# @downinnadesert on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DdsH1anGKo5
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/70864443-downinnadesert-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/87135837f6.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-09-25T00:00:10.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Down In The Desert🌵 (@downinnadesert) — https://gondola.cc/downinnadesert

## Caption

A Hopi artist was hired to decorate a tourist tower on the South Rim, and he used it to put Hopi history on the wall.

Fred Kabotie was born around 1900 at Second Mesa on the Hopi Reservation. His Hopi name was Naqavoy’ma, which means Day After Day. His family was among those who helped found the village of Hotevilla in 1906, a community built specifically to hold onto Hopi traditions that were being pushed out.

By 1915 the federal government was sending Hopi children away to the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. That is where he was given the name Fred Kabotie. He drew katsinas to deal with missing home, and sold his first painting for 50 cents to the school’s carpentry teacher.

By 1920 his work was being shown in New York. In 1926 he came to the Grand Canyon and worked for the Fred Harvey Company as a guide. In 1932 his paintings were in the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Then Mary Colter hired him to paint the interior of her new Desert View Watchtower.

He painted the Snake legend. And he explained later exactly why. He wanted to show that the first man to float through that canyon was a Hopi, hundreds of years before John Wesley Powell made his famous 1869 trip and got the credit.

He did that inside a building put up by a railroad tourism company, for tourists, and it is still on those walls today.

He kept going. He reproduced the ancient kiva murals from Awatovi. He won a Guggenheim in 1945 and wrote a book on Mimbres design. He painted the murals at the Painted Desert Inn in 1947 and 48. He taught art at Hopi High School for 22 years. In 1948 he and Paul Saufkie taught silversmithing to Hopi veterans coming home from World War II on the GI Bill, and that became the Hopi Silvercraft Cooperative Guild.

In 1971 he helped open the Hopi Cultural Center and served as its first president.

He died in 1986 at Second Mesa, where he started.

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#FredKabotie #Hopi #GrandCanyon #ArizonaNews #DownInnaDesert

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## Credits

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## Tags

hopi, downinnadesert, arizonanews, grandcanyon, fredkabotie

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