Native American art and culture
Catryna's great aunt Leslie Van Ness Denman was a friend of Hopi artist and silversmith Fred Kabotie and an important champion of Native American art; she and her husband William amassed a significant collection. Her interest was passed on to Catryna, who, along with Cyrus Vance and Arthur Schlesinger, co-founded the Friends of the National Museum of the American Indian to lobby for the establishment of the museum on the Mall in Washington, DC. In the preface to her book Enjoying the Southwest Catryna wrote that when she was seventeen her great-aunt took her to Second Mesa
where she witnessed Hopi Snake Dance, and to Canyon de Chelly where she saw cornfields and pastures worked by the Navajo community.
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Tryntje wrote two books about Native American art and culture, The Gift of Changing Woman and Where the Rainbow Touches Down.
Review of The Gift of Changing Woman from Publisher's Weekly, 1993:
"Seymour, who researched Apache traditions for When the Rainbow Touches Down, her examination of Native American art, here offers a detailed description of that nation's Na'ii'ees ceremony, known in English as the Gift of Changing Woman. An elaborate four-day celebration, it marks the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Seymour scrupulously if laboriously explains Apache spiritual beliefs as she discusses the significance of each part of the ritual and the roles played by the girl's family, godparents, the medicine man and the Gaan , four dancers who represent the Mountain Spirits. The book is dedicated to the late Philip Cassadore, an Apache medicine man who conducted a ceremony attended by Seymour in 1984. Sprinkled throughout the text, Cassadore's observations and interpretations (as well as those of his sister, who had her own Na'ii'ees ceremony) lend the account an immediacy and authenticity. Pictures by nine Apache artists help convey the event's grandeur and pageantry."
