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Store Connected to Zuni Fetishes
7/1/1996
by Patrick Armijo
in Albuquerque Journal
Cooperative Asked Teacher To Purchase Successful Business
When Robin Dunlap calls her store Keshi, the Zuni Connection, she’s serious. The store is her connection to the people she grew to know and admire 15 years ago while teaching sixth grade at the pueblo’s Dowa Yallane Elementary School.
Keshi opened in Santa Fe in 1982 as an attempt by the pueblo’s teachers to open a cooperative store. The idea of the teachers, of whom all but two were Zunis, was to sell hand-carved Zuni fetishes and jewelry directly in the lucrative Santa Fe market. Before Keshi opened, the items were available in Santa Fe only through middlemen.
“We’d teach all day. All night, we’d drive around the pueblo mostly talking with silversmiths trying to tell them about the store,” she recalls. The teachers’ pocketbooks were slim, so they obtained their pieces on a consignment basis. They made one guarantee to the Zuni artists: The artists would always get 50 percent of the retail sale price of a carving or piece of jewelry. Dunlap says she still honors the guarantee.
“The families gave to us. Now, I think they did it because they liked us. I don’t really think they thought they’d get anything out of it.” Zuni artisans found the store, a four-hour drive from the pueblo, to be the best way to break into the Santa Fe market.
The heart of the store is made up of traditional Zuni fetishes, which might be more accurately called carvings. Fetishes are usually ceremonially blessed. The carvings at the store are not blessed.
The Zunis use fetishes to enhance the success of hunts, to help in curing ceremonies, to help the family prosper, to bring rain, to help bring fertility and to enhance other aspects of life.
The fetishes, usually in the form of animals, come from the Zuni belief that, by honoring a quality in an animal, one can enhance that quality in themselves.
Mountain lion fetishes are supposed to ensure a fruitful hunt and are also protectors and good for travelers to carry. Bear fetishes are known for their curative properties. Badger fetishes are used to achieve discipline and mental focus.
Besides the Zuni carvings, Keshi also sells medicine pouches, Zuni jewelry, pottery and Cochiti carvings.
About six years ago, Dunlap says the store’s board of directors, which acted as the cooperative’s decision-making body, approached her and asked her to buy it. “I had been managing the store, and they liked the job I was doing. I had begun buying pieces directly,” she says, and that helped the artists’ cash flows.
One reason for the sale, she says, is that the Zunis on the board felt they were spending too much time running the business and it was taking too much time away from other aspects of their lives. “They really didn’t want to deal with the business end of it. It’s just a different value system,” she says.
Purchasing the store seemed out of Dunlap’s reach, but she says the founders of the store arranged the financing to make her ownership possible. She knew she could make the payments because she managed the store and knew it was doing well.
Now, Dunlap says she’s representing about 50 Zuni carvers. One of her favorite carvers is Fabian Tsethlikai. “He carves intricate, delicate fetishes,” she says. And although he has grown and now has two children, Dunlap remembers him as one of her sixth-grade students from the pueblo school.
Copyright: The Albuquerque Journal. Reprinted with permission.
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