Indian Culture Center Fading Into Past : Heritage: The elements are reclaiming a national historic landmark. Time is running out for restoration.

In a crumbling Navajo hogan on a rise dotted with pinion pine and juniper, colorful wall paintings of Kiowa rituals and Hopi Kachina figures are washing away into the red earth.

Rain and snow fall through what once was a conical roof to erode the murals. One depicts a brave with arms raised toward a buffalo while another beats a drum. On another, dancers hold up prayer wands as a funeral procession makes its way.

Vanishing along with the paintings is part of the history of naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, who founded the Woodcraft Indians organization at the turn of the century. Seton championed tribal peoples at a time when many others regarded them as red devils, and he built the hogan as part of his College of Indian Wisdom in the 1930s.

The British-born, Canadian-reared Seton was 70 that year, when he bought 2,500 acres of land near Santa Fe to build Seton Village, an art colony and cultural center.

The village, designated a national historic landmark in 1966, includes the 30-room, stone Seton Castle; a kiva, or ceremonial chamber, decorated with the plumed serpent of the San Ildefonso Indian pueblo, and the round hogan that contains the damaged mural.

“It was painted by a Kiowa Indian named Jack Hokeah, who was at the Indian School” in Santa Fe, said Dee Seton Barber, Seton’s daughter. “The hogan was for public ceremonies--a campfire and stories, a dance demonstration or whatever, a Woodcraft council.”

Barber, who still lives in Seton Castle, said she had the hogan re-roofed 18 years ago but can’t afford to do it again. Time, weather and vandals have nearly destroyed it.

Seton built the rambling mansion after a lifetime as an author, illustrator, naturalist and lecturer. It was designed to house his library of 40,000 books, nearly 3,000 paintings and drawings and specimens of nearly 3,000 birds and animals.

He wrote hundreds of books and articles, including “Wild Animals I Have Known,” “Two Little Savages” and the first Boy Scout manual.

He hobnobbed with Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain, helped found the Boy Scouts and was the first Chief Scout. But he fell out with Roosevelt and scouting leaders because he believed the movement had become too militaristic during World War I.

He urged the government to give back Indian hunting grounds and worked to help members of Southwestern tribes support themselves by marketing their traditional pottery, textiles and jewelry instead of cheap tourist knickknacks. He also brought Indians to Seton Village for them to share their traditions, songs, stories and arts.

He adopted his daughter in 1938, when he was 78.

The village once had a zoo, a museum, a crafts shop, a dining hall, log cabins and adobe houses. It could accommodate as many as 150 people. Youngsters studied tribal lore. Adults attended Seton’s lectures on the virtues of outdoor life or listened to his wife, Julia, beat a drum and sing an evening chant at lights out.

Snapshots taken in the 1930s and 1940s show intricate carvings over the entrances to dorms and the dining hall, long rows of tepees and a thriving vegetable garden.

Many adobe houses remain, some rebuilt and expanded. Other buildings, including the dining hall, dorms and dance lodge, are gone, and the hogan is nearly so.

The National Park Service oversees national historic landmarks but has no funds for repairs. It reported in 1986 that the outside of the hogan could be patched for $6,000. It also recommended spending $2,800 to have an art conservator evaluate the wall paintings for restoration.

The kiva, with the plumed-serpent painting circling its inner wall, at that time needed $5,450 worth of exterior work, plus interior repairs, evaluation and outside grading estimated at $2,300.

Those findings were made in a “landmarks at risk” report soliciting donations to the National Park Foundation, which administers private contributions for the Park Service.

“We were unsuccessful with Seton Village,” said Gregory D. Kendrick, chief of history at the Park Service’s Rocky Mountain regional office.