identified, by name, as being responsible for the statue's disfigurement a delayed vigilante response to Onate's amputation of the feet of Acoma Pueblo men in the 16th century.
Now, the story of how Onate lost his foot has been described in "The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams," a memoir published under the name Nasdijj, which means "to become again" in Athabaskan (Navajo is an Athabaskan language). The author of the book, issued by Houghton Mifflin Co., has not been otherwise identified, and Nasdijj declines to say more about who he is.
Nasdijj's book has garnered critical acclaim, winning an award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association. The author will speak at the association's awards ceremony in Santa Fe on Saturday.
In Chapter 14, he tells the story of an unusual tourist trip to the Onate Center at Alcalde that he says starts before dawn on the Navajo Reservation, where three men and a dog set out in a pickup truck. They stop at Acoma Pueblo to squeeze in another friend and his hacksaw.
Nasdijj's written account has a lighthearted flavor, despite the grisly backdrop of Onate's military exploits.
The region's first colonial governor, Onate laid siege in 1599 to the sky city of Acoma Pueblo. Triumphant, Onate ordered young pueblo men punished by cutting off their right feet.
In Nasdijj's account of the assault on Onate's statue, the reader meets Roy Laughter, who picks up after his dog in public parks, worries about an old speeding ticket and, nevertheless, leads the expedition to Alcalde.
Ray Redshoes of Acoma brings sandwiches and the hacksaw, and the men are surprised to find the statue is hollow.
"The Indian men do not celebrate what they do," Nasdijj writes. "They don't feel good about it. They know this: It's way past time for something to be said. The romanticizing of such men as the conquistadors must end here."
Then it was back to Acoma, with the foot rolling around in the back of the pickup.
There's a curious shift from the third-person to the first-person as Nasdijj talks about protagonist Roy Laughter.
"Roy Laughter sort of likes being denounced as a vandal," Nasdijj writes. "Vandal is better than writer."
Contacted by e-mail and telephone, Nasdijj stressed that the chapter titled "Onate's Foot" is a story to be read as entertainment and legend.
"There's a new story being told among the Indians," Nasdijj writes in the memoir. "I cannot testify that the story is wholly accurate, only that it's being told, embellished with flourishes perhaps as the story is explained to children. House to house. Family to family. Cooking fire to cooking fire. Bar to bar. Powwow to powwow."
The disclaimers extend beyond the chapter to the entire book, starting with an author's note inside the cover that says, "I have attempted to protect the privacy of people through the editorial decision to frequently change names, appearances, and locations, as these are not relevant to the focus of the work or the issues the work strives to deal with."
Contacted for this article, Nasdijj declined to reveal more about the facts behind the Onate chapter and the location of the severed foot.
"I can't talk about the foot," said Nasdijj, who lives in Hillsboro, N.C., and was driving to Santa Fe this week with his dog, Navajo, to avoid air travel. "I plead ignorance. I have said everything I can say. Read carefully."
Although whimsical in places, the Onate chapter also contains some serious reflection on law and order.
"Writing this confessing to knowledge of a crime scares the hell out of me," Nasdijj writes.
The missing foot on the Onate statue in Alcalde was quickly recast in 1998 and law enforcement officials pledged to investigate. But details about who was behind the caper never surfaced, beyond an anonymous note to an Albuquerque Journal columnist and photos of the severed foot delivered to television stations.
Finding that foot, Nasdijj now says, "would be like getting into a Hopi Kiva it ain't going to happen."
Nasdijj declined to provide his full legal name, information he also has refused to reveal to other news publications.
"I have to stick with that," Nasdijj said. "That's the name my mother called me, that's the name I go by, even if the New York Times didn't like it."
Nasdijj's editor at Houghton Mifflin, Anton Mueller, said he knows the author's full name but that it was up to Nasdijj to share it.
Nasdijj has worked at small newspapers and written pornography to support his more serious writing. He has been published under different names that sometimes incorporate Nasdijj, Mueller said.
The book includes many harrowing chapters from the author's life, which he says started on the Navajo Reservation in 1950 and extended through an impoverished childhood of migratory labor camps, homelessness and dogged efforts to continue writing.
A chapter about Nasdijj's adopted son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, and the young boy's ultimately fatal struggle with fetal alcohol syndrome was published in 1999 in Esquire magazine. Houghton Mifflin plans to publish another book by Nasdijj that focuses on his early life as a migrant worker.
Mueller said none of the facts in the Onate chapter were checked by the publisher.
"There wouldn't be anything we could fact check because it's always been presented as a story as told to me" by other people, Mueller said. "One of the points is this was a story in circulation on the reservation and there was probably a certain amount of exaggeration."
Nasdijj said he hasn't kept up with New Mexico news and the controversy over a second Onate statue planned in Albuquerque. (Ciudad Juarez also has a public statue of Onate.)
"I know this: It's a cultural war out there and it is filled with the mine fields of symbolism," Nasdijj said. "It will not go away. Certainly, not in New Mexico. It is more than a matter of taste. What some people see as symbols of their pride, other people see as violence and oppression."
Nasdijj's writing is steeped in Indian tradition and he uses the words "we" and "Navajo" interchangeably. But according to his book, his father is white and the ancestry of his mother is not made completely clear.
"My mother was a Navajo," Nasdijj writes. "Or so she claimed."
The author said he is looking forward to his return to northern New Mexico. Nasdijj said he once worked at Taos Pueblo as a counselor for young people with fetal alcohol syndrome, a condition Nasdijj has and talks about in his book.
He left the high desert for the Southeast because it was too expensive and too cold.
"I'm really looking forward to coming back because New Mexico is always again and again (returning to) me," he said. "For a lot of people that are connected to any reservation, it's always a thing of on again, off again, and always coming home."
If you go
WHAT: Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association banquet honoring Regional Book Award winners. "The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams," by Nasdijj, won the nonfiction 2001 Regional Book Award.
WHERE: La Fonda
WHEN: 6:30 p.m. Saturday
HOW MUCH: $40 includes dinner
PHOTO: Color
MYSTERY AUTHOR: Nasdijj, the only name he will give, has won critical acclaim for his memoir "The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams." The mystery author is shown with his dog, Navajo.
PHOTO: JOURNAL FILE
PHOTO: Color
PAYBACK? In 1998 someone cut off the right foot of the statue at the Onate Monument and Visitors Center at Alcalde north of Espanola.
