With winter settling over the city last month, Santa Fe business owner Amy Denet Deal attended a Museum of New Mexico board meeting to call attention to “an urgent health issue” — a lack of tables or heaters for Native vendors at the Palace of the Governors.

Denet Deal followed up her concern with an offer to donate tables, chairs and space heaters from her Santa Fe store to the New Mexico History Museum for its Native American artisans program, which hosts Native artists selling handmade, traditional works in the portal on the north side of the Plaza every day year-round.

The board, museum director and a committee of artists appear poised to decline that offer — to mixed reactions from Indigenous artists.