The following is an original production of AZPM News.

(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, learn the history of this tasty Southwest staple.

(Veronica) It's constantly talk to them, teach them, remind them and just share with them.

(Tom) Meet a couple of intertwining art and life.

(Jo) Transcendence, art still recognizes the dignity of human existence.

(Tom) This dance troupe is bringing Bollywood and more to the Old Pueblo.

(Megha) I love that we get to spread the message of our dance and our love for our culture, not just to Indian people, but to like the whole community as well.

(Tom) And our story on two bishops who gave up their church to help the homeless wins a Murrow Award for hard news.

(Bennett) I don't mean to say bad things about the people working hard to provide services, but they don't meet the needs of many, many people.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara and we're joining you from our cool new state of the art production control room right here at the Baker Center for Public Media.

Now, from this central location, Dara can punch up and control any studio in this entire building like this one, where we record The Press Room each week or here on our virtual set where we record Hollywood At Home.

And then there's our sizable, comfortable Studio A where we host community events.

All right.

Thanks, Dara.

Good job.

Appreciate it.

Well, now back to our show.

Let's talk about frybread.

It's a staple here in the Southwest.

But very few people know the history behind it.

Now, if you're of Native American descent, frybread means a lot more than food.

It's all about history and culture and the ability to endure.

♪ UPBEAT GUITAR ♪ (Alice) At Gathering, I love to include people, try this, try that.

It's good, you know.

It makes me feel like you're welcome.

Try it.

And come to my house, eat whatever we have.

(Pablo) People that, you know, you share your food with, that you share your culture with, that you share those emotions, those feelings.

'Cause it's, it's more than just that.

It's more than just food.

It's life.

♪ GUITAR STRUMS ♪ Fry bread, pretty much to break it all down.

It's made from flour, water, baking powder.

You knead that all together into a nice little dough ball.

Give a little love and tenderness in there.

You deep fry that bad boy up, boom, and it kind of fluffs up.

(Veronica) But it's similar to tortillas, bread, you know, the regular bread you eat, but it tastes better than everything else.

♪ MUSIC ♪ (Pablo) Other tribes like, say more the Northern tribes, they, they like to use the Blue Bird flour and that has like, you know, self-rising stuff in there.

And then people use milk, butter, and different ingredients that they add to to kind of, you know, spice up their, their bread a little bit.

Everywhere we go, we're always using the mesquite wood as the eye-catcher for our vending spots, 'cause you don't get many people cooking with mesquite wood right out in an open flame.

That really adds to the flavor, the smell.

(Lorinda) It is very popular, 'cause it's, it's so good and it's so versatile.

Like, you can eat it any way.

You can eat it plain.

You can have different toppings.

(Jennifer) I like the green chili cheese and also the sweet with the powdered sugar and everything that's delicious it's just like eating a donut.

[ LAUGH ] (Pablo) Mine's would always have to be the red chili fry bread or, you know, throw a little bit of pinto beans on there.

It brings like a homey feel back to everything.

(Veronica) For the most part, I like them plain with a little salt, the honey.

My children love it with the next day with regular scrambled eggs, like a sandwich.

Fry bread is good with everything, I think.

(Veronica) It's not so much a traditional food, but it was more of a food that, that the natives were able to get by with what the government provided to them.

(Pablo) Fry bread pretty much came through us through the, through the commodities of the people who come in across seas that began their first kind of owning of lands and pushing us into reservations and from the commodities that we got from there.

(Jennifer) Some of that was bought over by the Spaniards and everything that all compiled with what we, we would grow, cuz we were just living off the-the Earth, like growing stuff and everything.

(Veronica) The flour and, and lard and, you know, whatever else they were afforded.

So they made do with that and started making the fry bread.

And it just progressed from there to, to the tribes.

(Pablo) Different tribes, different people traveling through, you know, that already know how to use these commodities already or have a basis for it.

They would teach us how to, how to survive on those certain commodities.

We started learning how to thrive.

I've been a fry bread vendor since I was about like three years old, maybe even younger than that, being in the kitchen with all the family.

About 12, 13, I had to start learning how to make the fry bread.

I think I got into my early teens when I started learning about fry bread.

I actually learned maybe five years ago.

Yeah, very recent.

My fry bread was horrible.

It would come out like raw.

I had to learn.

And I did, was like, oh my gosh, I finally did it.

I was so happy.

I called all of them.

I called Alice.

I called my sister just to like, I did it!

I can make it!

I posted on Facebook.

(Jennifer) It was something that traditionally, we know, we have to make sure that our kids know how to cook, know how to do certain things.

(Veronica) I'm really glad that my granddaughters know how to make dough now and they make it and then the other ones are learning.

Constantly talk to them, teach them, remind them, and just share with them.

I just was interviewed by my granddaughter.

She's going to school in Oregon at Chemawa Indian School.

I was sharing with her what I saw on my personal end and how we can hopefully bring things back just by education and keeping our language and practice it.

The connections that you feel with family while making those and the memories that you guys shared together, they'll go on and you'll want to share those with your own family.

They may have 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road.

It goes from there.

I'm very proud to be a part of this group and it helps when we do get out there.

It's a lot of hard work, but it's well worth it in the end.

(Pablo) Give thanks to everything that we use.

We thank the Sun, the Moon, the Earth.

♪ MUSIC ♪ Rain, without it all, all mixed together, we wouldn't be connected.

You put that connection into your fry bread when you make it all together.

Our mothers, grandmothers, our fathers, grandfathers, guidance, for the teachings.

♪ CHIMES RING ♪ The animations in that story were created by recent University of Arizona School of Art graduate, Aaliyah Radebaugh, who worked as an animation specialist on our show during the spring 2025 semester.

Thanks, Aaliyah!

Next, we'll introduce you to a husband and wife who've been artistic collaborators for years.

He is a fine art photographer.

She is an abstract painter.

And together they create diptychs inspired by emotional responses to each other's work.

♪ SOFT PIANO ♪ (Jo) If you want to be an art photographer, which is what I know and what I teach, do you love it?

Because that's the only reason to do it.

Don't do it because you're gonna get rich or famous.

The chances of that are tiny.

You have to do it because you have a compulsion to do it.

It gives meaning to your life.

It identifies who you are.

That's the reason you become an artist in any medium.

For me, what was really appealing about, particularly about photography, was it made me curious.

So early I did what, for lack of a better term, was called straight photography.

It was a way for me to go out in the world, have completely new experiences, encounters that if I hadn't been out making photographs, never would have occurred.

♪ SOFT PIANO ♪ (Laura) I wasn't gonna be an artist, but I always loved art and I just loved looking through an art book or going to a museum inside just so peaceful.

Knowing that I always would love it, but never thinking that I was actually gonna be an artist.

I majored in psychology at the College of William & Mary and it was existentialist and humanist focus.

(Jo) I was educated and working as an engineer, feeling a little bit of dissatisfaction in my life.

I have to do this 50 weeks a year and take two weeks vacation and what can I do?

And I applied to Massachusetts College of Art.

A couple weeks into that semester, I found myself- lemme get everything out of the way so I can do my photography.

And given my background in engineering, I felt I could learn the technical side of photography easily, but I was interested in, "How do you go from there to an expressive art form?"

(Laura) When people look at my work, I want them to have a feeling of going someplace else, not in reality.

So to make them think, and I want them to feel.

So my process is really subconscious and I actually want to tap into a part of the brain where it's not logical.

So I oftentimes will start, especially even on a piece that's 8 by 12, which I love the most.

I'll even close my eyes, draw with my left hand because I'm right-handed and just see what comes up.

Because when I try to do something that turns out, like when I think I'm thinking about it too much, it looks dull.

So I'm trying to create things that look, that are kind of of another world.

(Jo) After I finished undergrad school, I moved to the Navajo reservation and lived in Chinle, Arizona for two years at the base of the Canyon de Chelly.

And then I came to Tucson.

Everything I do in terms of my art making, maybe 99% from my subconscious is coming from deep inside me someplace.

I don't want to interrupt that flow.

(Laura) I don't draw from life or from photographs or from anything.

It's all out of my head.

Humans that are part animal, there's figures that I make up.

The other continuous theme is how we treat that, which we consider to be beneath us.

That includes animals, humans, anything.

And culture is just, and pretty much there's not a piece that doesn't have that.

(Jo) In the studio, I have a shooting table and I have studio flash.

And I have things to put on the studio flash to control the light.

And I have heaps of stuff that I collect.

I make exposures with digital cameras and then I edit on a computer.

I often make work prints and things.

I have a big, you know, wide-format printer in my studio.

Digital allowed more control than gelatin silver.

If you use pigment ink and cotton rag paper like I do, it makes a very stable product.

And that's what I use in the digital darkroom, is cotton rag papers and they soak up the ink and I just love the aesthetic of it.

(Laura) These are pretty awful times.

I don't think it's about escaping as much as I think it's about recognizing where we're at and what's inside of us.

And I think that art is good way to do that.

(Jo) One of the values of art is, is it gives form to things that are difficult, if not impossible to express with words, joy, grief, transcendence.

Art still recognizes the dignity of human existence.

It's not about productivity or making money.

It's about recognizing humanity as something special.

The University of Arizona dance team, Om Shanti, lights up the stage with their unique Bollywood fusion style.

Now they've won awards, they continue to grow, and now they're sharing their culture with bigger and bigger audiences.

♪ INDIAN MUSIC ♪ (Reva) There's a dance style for every emotion.

Like whichever emotion you're feeling, you can be able to express that through dance.

♪ INDIAN MUSIC ♪ (Reva) So Om Shanti is a Bollywood fusion dance team that celebrates culture from South Asia.

And it fuses it with Western dance styles like contemporary hip hop.

Om Shanti, Om Shanti, Om Shanti.

♪ INDIAN MUSIC ♪ (Anisha) We also celebrate our classical elements of India.

So we perform Kathak, Bharatanatyam and we try to incorporate those as much as we can.

And we also use dance styles from the south of India.

So Mas, Kuthu, those are your energetic, really fun masala-y dance styles.

So we try to incorporate all five, six styles in our comp pieces or wherever we go and perform out to the world.

(Megha) Growing up, I've seen movies with Bollywood dance teams.

I've heard of people going to bigger colleges that have Bollywood dance teams.

But Tucson doesn't really have an Indian community like that, so that we were able to find a community within such a small group was such a huge thing.

(Reva) I'm excited to see the updates that we've done to the choreo.

(Parami) We always dance to tell a story to our audience.

It's either a story of our rich heritage or it's very lyric based on the songs that we're performing to.

Either way, we perform for kind of a storytelling aspect.

And I think that that makes it really special.

I feel like we need to clean that part up a little bit because the gaps between agents was looking odd and it was not in sync.

We try to perform in communities on campus, off campus.

And now we've been competing nationally.

And our main objective is to bring the community together and educate people who may not be aware of the plethora of styles that India and other South Asian countries have to offer.

(Parami) South Asian dance styles aren't very mainstream, especially at a predominantly white university.

So we get to showcase our heritage to people who have quite literally never seen things like this.

And so that makes me feel very proud and like we're making an impact, not just to students watching us, but to the actual university itself.

♪ HIP HOP BEAT ♪ (Taneah) We started and it was such a small team.

And so now we're nationally doing this and it was something we dreamed about when I first started.

Good Morning -What time is it?

-It is 6.45.

In Santa Barbara, we're about to go for a prop setup.

-We are at Tech Rehearsal [CHATTER] I love people coming up to us and asking us, "hey, what are you performing?"

And we get to open a whole other door for them to watch Bollywood movies or listen to music.

It's honestly amazing.

♪ HIP HOP BEAT ♪ Going to competition and seeing hundreds of other people and so many different teams across the US all come together for their love of dance, their love of the community was such an amazing, beautiful thing.

And it gets just bigger and bigger every single time.

I love that we get to spread the message of our dance and our love for our culture, not just to Indian people, but to the whole community as well.

♪ HIP HOP BEAT ♪ (Anisha) How I am right now is because of dance.

That was my outlet that I needed to express myself where I couldn't academically or in a clinical environment.

So I think that's what I took from dance and that's what kind of keeps me going with dance.

It's not just a hobby, it's a passion that I can't ever leave.

♪ HIP HOP BEAT ♪ So my current members and any future members of Om Shanti, I wish and I hope you have the same love for dance and the same respect for dance and culture.

As I have, as my fellow members and my fellow leadership has, that you guys promote and propagate the team just forward.

It goes up and up and up after this.

So I genuinely do hope that you guys feel the same love that I have grown to feel for this team and keep pushing the team forward.

We've come so far and the sky's the limit.

Just be Om Shanti.

But boss What about them?

They're witnesses.

-Don't worry.

-That's why I have this.

-Sorry.

Each year, the Radio Television Digital News Association recognizes excellence in broadcast journalism with Edward R. Murrow Awards.

This year, our station won eight regional awards and our show won six, including this story for Hard News on two bishops who gave up their church to help the homeless.

Congrats to producer Hannah Cree and videographer and editor Diana Cadena for putting this difficult story together.

(Bennett) My name is Bennett and I got some food here.

Are there some folks over there?

Let me go tell some people.

Let me go tell some people.

Oh, you didn't get tacos yet?

Wait.

Oh, well, I think I put them in.

Yeah, there's some in there.

Okay, you want some tacos and all this stuff?

People ask when I show up, they'll ask questions like "why are you being so nice to us?"

And my standard answer is "because I think hungry people should eat and thirsty people should have drink."

Again, people are conditioned over many years to think that there must be a catch for anybody who's being nice to someone or giving them something.

Bishop Sully and I have talked about a lot where people who are looking for services can find them at many religious organizations, but they have to attend services or they have to listen to sermons.

And we distinctly founded our organization in opposition to that notion.

There should not be conditions for people to get the help they need.

Good morning.

Are you all hungry?

(Celia) Anything but red.

OK, we got you.

Thank you.

Was it Nakoda?

- Nakoda.

(Bennett) Let me get you some tacos, too, and all this stuff here.

OK, calm down.

[ DOG WHIMPERS ] OK, really?

This i- this is life this is life she comes first.

Every bit of help comes with a price.

I would say about 95 percent of times the help has been offered to me, it comes with a sexual price.

How many times I've been walking and a person in a nice vehicle will show up.

Nice looking gentleman asked me if I'm working or if I'd like to make some money.

It doesn't matter if I look just to the nines or if I'm really looking raggedy that day.

It's just a woman walking around alone.

(Bennett) Very, very few Americans are interested in going and sitting in a space on a Sunday morning and doing what's called going to church.

But more and more people have needs.

And when we saw our attendance declining over time, along with many other churches, and we realized that we were raising money to pay rent to continue to stay in the practice of holding services for fewer and fewer people.

And it became a well, a cost benefit analysis.

If we're going to raise money instead of paying rent, why don't we use that money to buy food and other items to assist people?

(Celia) Closing the doors, there was a little bit of grief and loss for that, but the benefits or the inspiration and motivation that we have now to continue doing this type of work.

But we decided it was time to transition.

And Matthew 25:34, because it's the passage where Jesus tells us that it's how we care for the least.

We call those people the marginalized today, but how we care for the marginalized is the real test of our faith.

Were you there when they cleared out the camp a couple weeks ago?

Yeah, I pulled up just as the police were clearing out the camp.

- I got jumped back there excited.

- Oh, okay.

Yeah, I understand.

(Celia) Prior to that, our church services in Casa Grande, we were starting the bags of blessings, which is pretty much what we're going to be doing here today.

We just filled bags and we took them out to the homeless.

(Bennett) It's also important for people to see them where they are.

To see their circumstances, to see the conditions in which they live.

It's one of the things that helps generate empathy.

I don't mean to say bad things about the people working hard to provide good services, but they don't meet the needs of many, many people.

Imagine that you are homeless and you are homeless with your pet.

Shelters won't take your pet.

When I first wake up, it's like she wakes me up with kisses and I know she's safe and I know I slept through the night because she's a good guard dog.

(Bennett) Imagine if you are a couple, male-female couple, and you were homeless.

The shelters will separate you.

People often can't keep their possessions when they get services.

Many services won't serve people who have addictions.

(Celia) had a 29-year history of addiction and that ended in 1997 after I found the Liberal Catholic Church Internationals.

It's something that I like to share with them so that they know that they're not alone and that there's a way out.

(Bennett) One of the myths is that-that most homeless people are homeless because of drug addiction.

And it's actually- the majority is the other way around.

Is they started doing drugs after living out here to medicate, self-medication because of how hard it is to live out here.

(Carmen) I've had the addiction problems.

I've had the sexual abuse problems in my past.

You don't have to give in to it.

But I think that the single women here in this world are being overlooked because there's not a lot of resources for them.

(Celia) If they want to stop, sometimes they're not ready.

Sometimes they are, and when they are, I give them the resource information that I have.

I just want people to know that they don't have to remain in that type of pain and suffering.

Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

(Carmen) It's the hidden gems, I think, that do the most.

And it seems to be more faith-based.

My opinion about faith doesn't really matter when I'm helping people.

My faith motivates me to do the help.

The people I help don't need to know that.

To see a full list of Arizona Illustrated's 6 Edward R. Murrow winning segments, go to azpm.org/murrow Thank you for joining us for Arizona Illustrated from here in our cool new production control room at the Baker Center.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you again next week.