Projects

Archive: Walking Thunder at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York City

In April 2002, the Ringing Rocks Foundation sponsored a two-week event: The Art of Sand Painting as demonstrated by Diné Medicine Woman, Walking Thunder. Visitors had the unique opportunity to observe Walking Thunder create her vibrant sand paintings as she spoke about her life and culture at the National Museum of the American Indian's George Gustav Heye Center in lower Manhattan.

While sand painting originated as an integral part of some Diné (Navajo) ceremonies, it is also practiced purely as an art form. Walking Thunder creates her sand paintings on a bed of New Mexico riverbed sand smoothed with a weaving batten. Colorful and highly detailed pictures are created by using crushed stone, flowers, gypsum, pollen, and other natural elements to make symbolic designs. Walking Thunder holds a small amount of sand in the palm of her hand below the second finger, then allows it to trickle off her index finger, guided and regulated by her thumb. Sand paintings are created in one day, then erased, and the sand is returned to the earth.

In addition to the sand painting demonstration, the world-renowned Pilobolus Dance Theatre debuted a performance inspired by, and in honor of, Walking Thunder. Both of these extraordinary programs were developed in a unique collaboration between the National Museum of the American Indian and Ringing Rocks Foundation, and coincided with the publication of Walking Thunder: Diné Medicine Woman, a first-person story with detailed medicine practices. Walking Thunder speaks poignantly and candidly of her life as a woman on the Diné reservation in northwest New Mexico, and discusses her heritage, art, and native traditions. This book (which includes an audio CD) is the sixth volume in the Profiles of Healing book series.