Betty Manygoats grew up in the remote reaches of the Navajo Nation, so remote she was home-schooled by her father. She never learned to speak English. When she was twenty-five, she learned how to make pinch pots from her maternal grandmother, Grace Barlow, and before long she was teaching people how to make Dineh pottery at the Tuba City High School. Betty went against Dineh teachings when she first put horned toads on her vases. Traditional Dineh believe it best to avoid the horned toad and that "messing" with him brings bad luck. Being a Christian, Betty doesn't pay much attention to them. Besides, she's become rather famous for the horned toads that decorate her pots.

The traditional Puebloan wedding vase with a top handle spanning two spouts is Betty's favorite piece to make (with plenty of horned toads decorating the surface, too), but she is not limited in her scope of imagination or abilities. She uses the widest range of motifs on her pottery of any current Dineh potter and she occasionally paints her figures to add more detail. She sometimes has up to ten pieces at a time spread out on her kitchen table, all hand coiled, decorated and waiting to be ground fired, then coated with pine pitch.

Betty taught several of her children how to make pottery and counts Elizabeth Manygoats, Rose Williams and Louise Goodman among her well-known potting relatives. Over the years she has participated in shows at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, the Santo Domingo Arts and Crafts Show at Santo Domingo Pueblo and the Window Rock Arts and Crafts Show in Window Rock, Arizona.