Cathy Williams or William Cathay? Source: St. Louis Daily Times, January 2, 1876 "My Father was a freeman, but my mother a slave, belonging to William Johnson, a wealthy farmer who lived at the time I was born near Independence, Jackson county, Missouri. While I was a small girl…
Although many people believe Vivian Vance to be a native of Albuquerque, Vivian Roberta Jones was actually born in Cherryvale, Kansas. The beloved character, Ethel Mertz, whom Vance played on the I Love Lucy television show, claimed Albuquerque as home and the association stuck. That and her (Vivian Vance’s)…
The dominance of Spider Woman, the female creative principle, befits a culture that remains matrilineal. The Hopi creation story uses many familiar motifs: the creative female principle itself, associated with the Earth; the more mysterious divine spirit, the sun god Tawa; the division of the divine parents into new…
1912 By Matthew Martínez My grandmother Esther Martínez often introduces herself by saying that she was born in 1912, the same year New Mexico became a state and the Titanic sank. The metaphor of the birth of a new period in history as well as the sinking of the…
By Jessica R. Metcalfe While flipping through Native Peoples magazine one day in 2003, I came across a photo spread of contemporary Native high fashion. It intrigued me how the designers incorporated elements from their cultures’ traditional art forms into high fashion. Who were these designers, how did they…
First Lady Susan Wallace, storyteller and writer, tells of a winters' day when she took a walk and discovered hundreds of years of New Mexico's history–neglected in a shed. Here, in her own words, she tells of her discovery: North of El Palacio, is a waste spot of earth,…
First grown in Mexico about 5,000 years ago, corn soon became the most important food crop in Central and North America. Throughout the region, Native Americans, Maya, Aztecs, and others worshiped corn deities and developed a variety of stories about the origin, planting, growing and harvesting of corn (also…
1 By Robert Torrez New Mexico's history is full of marvelous stories about ordinary people who happen to end up in the historical record when they get caught up in extraordinary circumstances. As we leaf through the stories of such individuals, one often wonders how much of what has…
By Michael Ann Sullivan On October 27, 1937, the Santa Fe Maternal Health Center (SFMHC) opened under the auspices of Margaret Sanger and the New York Clinical Research Bureau. Florence Davenport, Faith Meem, and several other prominent Santa Fe women had invited Sanger to tea the previous summer to…
Musings on the Navajo Nation and the Ideology of Development and the Politics of Tradition By Jennifer Denetdale, Ph.D. For most of my career as a scholar, I have been interested in myriad ways that the Diné/Navajos have been represented by generations of travelers, writers, anthropologists, federal policy makers,…
