﻿- Four direction of colors, was brought to us by our great grandfathers.
When you face the east to pray, That's the yellow. You go to the south, that's when you
see a lot of darker green. To the north is where the gifts are given, so there's the dark colors.
To the west you do a lot of reddish colors because the sun is going down.
The Navajos always used these colors, but that was what I have in mind once I start doing my pieces.
The changing of the landscape is coral. Coral comes in 7, 8, 10 different shades,
orange, red, pink. And the best of the best in coral, which is dark oxblood red.
To use the best stones means a lot to me. You learn how to shine it, you learn how to smooth it.
So just having the stone makes you want to be just as good. It's kind of like watercolor actually.
I match them up and say, who wants to be together the rest of their lives? So lapis is sturdy,
that's pretty good. The green is gaspeite and they're the same family as the turquoise.
My grandmother taught me just about everything I know. One day she got two stones,
wet it and rubbed it together, and then she put it to my nose and asked me what I smell.
I said natural mud. And she said that's how you know it's real turquoise.
Lapidary is working with stones by hand,
polishing it and getting it to complete finished into cabochon. I can make it perfectly round,
and dome smooth. Not too many people can do it. - Jessie is one of those incredible artists who is
very, very skilled with stone inlay, the very intricate designs that he does.
You can't tell where the inlay of one stone starts and where they meet or
where they join. It's just perfection. - This is all Navajo. It's home for me.
I might go far away but once I come back, this is home. This is where I belong. Toadlena
is the water that comes out of the mountain. Toadlena.
This was our halfway point going up and coming down these mountains with 200 heads of sheep.
And we wash our face in the cold, cold water right down here.
It was a really beautiful place to gather. All the great weavers, grandmothers, and they would
talk with each other about different sheep, who had the best wool.
Grandmother was a matriarch and one of the medicine people, She taught me how
to pray and my aunties and my relatives around me, they all became great weavers.
I watched them very closely, so my work was just kind of like weaving. I can pick up the stone,
I know exactly how I'm going to cut it. I don't require too much drawing or anything like that.
What grandmother said is what I go by. Never finish your piece in a drawing, finish it when
you're doing it. When I first started, I got a piece of turquoise like this and it looked
like just dirt. The guy just threw it to me and he said make something out of it. So I took it home,
I said I should start praying. There's a place up in the mountains and the forests are very
thick. Me and my grandfather were up there and this big bear came running out of the forest.
I'm looking into his nose, he was right here, breathing you know. Grandfather said,
don't be scared. And don't act like you're tough because the bear will read all of that.
My grandfather said, let us through. We're going to be here just for a moment.
And the bear just went down and then let
us through. It was an amazing teaching. This aura from the body, he reads it.
I was standing over a machine to cut that piece, somehow I emotionally knew, it was going to be,
that thing was solid. Solid piece of webbed turquoise. That's what put me on the map.
- That issue of Arizona Highways was an opportunity for Jesse to really prove
his abilities. His bear pendants, they're very complex in terms of the inlay. He's done them
so that they're reversible one side might have jet as the background, the other side might have
coral or lapis. That issue was a good look at a lot of artists. Some who were emerging,
some who were more established. - All these guys that are in here
they were the top, top-notch guys. My dad is here, Preston. There's Preston.
When I found my dad he was a little bit leery, I guess a little bit,
not too sure about me. Grandmother and Grandfather raised us. Now all of a sudden his son shows up.
I think he didn't trust me until we started drinking together of course.
Okay, here we go. The magic touch. There you go, the stone's life is forever changed.
My grandfather on the Hopi side, David Monongya. He used to pray up
there in the mountains with Dalai Lama. When you're near them, you could feel something
is powerful around here. My grandpa, he was a tiny little guy and he wore these thick eyeglasses.
And he looked at me and he said, you know what grandson, you are going to be a special person.
And for a guy that was just a drunk on the street doing drinking and doing stupid things.
I go to alcoholics anonymous. They teach that it's very important, to have some kind of a
God that you need to turn to. I prayed the way grandmother prayed.
The word hogan is home. Hogan. And inside the hogan, there is a pole to the sky.
And I used to lay there at night time and look up into the heavens,
it's just fascinating, the universe. It opened the mind. You go out there and pray and all the stars,
all the dippers and all the milky way and all these things. And my people have prayer lines
for them. If you really listen to my story, everything has to do with spirituality.
That everybody have some kind of spiritual ways in themselves. There's the universe,
And then there's this universe inside of you.