Prior to 1983, when we still operated our Navajo rug business out of the front office of our father’s Pepsi Cola business in Durango, it was a common sight to have a pickup truck pull up in front of the bottling plant and see an older Navajo woman emerge with a Navajo weaving rolled up in a Blue Bird flour sack.

When a weaver walked into my Dad’s office, everything else stopped. He would get everyone in the group a Pepsi and they would catch up on the family stories.

Years ago, my sister published a print from a painting by Western artist Jim Rey that depicted early explorers, with their horses, staring down at Cliff Palace. Richard Wetherill, an area cowboy, is widely credited with having “discovered” the ruins, but likely, early explorers beat him to it. He was the first to realize the archaeological importance of the find.

Storyteller jewelry by Navajo silversmiths have been popular for about 50 years. Not a lot of artists make this style, as it requires a special artistic talent and a lot of time. 

Silver figures of people, hogans, horses, clouds, sheep and even an occasional outhouse are individually cut out of sheet silver and then soldered onto a second sheet that is sometimes stamped with other designs.

Dolls have been a standard toy since the beginning of the human race. It doesn’t matter where you look in the world, from the courts of Europe kings to the Plains of Asia and America or to the vastness of Africa, anywhere there has been civilization, people have made dolls for their children.

“From Debutante to Indian Trader,” is the story of a woman born into a privileged life in Wheeling, West Virginia who ended up buying the Wide Ruins Trading Post in 1938, at the age of 32, and transformed the art of Navajo weaving.

Acts of kindness are usually done without any thought of personal gain or any idea of what they could lead to. Sometimes they are simple, solitary gifts; sometimes they can change a life.

Many of you who follow our newsletter are aware that we are in Durango, Colorado, the home of Fort Lewis College and the Center of Southwest Studies.

The Center is the home of the Durango Collection, representing 800 years of weaving in the Southwest. It was put together by Mark Winter and Jackson Clark Sr. The living collection was donated to the Center by Richard and Mary Lynn Ballantine of Durango.

I was a couple of years behind Jake Dalla at Durango High School. He was a cool guy. He had a sharp car and he was always nice, even to underclassmen!

This fourth generation Durangoan came from one of the many early Italian families that settled in the Durango area. One of his goals in life was to create a wildlife park and recreation area in honor of his parents.

In the 1970s, when the #8 Turquoise Mine in Eureka County, Nevada was closing, Jeanette Dale was soldering circuit boards at the Fairchild Electronics Plant south of Farmington, New Mexico. 

Many of you know that two years ago in September we had a burglary at the gallery in Durango. It was a big one. The thieves broke in through a skylight window from the roof, dropped into the offices, ran down the stairs, smashed three showcases that had our expensive jewelry in them and were out the emergency fire door in less than a minute.

When the Winter Olympics came to Salt Lake City in 2002, one of the most popular attractions for people from all over the world was the exhibit on Native American cultures and lifestyles. The organizers of the Olympics made a special effort to highlight the tribes of Utah and the Southwest. 

The Anasazi, or “Ancestral Puebloans” as contemporary anthropologists refer to them created pottery for utilitarian uses beginning about 200 A.D. They cooked in it, stored food in it, ate and drank from it. And, as anyone who has spent much time looking at the pottery from Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon or any of the early living sites of the early inhabitants knows, they spent an inordinate amount of time and effort decorating these vessels with beautiful designs.