Our dear friend, producer Mark Gordon is currently working on a sequel, "Man of Many Colors," to his award-winning documentary “Awakening in Taos” on the life and influence of Mabel Dodge Lujan and her Taos Pueblo husband, Antonio Lujan. Tony was the first Taos Pueblo native to marry a white woman. For this he was both admired and reviled, depending on one’s point of view.
Mabel was no ordinary white women. She was a New York heiress with many high-profile connections in the worlds of Art, Literature, and social change. Although Mabel and Tony did much to put the small mountain town of Taos New Mexico on the world map and fought to improve the government’s treatment of Native Americans, they also stirred up controversy. Growing up in their shadow as my husband, Blue Spruce Standing Deer did was socially and psychologically complicated.
The sequel, “Man of Many Colors” is the story of Tony's great grandson, Blue Spruce Standing Deer. After the first film was completed, we talked it over and decided that the story didn’t go to sleep after Mabel and Tony left this world, but continued to affect both the town of Taos, Taos Pueblo and more intimately the great grandson of Tony Lujan.
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Blue Spruce Standing Deer is now an artist and composer/singer of native songs. However, because of a unique background split between a deeply traditional Taos Pueblo life and the eclectic international cultural world of Mabel Dodge and Tony Lujan, he had a complicated early life. Also, do to the help provided to Standing Deer’s father with farm equipment and land, he was often an object of envy and resentment by other tribal members.
Standing Deer remembers Mabel and Tony very well and for that reason he was an invaluable resource of information for “Awakening in Taos.” Yet, there was another life so far from Mabel’s international salon that it was as if they existed on different planets. Standing Deer’s father became a traditional medicine man who knew the herbs and ceremonies for healing and spiritual cleansing. As children and adolescents, Standing Deer and his friends played in the mountains and hunted and fished in traditional ways. There are remote areas on the reservation even now where the raw power and peace of nature causes the modern world, only a few miles away to fade away like a fuzzy dream.
By the time Standing Deer graduated from high school, Mabel Dodge and Tony Lujan had passed on and his personal conflicts were conveniently shelved by an offer to go to San Jose California for vocational training as a welder. At that time, the Bureau of Indian Affairs offered vocational programs as part of its cultural assimilation agenda. However, Standing Deer seized on this as an opportunity to break free from all his internal and external problems.
He became an accomplished welder and for the first time had plenty of money to play with. Standing Deer went rogue with his new freedom. He says that he has little memory of the details of those years. He found it easy to attract women and spent most of his money partying. He was seldom sober. His employers valued him as a versatile master welder, and he found it easy to get good paying jobs. However, he always came home to Taos for tribal holidays. This went on for years until one night he had a dream. “I could hear my father’s voice say, “it’s time!” “That’s when I knew I had to come home to Taos. I knew that I belonged to my tribal ways. When I walked into my father’s house at the Pueblo, he looked up and said, “So you got the message?”
His return to his Pueblo Home and the Town of Taos brought him into confrontation with the old conflicts and the cultural dissonances that lay in wait for his return. After his parents left this plane, he found himself the family elder charged with representing tribal values and traditions within his family. In recent years he has been further challenged by a progressive lung disease and the limits of mortality.
This film follows his journey into discovering himself as an artist and then an elder in his tribe, at first unwittingly and finally consciously honoring and embracing the path between cultures carved by Mabel Dodge and Tony Lujan.
