- Hi, I'm Kate Perdoni.
- And I'm Michael Gadlin.
Welcome back to Arts District on Rocky Mountain PBS.
- Chela Lujan is an artist who draws
from a culture of ceremony and traditions
passed down through generations.
She's found that the ancient art of beadwork
connects her to her self-expression
and her roots as a woman of color.
- Kate recently spent a day with Chela
in her La Junta, Colorado home studio
where a legacy of art and reverence continues.
(melancholy music)
- Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico,
it all has the same air of just that high desert,
high plains, which I think my beadwork
really draws from that energy.
We grew up on the Dene Nation,
the Navajo Reservation, in Ganado, Arizona.
All of those traditions and cultural backgrounds
really had an effect on me.
Ceremony and traditions
and the culture of indigenous people,
those things are just really, really near
and dear to my heart.
They really kind of shaped who I was growing up in that way.
My mother Charlotte, her grandmother was Jicarilla Apache.
Her name was Delavina Chipoon.
I don't know much about that lineage, unfortunately.
I really wish I did, but back in those times
she didn't tell anybody that she was Apache,
so there isn't a lot of those traditions
that she might have had in her life passed on to my family.
My mother Charlotte was actually the one
who taught me beadwork,
and she was taught by a famous Dene or Navajo artist.
I remember her teaching me the loom,
the beaded loom, which, when I was about six years old,
I was just a baby.
And I remember taking to it really easily
but I didn't pick it up again until I was 23.
I remember seeing a hatband that somebody was wearing
and I knew that that's what I wanted to do,
and I knew that I had to teach myself how to do it,
and so I did. (laughs)
The name of my business is Roadside Remedies.
You know, you go to these places
and there's always vendors on the side of the road
who are selling jewelry.
It started off on like Etsy.
We found the name and I started getting the supplies
and my supplies at that time were cheap,
for lack of a better word,
'cause I didn't know the difference
between this bead or this bead
and quality versus quantity and that sort of thing.
Finally opened up my own online store
which looks a lot better.
Thank God for Instagram and things like that.
And then I have gotten onboard
with really talented women, other women makers,
people like Cate Havstad who is making her own hats,
Suzy Cautcher who, her hatband was the first hatband I saw
that I wanted to do,
and she was really supportive of my work.
This is a porcupine quill hatband,
so you string up the porcupine quills first
and those are all hand dyed.
This is a Dene Tree of Life, the Navajo Tree of Life.
It's a cornstalk and birdies in the basket
and feathers and it's all sacred symbols.
This is the Cheyenne brick stitch.
This one in particular was inspired by a ceremony,
by the four rounds of the ceremony.
So this is what I call Midnight Water
and the line of blue represents the water
and the shape of course is the teepee,
the womb, the ribs, the mother.
And the gray is the smoke coming out of the fireplace.
I use a lot of hearts and a lot of triangles
that I think represent fire and like this teepee shape
to represent the womb and Mother Earth, essentially.
Yeah, and the colors, just it's kind of like a painter
would pick out his palette or her palette
and I do the same thing with my beads
to develop the relationship with threads and beads
and patterns and colors, and they talk to me
is kind of how I feel. (laughs)
There's times when I think
that I don't want to teach somebody,
but I know that people have helped me so much learn
that it isn't mine, it's not mine to hold,
it's not mine to own.
So it has to be passed on or it'll be lost.
My own lineage, my being a woman of color
and trying to find out my roots
and what those are, I think really is what inspired me
to continue the beadwork as my mother started it
and passed it on to me,
and hopefully my daughter will do it too. (laughs)
I'm all for it, I can only imagine
wanting to sit next to her and teach her how to do this
and pass it down like my mother passed it down to me.
But I definitely, I'm a little slower now. (laughs)
(flute music)
Hi!
- You know, as a parent and an artist,
I can relate, and I'm sure you can too, Michael,
to that balance of creating and raising a family
at the same time.
And it is an incredibly precious experience
to raise a child in tandem with the artist's way.
- Yeah, it's really wonderful to have a child grow up
with creative parents, and how cool that she wants
to pass on her talent and continue that legacy.
- So cool.
Chela's work can be seen at roadsideremedies.com.