Ask a Local: Orlando Dugi on Santa Fe, New Mexico — Tradition, Turquoise, and Terrain

Santa Fe is often reduced to postcard clichés: adobe walls glowing at sunset, turquoise jewelry stacked on every wrist, and art galleries charging $8,500 for abstract oil paintings. But Orlando Dugi—a Diné weaver, educator, and longtime Santa Fe resident—offers a different lens. Since moving from Tuba City, Arizona in 2003, Dugi has navigated the city’s layered contradictions: a UNESCO Creative City designation coexisting with a 22.7% poverty rate (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 ACS 5-Year Estimates); a $692,000 median home value (Zillow, Q2 2024) alongside 1,240 documented unhoused individuals (New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, 2023); and an annual $217 million arts economy (Santa Fe County Economic Development Office, 2023) that rarely funds Indigenous-led initiatives at parity. In this interview, conducted over three mornings at his Canyon Road studio and one afternoon at Poeh Cultural Center in Pojoaque Pueblo, Dugi speaks plainly about language preservation, water scarcity, transportation gaps, and why he refuses to sell rugs at Canyon Road’s Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art—not out of disdain, but because its 70% commission structure undermines generational craft equity.

The Rhythm of a Real Santa Fe Morning

Dugi wakes before dawn—not for Instagram light, but because sunrise aligns with Diné timekeeping and the need to check irrigation lines on his half-acre plot in the Agua Fria neighborhood. His day begins with yucca root tea brewed in a hand-coiled blackware pot made by Santa Clara Pueblo matriarch Margaret Tafoya (circa 1982), followed by a 15-minute walk to the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market on Old Santa Fe Trail. He does not drive. ‘My ’98 Honda Civic was totaled in a hit-and-run near Cerrillos Road in 2019,’ he says, ‘and I haven’t replaced it. The bus fare is $1.50, but Route 4 doesn’t run past 7 p.m., and the last ride home from downtown is at 6:42 p.m.’

This logistical reality shapes his schedule more than any calendar app. Santa Fe Trails operates 21 fixed routes, yet only six serve the southside neighborhoods where 43% of the city’s Native American population resides (2020 U.S. Census). Dugi walks 2.3 miles to his studio on Canyon Road—past the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum parking lot, through the historic Railyard District, and under the 2017 concrete-and-steel pedestrian bridge installed after a $4.2 million federal grant—but never takes the shuttle. ‘It stops every 22 minutes. I’d rather walk and count steps in Navajo: tsé bich’í’íł (stone step), łį́į́’ bich’í’íł (water step), shash bich’í’íł (bear step). It keeps me grounded.’

What’s on the Table, Not the Tourist Menu

Breakfast isn’t green chile cheeseburgers—it’s blue corn mush (tádídíín) simmered for 45 minutes with juniper ash and served with roasted piñon nuts harvested from the Sangre de Cristo foothills. Dugi sources his corn from Tsaya Farms near Shiprock, NM, which grows drought-resilient Shi’niłchíí’ (Blue Hopi) and Tó Neinilíí (Water’s Edge Blue) varieties certified by the Navajo Agricultural Economic Enterprise Board. At the Farmers’ Market, he buys from vendors who speak Tewa or Diné as first languages: Maria Lujan of Santo Domingo Pueblo sells atole made with heirloom white corn ground on a metate; Robert Yazzie of Zuni Pueblo offers oven-dried rabbit meat jerky cured with wild oregano and red chile grown in Zuni’s mesas.

‘You won’t find these at The Shed or Cafe Pasqual’s,’ Dugi notes. ‘Those places use New Mexico-grown chile, yes—but it’s from Hatch Valley, processed in Las Cruces, shipped frozen. Real local food moves slower. It waits for rain. It respects seasonal boundaries.’ He points to the market’s 2024 vendor data: only 12 of 147 registered vendors are enrolled tribal members; just three operate under tribal enterprise licenses issued by the Pueblo of Tesuque, Santa Clara, or San Ildefonso.

Adaptation, Not Assimilation: Language and Land

Dugi teaches Diné Bizaad (Navajo language) twice weekly at the Santa Fe Indian School, using audio recordings of his late grandfather, Hosteen Yazzie, who spoke fluent ceremonial dialect. ‘We don’t teach vocabulary lists,’ he explains. ‘We teach verbs rooted in place: Yázhí yishłį́į́ (the small one sits on the mesa), Ch’il dóó nááts’ǫ́sí (the grass bends toward water). If you don’t know where “mesa” or “water” is in your body and landscape, words are hollow.’

This pedagogy directly challenges Santa Fe’s official bilingual signage policy, which mandates English and Spanish only—even though 17 federally recognized tribes reside within 100 miles of the city, and Diné is the most widely spoken Native language in New Mexico (137,000 speakers statewide, per 2022 American Community Survey). When the city installed new street signs in 2021 along Paseo de Peralta, Dugi co-authored a formal letter to Mayor Alan Webber requesting Diné translations. The response? A $12,000 feasibility study funded by the Downtown Improvement Board—still pending as of June 2024.

Water Is Memory, Not Commodity

Every morning, Dugi checks the Rio Grande’s flow rate via the U.S. Geological Survey gauge at Otowi Bridge (Station 08283500). In April 2024, it read 28 cubic feet per second—down from the 20-year average of 112 cfs. ‘This river used to flood fields in May. Now it barely reaches the acequias in Arroyo Seco,’ he says, referencing the historic community irrigation ditches managed by the Acequia Madre de los Ranchos. He shows a photo on his phone: a cracked, dust-choked ditch bed near his Agua Fria property, contrasted with a 1947 USDA soil survey map showing perennial flow.

Santa Fe’s Water Conservation Office reports per capita residential water use at 82 gallons/day—18% below the state average, yet still triple the 27-gallon target set by the 2020 Santa Fe Climate Action Plan. Dugi’s household uses 31 gallons/day, achieved through greywater systems feeding his fruit trees (two Santa Rosa plum, three Apache plums) and rainwater catchment barrels holding 1,200 gallons total. ‘The city sells rain barrels for $75 at the Utilities Department office,’ he says, ‘but they’re plastic, UV-degradable, and hold only 55 gallons. My cedar-lined ones last 14 years. I learned that from my uncle in Fort Defiance—they’re built to outlive us.’

The Unseen Economy of Craft

Dugi’s studio contains no retail display cases. Instead, there are four upright Navajo looms—two built by his father in 1973, two custom-made in 2019 by Diné carpenter Tom Tso of Crownpoint, NM, using juniper and ponderosa pine harvested under tribal forestry permits. His rugs sell exclusively through the Wheelwright Museum Shop (where he receives 60% commission), the Poeh Cultural Center (55%), and direct client commissions (75%). He refuses consignment at Canyon Road galleries like Gerald Peters Contemporary ($12M annual revenue, 2023 filings) or Charlotte Jackson Fine Art (founded 1976, 12 staff), citing exploitative terms: ‘They take 50–70%. They don’t credit my clan—Tódích’íí’nii, born for Kinyaa’áanii—and they hang my work beside non-Native artists without context. That’s not curation. That’s extraction.’

A 4’ x 6’ Two Grey Hills rug—woven with hand-carded, naturally dyed Churro wool from the Navajo Sheep Project—takes Dugi 320 hours. At $425/hour (the median Santa Fe hourly wage for fine artists, per New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions), that’s $135,200 in labor alone. He prices it at $14,800. ‘That covers materials ($2,100), dye plants ($380), loom maintenance ($420), health insurance ($1,900/year prorated), and still leaves me $1,800 profit after taxes. It’s fair. It’s not luxury pricing—it’s survival math.’

Where the Money Flows (and Doesn’t)

Santa Fe’s 2024 budget allocates $2.8 million to arts grants—but only $174,000 (6.2%) flows to tribal arts organizations. The largest recipient is the Santa Fe Opera ($1.2M), followed by the Center for Contemporary Arts ($420,000). The Poeh Cultural Center received $89,000; the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts received $62,000. Dugi helped draft the 2023 Santa Fe Tribal Arts Equity Ordinance, which mandates minimum 15% tribal funding allocation. It passed unanimously on March 14, 2023—but implementation remains unfunded. ‘They passed the law,’ Dugi says, ‘then voted against the $210,000 line item to hire a Tribal Liaison Officer. So we’re back to emailing PDFs.’

• Annual tourism revenue: $1.4 billion (Santa Fe County, 2023)
• Hotel occupancy rate (2023): 68.3% (STR Inc. data)
• Number of active tribal arts vendors at Santa Fe Indian Market: 1,286 (SWAIA, 2023)
• Median income for Native households in Santa Fe County: $42,170 (U.S. Census, 2022)
• Non-Native median household income: $78,920

Neighborhoods Beyond the Postcard

Canyon Road gets all the ink—but Dugi lives and works in the spaces between narratives. Agua Fria, where he rents a 1937 adobe duplex for $1,425/month (up 28% since 2020), hosts the highest concentration of Native renters in Santa Fe: 31% of residents identify as American Indian/Alaska Native (2020 Census). Here, murals aren’t decorative—they’re land acknowledgments: a 2022 piece by Jemez Pueblo artist Reynaldo Sandoval depicts the ancestral migration path from Spider Rock to San Ildefonso, overlaid with hydrological maps of the Santa Fe River aquifer.

South of St. Francis Drive, the South Capitol neighborhood contains Santa Fe’s oldest continuously occupied Indigenous enclave—the 1884-built San Miguel Mission complex, now home to the nonprofit Tewa Women United. Dugi volunteers there weekly, helping lead workshops on traditional seed saving. ‘They store 47 varieties of native corn, beans, squash, and amaranth in climate-controlled vaults,’ he says. ‘Not in banks. In clay pots lined with piñon pitch, buried 3 feet deep north of the mission wall. That’s how we bank memory.’

He also guides visitors—not tourists—to the lesser-known Kha’p’o Owingeh (San Ildefonso Pueblo), 22 miles north. ‘Don’t go for the pottery,’ he insists. ‘Go to hear the Tewa language spoken in grocery-store lines, watch elders mend nets at the Rio Grande, and sit quietly at the San Ildefonso Day feast on January 23rd. Bring blue cornmeal—not cash. And leave your camera in the car.’

Transit Realities: Buses, Bikes, and Barriers

Santa Fe Trails’ fleet includes 34 buses—12 electric (BYD K9M models, range 155 miles), 22 diesel. None have wheelchair lifts compatible with the city’s 1920s-era curb cuts, which average only 2.1 inches in height (ADA standard: 4 inches). Dugi’s mother, who uses a walker, hasn’t taken public transit since 2021. ‘They added “accessible” stickers to the buses last year,’ he says, ‘but the lift mechanism jams 63% of the time, per their own maintenance logs. I checked.’

Bike infrastructure is similarly fragmented. The city’s 2023 Active Transportation Plan identifies 47 miles of bike lanes—but only 11.3 miles meet Class I standards (physically separated). Dugi bikes the 4.7-mile route from Agua Fria to downtown on streets with no lane markings, sharing pavement with delivery vans from Whole Foods (which opened its Santa Fe location in 2018, driving a 12% uptick in local grocery prices, per NM Price Watch 2023 report). ‘I wear high-vis gear,’ he says, ‘but last October, a FedEx truck clipped my rear wheel on Camino del Pueblo. No citation. No insurance claim. Just a $210 brake replacement.’

Education: Who Teaches Whose History?

Dugi’s daughter attended Santa Fe Public Schools from kindergarten through 12th grade. She took Advanced Placement U.S. History but never read a single text authored by a Native scholar. ‘The district’s required curriculum cites Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States as ‘supplemental,’’ he says. ‘But it’s not on library shelves. I donated five copies to her high school in 2022. They were cataloged under ‘Social Sciences—General’—not ‘Indigenous Studies.’’

Santa Fe Public Schools serves 12,400 students; 18.3% identify as American Indian/Alaska Native. Yet only 4.1% of certified teachers are Native-identifying (SFPS Human Resources, 2023). Dugi co-leads the district’s Native Language Revitalization Task Force, which secured $87,000 in federal ESSER III funds to train 12 bilingual aides in Diné and Tewa. ‘Training happened in Albuquerque,’ he notes, ‘not here—because no local university offers Diné linguistics credits. UNM’s program is online-only, requires proctored exams in person, and charges $428/credit hour.’

He contrasts this with the Santa Fe Waldorf School, where tuition averages $24,500/year and the curriculum includes ‘Land Stewardship Days’ featuring Pueblo guest speakers—but no ongoing language instruction. ‘Waldorf calls it “cultural appreciation,”’ Dugi says. ‘I call it performance without accountability. You can’t harvest respect like blue corn. It grows in relationship.’

What Tourism Gets Wrong (and What It Could Learn)

‘“Authentic Santa Fe” isn’t a flavor or a font,’ Dugi states flatly. ‘It’s the sound of a loom shuttle clicking at 3 a.m. It’s the smell of sheep dung drying in the sun behind a hogan in To’Hajiilee. It’s the silence during a winter solstice ceremony at Chaco Canyon—no photos, no hashtags, no timed entry passes.’

He critiques specific tourism practices: the $249 ‘Full-Day Pueblo Experience’ tour operated by Santa Fe Historical Tours, which visits three pueblos in eight hours without tribal consent; the ‘Turquoise & Tradition’ workshop at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture that uses synthetic resin instead of natural clay binders; and the 2023 Santa Fe Travel Council campaign featuring a non-Native model wearing imitation squash blossom necklaces styled by a Los Angeles firm.

His alternative? Support the Native American Venture Fund, launched in 2022 with $1.8M from First Nations Development Institute and the Santa Fe Community Foundation. It provides zero-interest loans up to $25,000 to Indigenous-owned businesses—like Red Willow Weaving in Tesuque (founded 2020, 12 employees) or Ts’ah Yisnii’ Trading Post in Santa Fe (opened 2021, stocks only tribally sourced goods). ‘If you want to “support local,” buy a $32 jar of wild sumac jelly from the Diné woman at the Railyard Market,’ Dugi advises. ‘Not a $195 “Native-inspired” candle from Ten Thousand Villages.’

He pauses, then adds: ‘And if you’re here for healing—don’t book a “sound bath with singing bowls” advertised as “ancient Indigenous practice.” That’s not ours. Our healing is in the stories, the sheep, the slow turning of the loom. It doesn’t fit in a 90-minute slot. It requires showing up—year after year, season after season—with humility, not hashtags.’

Final Notes from the Loom

Dugi’s latest commission—a 7’ x 10’ rug titled Áshįįhí Bíyázhí Níłch’i’íł (East Wind Carries Small Seeds)—will debut at the Poeh Center in September 2024. It incorporates wool dyed with Rocky Mountain beeplant (Claytonia lanceolata), wild chamomile, and cochineal insects sourced from Oaxaca—but only after verifying the Oaxacan cooperative’s fair-wage certification through the Fair Trade Federation. The design maps groundwater recharge zones beneath Santa Fe, rendered in geometric motifs passed down through seven generations of his maternal line.

When asked what outsiders consistently misunderstand, he doesn’t hesitate: ‘That we’re waiting for permission to exist here. We’re not. We’re calculating monsoon rainfall totals. We’re teaching verbs for “to remember” and “to return.” We’re repairing looms. We’re paying $1,425 rent. We’re living. Not performing. Not preserving. Living—with precision, grief, laughter, and wool that remembers every mountain it crossed.’

His studio door faces east—not for symbolism, but because the morning light hits the warp threads at a 17-degree angle, making tension visible. ‘If you see uneven tension,’ he says, ‘you fix it before you weave the next row. That’s how you build something that lasts. Not with grand gestures. With daily attention. With care measured in inches, not miles.’

Santa Fe isn’t a destination. It’s a relationship—one measured in water levels, wage gaps, bus schedules, and the quiet, persistent click of a wooden shuttle passing through hand-spun wool. Orlando Dugi doesn’t offer shortcuts. He offers presence. And presence, he reminds us, is never for sale.

For those seeking deeper engagement: Attend the free monthly Diné Language Circle at the Santa Fe Public Library’s Main Branch (second Thursday, 6–7:30 p.m.). Visit the Poeh Cultural Center’s Living Traditions Gallery—open Tuesday–Saturday, admission by donation, no photography permitted inside exhibition spaces. Read Land, Spirit, Power: Native Voices from the Southwest, edited by Nancy Marie Mithlo (University of Washington Press, 2022), which includes Dugi’s essay “Warp and Weft: Material Memory in Diné Textiles.”

Most importantly: Listen longer than you speak. Ask fewer questions and observe more silences. Bring blue cornmeal—not expectations. And if you see Dugi walking past the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, don’t ask for a photo. Say Yá’át’ééh. Then walk with him—for as far as he’s willing to go.

The city’s beauty isn’t in its adobe facades. It’s in the resilience of people who’ve woven continuity through drought, displacement, and decades of misrepresentation. Orlando Dugi’s Santa Fe isn’t curated. It’s tended—row by row, stitch by stitch, breath by breath.

His loom doesn’t face west. It faces east. Always east.

Because the work isn’t finished. It’s just beginning again.

At 5:12 a.m., the Rio Grande gauge reads 29.3 cfs. Dugi checks it. Then he picks up his shuttle.