Fry bread and dead goldfish

The carnival grounds behind the bull pens at the White Mountain Apache Reservation rodeo in Arizona.

The cowboys at the Apache rodeo don’t talk to the women. The women have to go over to the side and huddle amongst themselves but they don’t speak or even look at their husbands or boyfriends while the rodeo is going on. Maybe it’s considered bad luck.

At the foodstand, four ancient Apache women ladle big spoonfuls of lard into frying pans over propane burners and  cook up Indian fry bread which they then fill with refried beans. It’s like a giant fried bean pizza. Obese kids sit in the dusty stands gobbling down the fry bread and beans or an Indian taco while the rodeo announcer encourages everyone to go on up to the snack bar and fill up.

“That Indian fry bread smells so good, I’ll tell you what…if anyone could ever invent a cologne that smelled like it, he’d make a fortune, that’s for sure.”

Little kids are going around the stands during the rodeo selling raffle tickets for a fund raiser for the grade school’s 6^th grade trip to Phoenix. The grand prize for the raffle is “Beef.” They don’t say how much beef; just Beef.

Other prizes include a quilt, case of Coke, and something listed as “Movie Posters.” There’s a sad little carnival going on behind the rodeo and the kids run over there for an hour or so and come back to their parents carrying plastic sandwich bags with goldfish in them and the fish cook in the sun and the hot water in the sandwich bag until they die and the parents make the kids dump the dead fish out on the red dirt. All the kids stand around staring at the dead fish in the dirt and kicking them around with their dusty shoes.