Elder preserved the ways of her O'odham ancestors

By Tom Beal
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Frances Sally Manuel wove her life and the story of her people into the fabric of this community before her death this month at age 94.

When she and her husband, Jose, left their ranch on the sprawling Tohono O'odham lands west of Tucson in 1941, their mission was simple. They needed to make money to feed and sustain their family after drought and disease killed off their cattle.

With feet firmly planted in two worlds, Frances Manuel eventually found new missions: as advocate for justice and keeper of traditional ways for urban Indians, and as an interpreter and educator to the larger community in which she found herself. With song and story, and with demonstration of the crafts learned from her grandmother, Manuel brought respect for the art and the wisdom of our region's early inhabitants.

She was a singer, a storyteller, a basket weaver, a doll maker, an authority on the medicinal and culinary properties of native plants. She dictated stories for a lovely and important book, sang on a recorded collection of O'odham songs, founded a dance troupe, and was, in the words of the obituary her family published after her death earlier this month, "a friend and Hu'ul (grandmother) to all who knew her."

Her oldest grandson, James Fendenheim, lived for several years with his grandmother at her home in La Reforma, the city housing project south of Downtown, where she would build a wood fire in the courtyard to make tortillas. "She brought her own ways to the projects," Fendenheim said, "her own style.

"And let me tell you, she had style," said Fendenheim. "We didn't do little things, me and her, we'd go to New York City, to Soho and hang out with the artists and the rich folks in their lofts."

Fendenheim, a silversmith, jewelry maker and sculptor, said his grandmother inspired and motivated his art. He went with her to summer classes she taught annually at an art institute in Idlewild, Calif. They traveled yearly, including this year when she was 93, to the Santa Fe Indian Arts Festival and to Native American arts events across the nation.

In the book she co-authored with anthropologist Deborah Neff, Manuel said she was taught to be "proud inside and not outside." She remained humble even while being feted for her accomplishments, Fendenheim said, but "enjoyed the stage" and the perks that came with being a tribal elder.

A couple months back, he took her to get her allotment from the gaming fund of the Tohono O'odham Nation. "We went at high noon. There was a four- to five-hour wait. She just walked through and parted the seas," Fendenheim said.

Manuel's contribution to the preservation and elevation of her culture was a package deal, said Terrol Johnson, who spent three years with her, putting together a book built, simply enough, around cooking.

Before she put a bean in a pot, Johnson said, Manuel would relate its O'odham name, its cultural significance, the stories and songs about it, its medicinal and nutritional properties.

"With the food comes the language and the songs and the stories. She was very instrumental in keeping the stories and songs alive. She was the one elder willing to share but also very understanding and patient. She always told us she's doing this for us, for her people, so that this knowledge doesn't disappear."

Manuel raised five daughters and a son by herself after the death of her husband in a hit-and-run accident on Congress Street in 1953. She cooked and cleaned and was a nanny to several Tucson families.

She also found time to serve civic causes — the American Friends Services Committee, the Association for Papago Affairs and the Tucson Indian Center, where she was a member of the board.

She helped found the Desert Indian Dancers. She sang on the recording "An Anthology of Papago Traditional Music" in 1972 and told the story of her life, woven with many stories of her people in "Desert Indian Woman: Stories and Dreams," with co-author Neff in 2001.

Her baskets, featuring her own variations on the Tohono O'odham man in the maze, won her wide acclaim, including an award in 1991 for Distinguished Tohono O'odham Basket Weaver.

In 2004, she was given a YWCA Women on the Move lifetime achievement award.

Manuel spent her final years on the reservation, having returned to the village of San Pedro in 1981. Her nightlong wake was held there on Dec. 22 and she was buried the next day in the village of S-koksonagk (Many Pack-Rats), where she had been raised, where she bloodied her young fingers learning the art of basket-weaving from her grandmother in the middle of her people's desert, a day's horseback ride from Tucson in the early part of the last century.