After The Feast

By Shon Quannie

One summer, I stayed a couple of weeks in Santo Domingo Pueblo (Kewa) with my cousin Floyd and our grandpa Tony and grandma Dot. Feast was just over and I had taken the beginning of the week to take part there. Now we wandered around where the big carnival was, kicking around the discarded snow cone cups, popper boxes and Rosie Green Chili Burger wrappers. We felt the boredom looming as we walked around and looked for something to do. At the house, we found our grandpa Tony with his work clothes on and instructed us to help him to take trash to the dump. We loaded a bunch of bags into his truck and off we went. 

The windows were down because the New Mexico sun was intense. The soundtrack of the rattling and squeaking the truck made on the dusty dirt road with my grandpa humming songs from days before was very memorable. As we arrive to a large pit of smoking trash, we quickly backed up and started to unload the truck. 

Boys + Fire = Awesome! It was then that I remember messing around next to a larger pile of trash in flames and smoldering near it was a large paint can. I could hear it sizzle, but did not realize the pressure was building. Not thinking much about it, I stood there to feed the fire with my cousin. Then, in a large flash of fire and heat, the silence was broken with a huge boom! In a split second, I was knocked back by the shock of the blast while smoldering paper goods and random pieces of plastic ware from the feast rain down upon us. 

In that moment from a distance I hear the howling and biggest laugh of all from my grandpa Tony! He could barely ask us if we were OK, he was laughing so hard. He had watched the entire thing from afar. Leaning against a stick he had, he continued to laugh as we looked at each other and joined him in laughter. We were OK. The ride back to the house was full of smiles and retelling the story to each other so we would never forget, of course while pulling pieces of “feast debris” from our hair. 

Shon Quannie is of Hopi and New Mexican descent and is enrolled member of the Pueblo of Acoma. He is a graduate of Arizona State University, where he is a Faculty Associate at The Design School. Shon is the visionary for 4X Studio, a graphic design and marketing communications company based in Phoenix, AZ. He still loves driving to NM to buy green chili and playing with fire.