Frederick Hammersley Foundation... New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund at the Albuquerque Community Foundation ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

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THIS TIME, ON COLORES!

RESEARCHING THE EXTRAORDINARY CHACOAN CIVILIZATION FOR DECADES, ARCHAEOASTRONOMER ANNA SOFAER SHARES LATEST DISCOVERIES THAT SHOW HOW CHACOAN CULTURE EXTENDS FAR BEYOND WHAT WE ONCE UNDERSTOOD.

AFRICAN AMERICAN CULINARY HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR MICHAEL TWITTY EXPLORES THE MEANING OF SOUL FOOD.

CORKY BENNETT, AKA "THE KING OF RENO" LOVES TO PLAY THE ACCORDION.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

ARCHITECTURAL PATTERNS TELL A STORY.

>>Ebony Isis Booth: How expansive is the >>Anna Sofaer: Wow.

That's a big question.

You know, when I started working in Chaco in the 70s, late 70s, people were really thinking it was basically the canyon.

Eight miles long.

Maybe a few sites a little further out.

But then every year it expanded in the range.

So that it became the whole San Juan basin, about 30 000 square miles.

And we began to see that those were outliers or outlying communities.

But then it became two to three times that, going up into the whole Four Corners.

So that you're up in the southern Rockies.

And then you're into the southeast corner of Utah.

And, uh, a lot of ruins are off into the west, into Arizona, way down south of Zuni.

It's really huge.

It's more like 70000 square miles.

If you if you understand it as a repetition of the same kind of architecture that you have in the canyon.

The the kivas and the very rigorously gridded, squared off, architecture.

Where kivas are contained within squares, and then, very commonly is a Great Kiva.

And we see that repeated.

120 outlying sites.

>>Booth: Are those the kind of patterns that helped you identify that these were Chacoan sites?

>>Sofaer: Exactly.Yeah.

>Booth: What is the center of this universe of sites?

>>Sofaer: Well, I really think you have to keep going back to that center of Chaco, and most especially Bonito.

But what we call in a slangy way "downtown Chaco", where there is the largest building site, Bonito.

And then just to the east of that, on east-west alignment Chetro Ketl.

And those, plus two or three others, are the largest of the buildings.

And they are also astronomically aligned.

So knowing more about them, especially Bonita.

Because it seems to be the ritual hub of the Chaco world.

It's aligned to the sun, and two major alignments.

The east-west wall, is exactly to equinox.

The north-south mid-wall is exactly the solar noon >>Booth: And what are some examples that you might be able to share that would give us an idea of this expansiveness?

>>Sofaer: Well one of the most exciting ones we've known about for a while is Chimney Rock.

And that again, maybe 20 years ago, people weren't sure if it was Chaco related.

But now we understand that it has a lunar alignment like we see in the alignments in Chaco.

On a precipice that really is extremely precipitous drop, from, I guess it's over 200 feet.

And that site is built there.

A Chaco Great House, just in order to make a relationship with the moon.

And again, has the typical Chaco architecture of the kivas, set within a grid, and a great kiva, quite close.

And the moon rises just at the far northern extreme in its 18 to 19 year cycle.

The same moment that it's marked in Chaco on Fajada Butte, at the Sundagger's site, as coming on the left edge of that spiral.

>>Booth: What about the Lowry site?

>>Sofaer: Well, first of all, we had some understanding, because way back, now it's 25 years or more, we understood that the great north road going out of Chaco, in a way following that line of north-south, that's so important in the canyon.

You follow that 35 miles north, and you find a very important insight.

That the road is not for trade and transportation.

It goes to the steepest edge of a badlands canyon, Kutz canyon.

And then we heard that this resonates with Pueblo people and their thinking of the north and the road to the north, return of the spirits, place of emergence.

And that's why we probably, that probably explains why we found so much pottery.

Broken pieces of pottery and a stairway going down that incredibly steep slope.

Because it was a place of ritual.

A sacred place.

So knowing that helped us to know that it wouldn't be that unusual if we're out way up in Lowry, and now that's 120 miles from the center.

But that those roads, those spokes, and there's four of them, well, really three, that are straight roads with some distance.

Each of those goes to a very important peak.

>>Booth: In the mountains.

The roads connect to the mountains.

>>Sofaer: Yeah.

Exactly.

And it's not a canyon in that case.

But other situations also show peaks and buttes.

High sites are really important.

The two close colleagues of the Solstice Project that I work mostly with, Rich.

He's uncovered that those are on solar and lunar alignment.

Now, the fact that those three straight roads that it has do that, is pretty convincing to me that you're having a pattern.

But does it happen in other sites?

Well, simultaneously, about the same time, Rob's work, and Rob Weiner is doing his PhD thesis now.

He's writing it on Chaco roads.

And he's working at a site north of Grants.

So now you're closer to 150 miles, 160 miles south of Lowry.

But you're in the Chaco greater region.

And what does he find?

Roads that give him views to high peaks.

And the most dramatic is the view from one of the great houses across to Mount Taylor, on the avenue and the trajectory of a straight road.

And Mount Taylor is so important.

It's so visible.

I remember how excited I was driving down to Albuquerque and being barely out of Santa Fe and there was Mount Taylor.

So knowing these mountains, and and knowing where you are in relationship to them.

Where is Sandia?

Where is Mount Taylor?

Where is the Jemez?

And if you're, it's kind of giving your, your place and space.

>>Booth: For these roads to be able to be identified with LIDAR footage, they must be fairly significantly sized.

We're not talking about narrow pathways.

Can you tell me more about that?

>>Sofaer: Oh, I know.

And that's so astounding.

They are usually 30 feet wide, maybe three feet deep.

And some are short.

Maybe more no more than a tenth of a mile.

But then, out of the canyon, we have the two very long roads.

The north road, 35 miles.

South road, 35 miles.

I think the act of making the road, the effort that they put into it, is part of their ritual life.

In the words of a good friend from Hopi, Phillip Tuwaletstiwa, who I've worked with for years.

And we did an interview with him.

And he put it so clearly that he thinks these roads are drawing energy, spiritual energy, in to the Great House and the Great Kiva.

And that makes sense, because even today, high sites, land forms that are prominent, are of great importance to the Pueblo world >>Booth: You have been working with this sacred landscape since you identified your first sun dagger in the late 1970s.

What has captured your heart and imagination about this work?

>>Sofaer: Oh, there's so much.

I talked to Rich and Rob, my two closest colleagues in this, the archaeologists I love working with.

We said the same thing.

That is it that we really don't understand it.

And I think it is, interestingly, there is so much At the same time, it seems like every month we're finding something new.

And there are pieces of the puzzle coming together.

And there's so much resonance through the history that I'm becoming more and more aware of.

So that what we're finding is so parallel, so corresponding, with the life of the Pueblo people today and their concepts of landscape.

Mount Taylor.

San Francisco peak.

Sandia.

These things we see, we just see them as beautiful mountains.

But they are believed to be sources of life and spiritual, hold spiritual power.

And that's so corresponding with what we see now in the Chaco roads.

So it can help us make sense of it.

Do you think that maybe we can learn by looking back and see how brilliant the people were and what they did?

That's why we call our new film "Written on the Landscape."

Because, as Theresa Pasqual from Acoma put it, their language, their history, is written on the landscape.

It's not in books and libraries.

And yet, that also has a profound meaning for us.

That there may be another way of knowing.

And it's a way of knowing when you really are deeply empathic with the natural world.

With the power of the earth below you and the rhythms of the cycles around you.

If you really engage deeply, deeply, you have this larger gestalt.

And then you can relate from site, one site here, to 120 miles there.

And 50 miles there.

Because your conceptual framework of the earth is a map in your mind.

And that's, I think, what we all find, our, me and my guys, find to be so thrilling SOUL FOOD IS ABOUT FLAVOR AND SPIRIT.

This would be less mature than that.

Michael Twitty: I want do this one.

Great.

Michael Twitty: We're also making sweet potato pumpkin, also known as cushaw, and that's the big striped pumpkin you see over there.

It's originally from the West Indies and was brought to the American South by the enslaved Africans.

Food is a vehicle for conversation.

Food is a means by which we can begin to understand ourselves and neighbors on a much deeper level.

I think when it comes to Southern food, one of the biggest misconceptions is that it just came out of nothing.

The reality is, is that Southern food is a result of multiple historical and cultural collisions, particularly between Europe, Africa, and Native America.

When it comes to people of African descent, there's extremely powerful notes that food is how we pass on our culture.

Food is how we resisted enslavement and oppression and food is how we showed our agency.

It wasn't, it wasn't passive.

One of the things that gets me the most concerned is when people refer to African-American vernacular foodways, sort of like what was given to us.

No, it's what we created for ourselves and for others.

So I think it's incredibly empowering to learn about that tradition from the historic side, the way I do here at Colonial Williamsburg.

Field peas, black-eyed peas, we think of them as something you just eat for good luck on New Year, something that, you know, fills the bill at a meet-and-greet.

Black-eyed peas, your greens, sweet potatoes, and you get a little meat.

Well, it's deeper than that.

When I went to Senegal, West Africa, I went to Goree Island, which is where enslaved people were prepared for shipment to the New World, including some of my own ancestors and the last remaining slave castle, the Maison des Esclaves, they explained to us that black-eyed peas were one of the foods that were given to enslaved Africans, cooked in palm oil to fatten them up.

One thing about sweet potatoes is that in the West Indies, anywhere they were boiling sugar, they were really quick energy food, and when the men would go to the sugar-boiling house, the job was to pour the sugar all night long, you know, talking about long ladles, molten hot cane syrup that becomes molasses and then it becomes fermented into rum, which of course will then cross the ocean, buy more enslaved people and feed the triangular trade.

But what happens is, while they're cooking this, this syrup down all night, they're dumping some of it over top of an iron pot full of sweet potatoes.

What does that sound like to you?

It sounds like candied yams and then they would eat that to heat them up all night because they had to be up and it was a high energy snack.

Every time you eat candied yams now, I want you to think about the enslaved man in that sugar-boiling house all night long, making that dish happen as a, as a means to stay awake.

I'm not interested in recipes.

I'm interested in formulas.

I don't think about food and cooking the way other people do.

I think of it in terms of big, black ideas.

The ultimate is to create something that tastes good.

Dude, that's the best black-eyed peas I ever tasted.

It's not about how much of this or that you put into it or what technique you use.

Black cooking is more about flavor.

It's about spirit.

And I think it's less about like gourmet techniques that require a lot of fancy stuff.

We didn't have that.

Only thing we had was, was our, our feeling about the food and feeling about each other.

For me, I think the epiphany moment was my parents asking, well, what do you want to be when you grow up?

And I said, I want to be a writer, I want to be a teacher, I want to be a chef, and I want to be a preacher.

For me, all those elements are conjoined.

This idea of feeding people as a spiritual exercise.

This idea of feeding people as being an educator.

This idea of feeding people as creating a text that's edible.

All of that, to me, it all makes sense, is all part of one holistic worldview.

The secret to the best cooking is trying to find things, but everything complements each other.

It's about, to me, creating communalism among your ingredients and that's how you make the food taste good.

We call our food soul food.

Why?

It's named after something that transcends life and death.

It's not about our nation.

It's about our spirit, and that's what makes me like so proud of it.

One of the things that surprises people about me is that I'm Jewish.

I became officially Jewish by conversion when I was twenty-two years old.

For me, particularly in Judaism, food and faith go hand in hand in a very particular way.

Every single part of the Jewish diaspora has its unique recipes and formulas that go hand in hand with the holidays, and they tell stories.

They're there for a reason.

It's not just because people like to eat them.

You sit down in a Jewish household.

The springtime, we have Passover.

We have matzah.

And matzah tells the story of how a people who were oppressed and enslaved got their freedom overnight.

How do we make the world a better place?

How can we learn from our mistakes as a human species?

Those are really big questions in Judaism and Torah, and that's undergirds a lot of my work, including the work I do with food.

I wanted to write.

One thing that's important to do is really do your own research, but I think for African-Americans, one of the struggles we have is that it's not easy for us to find out where we come from, because when we say that our names were taken and our identities were switched around for other people's benefit, we're not joking.

That's, that's how it happened.

We have to scale a lot of brick walls to get to where other people just hop on back.

For some people, they're satisfied, knowing that their ancestors came from Germany.

For a lot of African-Americans, they don't know which countries plural in West Africa their ancestors came from.

So, in The Cooking Gene, I decided to do all of those I wanted to know how did, you know, my ancestors who were enslaved, well what kind of work did they do?

How did they process all these crops into consumables?

And to know that if it were not for certain choices and accidents of history, you might be in their shoes and have that sort of feeling of gratitude that you're not.

So, how, you know, how hard was it for these folks, our ancestors, our forebears, to deal with those situations like that and somehow make a way out of no way?

I never say the word slave.

I say slave is an identity.

Enslaved is a condition.

So we don't want to put on our ancestors a label that they themselves would, would reject because it wasn't true.

Once you have that roadmap to where things start, you can kind of have a road map to where things are going to go.

And, for me, that's extremely powerful.

A DREAM COME TRUE.

My legal name is Leighton Wiley Brumble.

A lot of people know me as Corky Brumble, but even more people know me as Corky Bennett, the King of Reno.

I grew up in a little town called Sequim, Washington back in the 40s.

When I was seven years old in 1949, I heard a guy play the accordion on the radio.

And I didn't know, but it was Dick Contino.

And Dick Contino in those days was a huge, huge star.

I heard Dick play I go, wow, that's awesome.

So I said to my mom, when I grow up, I wanna be an accordion player.

She says, "Corky you can't do both."

So I became an accordion player.

About three years later, my dad brought home a little, whole bass accordion.

He says, "Here, play this, try it out."

So I play it a little bit.

He says, "You like it?"

I go, yeah.

The next week he signed me up for music lessons at a music store, Downtown Seattle, and I took to it pretty quickly.

About three months after I started, they put a bigger accordion my lap and he says, "How do you like that?"

I go, wow, that's beautiful.

He says, "well, that's good because your parents just bought it for you."

And I started crying.

I thought that was so cool.

My parents had bought me a big boy accordion.

I was in a band called the Buckaroos and we were a little country band and I was 11.

We played for the Kiwanis clubs and the Rotary clubs and things like that.

Our moms made us satin shirts with fringe all over.

We wore cowboy hats and cowboy boots, we were slick.

The accordion is my favorite instrument in the world because you can play so many different styles on it.

You can play polkas like, or you can play jazz.

Country music.

or you can play like cajin music.

The first gig I ever had in Reno, Nevada was at the old Golden Hotel.

This is in 1963 and then it turned into Harris Club.

That's how I honed my craft was doing shows in Nevada.

I do a lot of comedy in my shows.

I just like making people happy.

I was playing at this place called the Hardy House on California Avenue.

And it was packed.

It was like a Friday night.

Then somebody says, "You know what Corky, you're the King of Reno."

I go really, well.

A brand was born.

I became the King of Reno.

The accordion works just like the human body.

The bellows are your lungs.

And they push air over reeds, and the reeds are like your vocal chords.

And the more push over it, hardly a pump a pool, the more area pushing over those reeds and they get louder or softer.

Just like your voice.

And then when you press a key, that's like opening your mouth.

That's how the music comes out and the sound comes out of the grill here.

This is the bass side.

This has been like the left hand of the piano, where you play on note and then you play a chord Thing about the accordion is it covers the whole spectrum.

It can make people laugh, it can make people cry it can make people happy, sing along, accordion is great that way.

Most versatile instruments there is.

I get emotionally charged up by music.

When I'm playing at home.

I play things like Rhapsody in Blue Gershwin songs.

I play it like MacArthur Park, Jimmy Webb song.

And I love that kind of music.

It's my whole world.

There's nothing more important to me.

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Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Foundation... New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund at the Albuquerque Community Foundation ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

...and Viewers Like You.

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