He Has an Arresting Sense of Humor : Culture: Vincent Craig is serious about his job as the Navajo Nation’s chief probation officer. But he’s just as serious about singing satirical songs and drawing his hit cartoon.

Vincent Craig takes a battered old Alvarez acoustic guitar from its case and proudly points out where various country musicians have signed their autographs on its spruce top.

“This is my baby,” Craig says lovingly. Then, with a sly look he announces: “I do a takeoff on Navajo opera.”

Closing his eyes, he strums an A-minor chord and sings a quavering aria entirely in Navajo, replete with Pavarotti-like flourishes.

It’s called, “Grandpa, the Sheep Have Gone.”

Says Craig: “I envision a day when you drive up to Window Rock and follow the spotlights to the Window Rock Metropolitan Opera House.”

Vincent Craig has never been one to let reality hinder his antic imagination.

Craig writes and records popular Navajo cowboy ballads, protest songs, and social and political satire.

The 44-year-old balances the sublimely silly with the serious: He is the Navajo Nation’s chief probation officer, a job that gives him responsibility for about 2,700 people who have run afoul of the tribal justice system.

But he’s never happier than when he’s asking an audience to ponder the imponderable, like what if Columbus had been met by Navajos? Or what do sheep dogs say to each other?

“Things that are most simple, that are taken for granted--those kinds of observations seem to appeal to Navajos,” says Craig, who has a playful, teasing rapport with his audiences. “I don’t know if anybody else could say that to them.”

A fixture at schools and public gatherings around the vast Navajo Nation, Craig has also performed in such far-flung places as California, Alaska and Washington, D.C. He has been invited to attend the 11th annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev., in January.

Craig can pen a lonesome lament with the best of them, but satire is his strong suit. He tells of the Navajo who visits Italy and sees the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

“He looks at it for a while and says, ‘Golly, it’s crooked,’ ” Craig says. “He looks at it again and says, ‘The BIA must have built it.’ ”

He also reaches a wide audience with “Muttonman,” the weekly super-hero cartoon he draws for the Navajo Times, a tribally owned newspaper.

Muttonman--”More powerful than the (Bureau of Indian Affairs)! Able to leap Shiprock in a single bound! Faster than (a BIA) area director can pass the buck!”--is a goofy masked crusader with an overbite who wears an old Jim Thorpe-style football helmet, a silver concho belt and a Navajo rug for a cape. He’s gained his super powers by eating mutton from sheep that have watered at the Rio Puerco, a New Mexico river contaminated by a uranium tailings spill in the 1970s.

The strip was a hit as soon as it premiered in 1979; Craig launched his hero with a three-month story line incorporating aliens and mutant frybread. It ran in the Navajo Times for several years before Craig suspended it. It reappeared in 1990 in Navajo Nation Today, then returned to the Navajo Times when Today folded.

Says Navajo Times Editor Tom Arviso: “He’s always been real popular with our readership. They understand his humor. They can relate to it.”

Craig’s cartoons are widely admired throughout Indian Country. When Arviso attended the Unity conference of minority journalists in Atlanta last summer, editors from other Native American newspapers told him: “We’re glad to see Muttonman is back.”

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Craig’s droopy Fu Manchu mustache and bushy eyebrows give him a habitually severe expression that softens as soon as he starts cracking jokes--which is often. Married for 19 years, he and wife Mariddie have three sons, ranging in age from 9 to 18.

For the past four years he’s run the probation office from a crowded modular building at the foot of the giant sandstone arch that gives the Navajo capital of Window Rock its name.

Craig oversees 27 probation officers who serve 160,000 people on a reservation the size of West Virginia. The officers carry a heavy caseload because of limited jail space, he says. Most of the probationers have been sentenced for alcohol-related misdemeanors.

“We try to instill some sense of self-initiative,” he says. “Our probation philosophy is based on the Navajo concept of hozhoo ,” or self-harmony.

“When we do our treatment plans, we try to keep that concept in mind,” he says. “We ask what’s good for you.”

Craig has an informal style, wearing his black hair short in front and long in back and showing up for work in a gray sweat shirt, jeans and a straw cowboy hat. He was raised around Church Rock, N.M., a few miles east of Gallup. His father had been a Navajo Code Talker in World War II, part of a corps of Marine radio operators who baffled the Japanese by communicating in their own language. His mother was a cook at the BIA boarding school at nearby Ft. Wingate.

He and his older brother, Harrison, briefly attended boarding school, an experience Craig describes as “the most interesting thing that ever happened to me.”

He still remembers how the kids had their hair cut off and lived in dormitories dominated by bullies and ill-tempered dorm mothers. At Marine boot camp in 1969, “I kept thinking, ‘God, this feels familiar. What is it? Oh yeah, boarding school.’ ”

When he relates boarding school stories to Navajo audiences, they laugh appreciatively. From early in the century until the 1960s, Navajo children routinely were sent away to schools where Bureau of Indian Affairs educators tried to rid them of their native culture.

In the sixth grade he was sent to live with a Mormon foster family in Wayne County, Utah, under a church “placement” program. Craig thinks his parents consented to placement for him and his brother because they were having a hard time caring for their eight children.

Craig stayed with the Utah family through high school, returning to Navajo country in the summers. He remains close to his foster family and thinks the program taught participating Navajo children resilience.

“Many of those kids have the ability to adapt in any setting,” he observes. “They’ll always have it. Being the only Indian kid in my whole school was quite a test in itself.”

Craig explored his creative streak in school, learning to sing and play the guitar and writing poetry, but he was troubled by not having a life plan. “When I graduated from high school, I didn’t know what to do. I was always intrigued by how the non-Indian kids had goals, like being an electrical engineer. I just joined the Marines.”

Because his older brother, whom he idolized, had been sent to Vietnam, Craig drew noncombat duty at a Marine base in Hawaii. It was there he met Mariddie, who belonged to the White Mountain Apache tribe of eastern Arizona.

“I was just blown away by her the first time I saw her,” he says. “And when I spoke to her I was even more blown away.”

But he went into a tailspin after he returned from the service in 1973. Playing with bands in Gallup bars, living in a rented trailer and making $60-a-month payments on a pickup, he became a party animal

“I went into kind of a full-fledged occupation of holding up the walls in Gallup, making sure the buildings weren’t falling over,” he says wryly. “I drank a lot in the service. It was totally new to me, and I guess I wasn’t cut out to be drinking.”

Meanwhile, he courted Mariddie, who had returned to the White Mountain reservation. She rejected his marriage proposal. “She was very straightforward and said I had no direction,” he says. “It was just too much alcohol.”

Despondent over the rejection and the aimlessness of his life, Craig decided one night in October, 1974, to end it all.

“I was walking around the hills around my mom’s place in Crownpoint,” he recalls. “For some reason the water tower took on an interesting aspect and I decided it was over. I decided I was going to jump off and climbed all the way up. I was sitting up on the edge, and I wasn’t even afraid.”

For some reason, Craig decided to wait for one more sunrise, and when dawn broke he had a realization.

“I thought, ‘What are you doing here? God, you’re only 24 years old. Your family is in that house. Look at that beautiful sunrise.’ ” Craig says. “Then something grabbed me--a real heinous panic--and I thought, ‘I got to get off of here.’ ”

Craig broke down and wept. But then he glanced across the canyon, where a cheerfully whistling tribal policeman was gassing up his car.

“I could hear him and I thought, ‘That man looks content.’ Then it dawned on me and I thought, ‘Could I be a policeman?’ ”

He applied that morning and took an entrance exam, then went home and had his mother cut off his long hair. “Three days later I was in full uniform in a police car parked at the Circle K in on-the-job training.”

It was a turning point for Vincent Craig. He and Mariddie married six months later and he went to work for the White Mountain Apache police force.

Craig started a cartoon strip in 1977 for the Ft. Apache Scout called “Frybread and Beans,” featuring two trouble-prone protagonists named Joe Frybread and Billy Beans. Later, while at Brigham Young University, he drew a cartoon for the Native American student newspaper called “Benny Yazzie, Undergraduate.”

“Muttonman” came to life after the then-editor of the Navajo Times saw his BYU strip and invited him to start another cartoon. Craig continued the series after he transferred to Arizona State University, where he earned his undergraduate degree.

Meanwhile, Craig started writing songs and in 1982 produced a cassette for about $180 and took 300 copies to sell at the Navajo Nation Fair.

“We sold all 300 in 30 minutes,” he says. “After that I guess we sort of flooded the market.” Twelve years later, he figures he’s probably sold 20,000 copies of his three cassettes (a fourth is due out around Christmas).

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Craig’s performing, cartooning and law enforcement careers went swimmingly until the mid-1980s, when he decided to attend law school at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He put in several unhappy semesters. He missed his family and was unsure of what he really wanted to do. He returned to work for the White Mountain Apache tribe before being hired by the Navajo Nation in 1990.

Still, an old adversary lurked.

“I hadn’t really dealt with the alcohol,” he says. “I got more into closet drinking.” During one of his occasional binges, he was arrested for drunk driving.

Craig finally decided 2 1/2 years ago that he had to quit drinking for good.

With a friend’s support, he checked himself into a Gallup alcohol rehab center. He later learned that the center’s other residents assumed when he arrived that he’d come to sing for them.

He now relates his story as a cautionary tale for young Navajos: “When I travel places and I talk to kids, I always tell them who I am, what I’ve done.”