This article was produced in partnership with New Mexico In Depth, a local nonprofit newsroom.
The cliff fendlerbush’s blooms offered countless nibbles for one hungry young deer. Its mother watched the feast from several steps away, on the other side of a nature path crossroad below Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Getting impatient, or perhaps not feeling worried, the elder deer headed off to the Animas River and left her child behind in the bush to find its own way. Sooner or later, all parents have to let their offspring go. In the human world, we often call this “graduation.”
Downriver in New Mexico, near an entrance to the football stadium where thousands would watch Farmington High School’s graduation ceremony, Keira Manuelito quickly sold eight of the translucent starry light balloons she had made with the help of her cousin, Ashlyn Chee. An older white woman desperately wanted to purchase number nine: “I need one for the valedictorian — he’s my nephew, I only have $5 cash.” But Keira stood firm: The balloons were $10. The lady was persistent. Keira’s mom, Valerie Benally, stepped in, took the lady’s money, gave her the balloon and handed her daughter an extra $5. “Here, now you’re even,” she said, pointing to the next person with $20 in hand and no need of change to buy the last balloon.
The trip to Farmington had been a surprise; Benally wanted to encourage her daughter’s balloon-selling enterprise. That morning, they left their home in Twin Lakes on the Navajo Nation and drove east to Crownpoint to deliver a turquoise cluster bracelet that Benally had made for a graduate.
“I like that they are here to get experience talking to people and seeing others,” she said about her daughter’s balloon selling venture.
Blossoming flowers and graduation ceremonies showcase seasonal changes that celebrate the individual in the midst of the larger group: the bright bud on the fendlerbush, the high school senior wearing a cap beaded with colors on The Medicine Wheel amid a sea of green caps and gowns and tassels.
In New Mexico, graduation is central to the colonial experiment shared by the Apache, Diné, Pueblo and people who have lived and taught in the area for time immortal.
“My graduation is all love for my family and their support,” Farmington High School graduate Landon Sombrero said, clutching his Pendleton-design stole and the graduation lei his aunt, Amy Poyer, had made for him, using Mini Cheetos Crunchy Flamin’ Hot chip bags and Sour Patch Kids boxes. “I’m going into welding.”
“Education’s what helps us here with our Native people,” Poyer said. “It just adds to us — it adds how far we can go. It shows that they can’t keep us down.”
The class of 2025 is taking its role in this transition and leading in a new way. The students’ ideas might seem simple — perhaps showing up for graduation wearing your grandma’s squash blossom necklace or sporting the lei your aunt made from your favorite snacks.
But something simple can still be very fragile — especially something that is everything to you.
Viral reaction
Hunkpapa Lakota student Genesis White Bull was standing with her class for the national anthem at her 2024 Farmington High School graduation ceremony when two faculty members came up and removed her cap, which was beaded with an eagle plume attached to the top, and replaced it with a plain one. The incident was captured on video and sparked a national outcry, including from Navajo Nation leaders.
Some critics wondered why the removal of White Bull’s cap had not been prevented by a law that New Mexico passed in 2021 that prohibited discriminating against students for wearing particular hairstyles, such as cornrows, or cultural or religious headdresses.
State Indian Affairs Secretary Josett Monette said in an NMPBS interview a couple of weeks after the incident that the New Mexico Legislature could easily amend the 2021 law, which did not include the words “regalia” or “tribe.” But another option was to craft new and more specific legislation, and that is what the agency ended up doing.
At the start of New Mexico’s legislative session earlier this year, lawmakers introduced a bill, written by the Indian Affairs Department, that would protect the right of students who are enrolled or eligible for enrollment in a federally recognized tribe to wear regalia at school events. While the U.S. Constitution might theoretically protect those rights, local laws should, and often need to, offer more. New Mexico joined 18 states with similar laws on the books, leaving Wyoming as the only Western state without such protections, according to the Native American Rights Fund.
Dozens spoke in support of the bill during committee hearings, including a handful of young Native people wearing their own regalia, who told lawmakers that White Bull was not alone.
“My great-grandmother was only able to attend up to the sixth grade, and so when I graduated high school, I shared that accomplishment with her,” Alysia Coriz (Santo Domingo Pueblo), a staff member for the nonprofit NM Native Vote, said in a February meeting of the House Education Committee. Wearing regalia at her graduation ceremony would have been a way to honor her family, Coriz said, but school officials told her it was not allowed because it was “distracting.”
“We want our children to be proud of who they are — and respected.”
Both chambers of the Legislature passed the bill unanimously, and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D, signed it in March.
“It’s kind of sad we had to pass a law, because these are our ancestral homelands,” the bill’s co-sponsor, Sen. Benny Shendo, a Democrat from Jemez Pueblo, said in an interview. “But let’s pass the law to be able to do this. We want our children to be proud of who they are — and respected.”
Not here, there
That New Mexico is willing to consider cultural expression in new laws shows that tribal values are moving into local and state policies, among other things.
In his book, American Indian Tribal Governance: A Critical Perspective, the Ojibwe author Stephen Wall argued that “tribal culture is not the problem; the problem is the expectation, based on Western cultural values, that hold non-Western tribal governments to Western standards.”
It wasn’t really the feather in the cap that caused the issues at White Bull’s graduation; it was the system’s rules and the action the school decided to take. In response, the community asked for laws to protect its members from another such overreaction. As a result, the class of 2025 is the first in New Mexico to graduate with the necessary legal protection.
For Temagami First Nation fashion designer Lesley Hampton, her cultural influence is seen in the models wearing her clothes in New York City, London, Milan and most recently during Santa Fe’s Native Fashion Week. She is the person who gets the call when award-winning actress Lily Gladstone needs a new dress for a movie premiere, because every stitch, every bead, comes with Hampton’s full understanding of how vital clothing is to Indigenous culture.
Her contemporary designs come from a brand focused on promoting Indigenous worldview that “shows the expanded representation that reflects society.”
Graduations are paramount to that, she said.
“To be able to wear our regalia, especially during graduation ceremony, which is so many years of hard work being put into a single five-second walk across the stage — it’s so important, and you want to feel most comfortable and confident in that. And if you’re representing your culture, representing your family with the designs that you’re putting on your body, it’s massive.”
That moment came full circle for Hampton when she was invited to be the eagle feather bearer and to open the graduation ceremony at her alma mater, the University of Toronto.
Back in Farmington this spring, families embraced, celebrating graduation with hugs, smiles and reflections.
“My mom’s right here,” FHS graduate Kyrstyn Clark-Bekis said, pointing out her crowd in the group standing around her on the 30-yard line. “My friend Roxy, my other mom, Felicia. My grandma, my sister, my brother, my uncle, my uncle’s girlfriend, my aunt. Yeah. And my mom’s friend.”
During the interview, Clark-Bekis fit-checked her outfit while holding back tears every time she looked at her mom, who was recording the moment on her phone. “I was struggling kind of a little bit mentally, because my family’s been going through some stuff. But my family and my friends have just really helped through it.”
“She’s really improved herself, you know. I love her, and she’s my baby. She’s our last one,” Sheryl Bekis said.
Mocs, ribbon skirts, jewelry and leis, so many leis. This and that came from those people there, and that person helped with money. The materials ranged from intricately woven ribbons in school colors to ones made entirely out of cash, or candy, or hot chips.
Another graduate on the Farmington football field held a University of Arizona flag and sign that read “future engineer.”
“One last photo with Nathan!” his mom shouted while corralling three dozen relatives around a student rocking a Diné Club stole to honor his time in school with Native American students’ services. The family snapped several photos and exited together, past the Twin Lakes girls, who had sold out of their balloons.
Keira Manuelito, one of the two, was smiling, thinking about a future that includes applying for a summer program at Fort Lewis College, and planning what to wear when she walked with the class of 2027 at Gallup High School. “I already have my ribbon skirt and moccasins. I’m gonna save for new leather,” she said, describing the kéntsaaí. “I’ll probably need fresh ones for my graduation.”
