Pageant or no pageant, counteracting cultural entropy isn't for the uncommitted. Because we respect them so much.") Dempsey, whose spoken Navajo has improved significantly since a medicine man addressed the problem with a ceremony for her, encounteredĪ different problem: she usually uses powdered milk in her recipe, but the pageant hadn't provided any. She noted afterward, "they really scare us.
She had said "lightning" instead of "match." ("Those elderly lady judges," Jones, who has a degree in social work from Northern Arizona University, struggled to keep her fire going and looked sad. A judge had asked her, in Navajo, about lighting the fire, and she had answered using the word "liver" when she meant to say "bark." Valerie Preacher, stared angrily at the frying pan resting on her fire. candidate in environmental engineering and science at Stanford and the daughter of a Baptist Shortening in pans and prepared fry bread - a traditional food that resembles a Frisbee-size sopaipilla. (Some of the modern contests involved demonstrating CPR, reciting Natalie Merchant lyrics in poetic form and doing aerobics.) They seemed to have the hardest time when they each built a fire, heaped Instead, the women, outfitted most of the time in moccasins and crushed velvet dresses or tunics that resemble Navajo rugs, with their hair pulled back, had to explain the background of the Treaty of 1868 - in Navajo. "You need the hooves to hang it up with," recalled Floranda Dempsey, the only one of this year's four contestants who competed last year. "I could have smelled like sheep, and it would have been fine." Indeed, the year before, contendersįor the Miss Navajo crown had competed in sheep butchering. Princesses and regional Miss Navajos who came last month to watch the five-day pageant in Window Rock, Ariz. "If there was a swimsuit competition, I would never enter," said 19-year-old Leslie John, one of the dozens of junior Spend about as much time in standard pageant-issue evening gowns as it takes to boil an egg. That's why there's no swimsuit competition, and contestants Photograph By Paul Natonabah/Navaho Times The Way We Live Now: Too Many Eyes On the PrizeĪt this pageant, fry bread counts for a lot more than evening gowns.