A farming heritage —
Zuni festival promotes culture, health
ABOVE: Left to right, Dion Celecion, Javin Pablito and Raddale Boone compete in a jalapeño eating contest during the A:shiwi Doye:nakwe Farming and Gardening Heritage Festival at Zuni Middle School, Saturday. Pablito won the contest and the $100 prize by eating 10 peppers in two minutes. BELOW: Missy Peynetsa, right and Lena Sanchez get ready to run the first heat of the water jar race. — © 2008 Gallup Independent / Cable Hoover

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola
Staff writer

ZUNI — Javin Pablito Sr. was the hero of the afternoon at the A:shiwi Doye:nakwe festival.

Pablito ate 10 whole, raw jalapeño peppers in two minutes flat during the Zuni farming and gardening festival’s chile eating contest on Saturday afternoon. With that accomplishment under his belt, Pabilto collected bragging rights and the $100 prize.

“I could do some more,” Pablito said while being congratulated by several of his competitors. “It was the watermelon earlier,” he explained, rubbing his stomach.

About an hour earlier, Pablito had been one of about two dozen competitors in the festival’s very wet and very messy, no-hands-allowed watermelon eating contest.

These Zuni-style competitive eating contests were part of the fourth annual A:shiwi Doye:nakwe festival that celebrates the Zuni tradition of farming and gardening. The event started with a tractor parade at 10 a.m. and ended with a raffle drawing for a wheelbarrow and a tractor plow at 3. p.m. Considering the theme of the celebration, the summer rains that lightly showered the event were a mostly welcome addition to the day.

Zuni Pueblo’s A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center sponsored the festival as an effort to encourage more Zuni people to grow their own fresh vegetables, particularly traditional Zuni crops.

Jim Enote, the center’s director, had a petition for pueblo residents to sign, asking for the Zuni Reservation to be designated a “genetically modified organism free zone.”

Information that accompanied the petition explained that traditional Zuni crops like noshilowa (red beans), y’e:ts’ido’kya (tomatoes), chu:k’ohanna (white corn), and other varieties of Zuni blue and red corn had adapted to the high altitude and dry conditions of the local environment, and they had the potential to be threatened by non-indigenous plants. Zuni corn in particular, when ground into cornmeal, has unique textures and flavors important to Zuni culture.

“It’s potentially a problem because a lot of the farmers don’t know where their seeds come from,” Enote said. Traditional corn can easily be cross pollinated by the wind blowing from one corn field to the next. Once that happens, he said, “We can’t reverse it.”

The festival also promoted the use of the Zuni language and healthy lifestyles. A Zuni bingo game was conducted entirely in the Zuni language with pictures and words of everyday items from the pueblo featured on the game board, and sacks of fresh fruit were given out to the winners.

Children and adults competed in fruit scrambles and other games for prizes of pumpkins, melons, ears of corn, potatoes, radishes, onions, and tomatoes.

Ruby Wolf, director of the Zuni Healthy Lifestyle Program, manned a booth filled with promotional material for children and adults; however, her fruit walk and veggie walk — modeled after musical chairs — got rained out.

A couple of the most popular guys at the festival were Keith Edaakie and Vaughn Awelagte of the Zuni Recovery Center. With the help of some of their ZRC co-workers, Edaakie and Awelagte ran both the funny watermelon eating contest and the even funnier olla jar water carrying race. In the latter contest, pairs of participants attempted to walk a relay race with modern-day “olla jars” — shallow plastic bowls filled with water — balanced on their heads like traditional Zuni Olla Maidens. Although Edaakie and Awelagte instructed the contestants to balance the bowls with no hands, all the contestants used at least one hand, and most still ended up splashing almost all their water on their heads and T-shirts.

Edaakie and Awelagte then showed the crowd how it’s done — both walked and balanced their water bowls hands-free — and Awelagte, whose wife is a Zuni Olla Maiden, amused the crowd with his imitation of the Zuni Olla Maidens’ dance.