O’odham artist works with arrow points, fetishes

By John Christian Hopkins
Diné Bureau

SALT RIVER INDIAN COMMUNITY, Ariz. — It may be manual labor, but it’s a labor of love for O’odham artist Royce Manuel.

Once a promising baseball player, an injury led Manuel to strike out on his own and enter the art world.

He specializes in the “Gih-ha” — the O’odham Burden Basket — and also makes small figurines, fetishes, horned toads, frogs, turtles, snakes, Gila monsters, and lizards.
He said he doesn’t make a lot of snakes because his partner, Debbie Nez, is a Navajo. She doesn’t like it when he carves snakes, Manuel said.

Royce also makes “stone-knapping arrow points,” a distinction Manuel is adamant to make. That is the correct way to say he carves arrowheads.

“For the last 20 years, I’ve been carving stuff ... I’ve been stone-knapping arrow points forever, all my life,” Manuel said.

Maybe that’s because arrow points remind him of his family legacy.

“I have an old bow from 1926, my dad’s grandfather gave him one. That was the first time my dad met his grandfather. My dad was 6-years-old, and my grandfather was selling bows and arrows at a Phoenix Railroad station,” Manuel said.

“(My grandfather) was selling the bows and arrows to the tourists.

“I started making them (bows and arrows) seriously about 25 years ago,” Royce said.

His entry into the Gih-Ha, the burden baskets, came through his own interest. He said he taught himself how to make them. He taught himself through books and by looking at displays at museums.

“One thing, the burden basket is — it’s a lost art,” Royce said. “The men made the basket and the women use the burden basket. One of the stories is when the men make the basket, it has a part of them in it.”

Manuel’s early carvings were little surfboards. When he was young, in the 1960s, “everything was about surfing,” he chuckled.

“When I first started (making things), one of the things my grandmother and my grandfather said to me is when you make something — to ensure your success — give it away,” Royce said.

When he first created carvings and fetishes, he made a round of figurines — a bear, javalina, frog, a turtle.

“The javalina I gave to my dad, it looked like the real thing, and I surprised myself. That was about 15 years ago or more.”

Born in Phoenix in 1953, Manuel ended up in California on the Indian Relocation Program. He returned to Salt River when he was 7.

Royce can’t say what it is that inspires him to create.

“I’m not really sure,” Royce said. “I just do it.”

Royce said he observed that during his grandfather and father’s time, the O’odham bows and arrows were made of pomegranate wood — brought to them by the Spaniards.
But when he makes them, he uses indigenous wood, that makes it more indigenous to him, he explained. Wood, fibers from sources, from the willow, wolf berries, and mulberries are all indigenous to this area, Manuel said.
“When I make the bows and arrows, I make the arrow out of deer and buffalo sinew. Originally the string was made of out horse intestine, ” Manuel said.

The original material for arrow points was obsidian; the carvings were originally made from mesquite and ironwood.
“I make them now for gifts, to sell. I use them to educate the young generation,” Royce said. “I make them, not just for display, but for utilitarian purposes.”

By day, Royce is a firefighter for the Salt River Fire Department. But that fire that burns inside him is one that can’t be extinguished.

What he does now, is for the community, he said.
“I do O’odham crafts and education for information. The young people feel lost when they don’t have something, families feel lost when they don’t have anything to pass along,” he said.