Reflection

Photo from summer Scout camp one year. I took the
picture with my Brownie camera.

     I am sick of the first person singular, not of myself, but rather of writing about myself. Employing first person leaves me feeling like I have not heeded the advice of my teachers who found its over-use distasteful, but for the past eight years I have written almost everything in the ego person. I have become the only theme of my writing. Whatever the topic, I write about myself. My writing reminds me of a friend who authored a book about her grandmother but admitted that the real subject of the book was herself. I have tired of my self-focus but cannot seem to break the habit. Second person becomes tedious and nonsensical; third seems inaccessible. I seem stuck with myself.

     I wonder if I am trying to get over an episode of arrested development characterized by too many years of setting aside my own needs, even needs for personal recognition and acceptance. Now, in early old age, I may be striving to solve a dilemma of my personality hoping to complete some task of my maturing process. I hope I’m in some kind of developmental phase, something I will grow out of as I resolve its crisis. I’ve grown weary of writing “I” even while I recognize its economy and probable necessity.

     I re-read Conrad Richter’s novel The Light in the Forest. The story describes a white teen raised from early childhood by American Indians. He is reunited with his white family whom he has never known but is unable to adjust. Running away, he rejoins his tribe only to discover he doesn’t fit there either. He is an adolescent caught between two worlds. It seems to me that I am writing about a similar kind of situation in my own life, but one that started before my teen years and persists to this day.

     I enjoyed Richter’s story, and although I liked the idea of being raised by native folk, I wasn’t the rough and ready type. For me, the skills of forest survival, which had been fostered in me by Boy Scouts of America ideology—preparedness and self-sufficiency with an overlay of Indian images—held their appeal due solely to the Indian theme. I didn’t seem the typical Scout. I sang in choirs at church and school, made costumes, and hung art in my room. I did hunt rabbits with my rifle and camped out in a pup tent with my friends. I went to Scout camp and earned merit badges in pioneering, swimming, and hiking. I knew knots, could fashion a shelter, learned how to protect myself in harsh weather, and could identify beneficial and noxious plants. But I knew I would never live like an Indian in the wild. I liked my room, books, piano, school, friends, family, and church much more than Scouts. Still, because of the Indian images, I stayed in Scouts and continued to dream.

     I realized limitations of my strength. I could tie a knot but not very tightly. I could jump but refused when the gang dared me to jump off the garage roof. I could play basketball but not sink many goals. I knew many skills; often I could not do them well. Skinny, sunny, weak, witty—I was an artist. When it came to Indians, their art, crafts, dance, and music were my deep interests, not living out in the rain. I loved Indians but didn’t know any of them. I lived Indian in my imagination, and some Native American ideals influenced my values for people, fostering an acceptance of difference and a taste for the exotic. There were Indians living along the creek of my imagination, a constant flowing and sometimes flooding of images and thoughts. I lived among them with a sense of difference and reserve.

     Why this interest in Native Americans? Why not some other group of people such as knights in shining armor, soldiers fighting wars, or baseball heroes? Some of my interest surely stemmed from their having gone missing from one of my favorite places on earth, my grandparents’ farm. A treasure of arrow points and hide scrapers, corn grinders and flint knives stimulated my curiosity. And, as my oldest sister put it, “Mom pounded into my memory the fact that an Indian ceremonial ground existed just across the creek from the farm.” It was as if I lived in an Indian presence, but their presence was unseen.

     “The Indians” were a group whose current reality was first revealed to me when my mother was faced with a pile of outgrown clothing. She declared, “We’ll send them to the Indians.” The items were shipped to a mission outreach supported by her women’s circle at the church. These poor Native recipients of white castoffs became more real to me when Bob took his son and me to powwows. Bob introduced us to Indians who were living a life rich with socials, dances, markets, and laughter whatever clothing they were wearing. He taught us how to perform dance steps and soon we were dancing with Indians at Wamego, Wichita, Ponca City, and other White towns with Red names. We visited Indian City USA in Anadarko, were entertained in the home of an ancient Iowa-tribe woman near Hiawatha, and conversed with a Pottawatomie man on his reservation farm near Mayetta. But we had no Indian guests in our home. None came to our church. I didn’t know any in our city.

     I look back into those childhood and adolescent years, now assessing my interests from an adult point of view that suggests the images of Indians were especially meaningful to me as a developing homosexual person. Jamake Highwater’s book, Sexuality and Transgression, a queer theory study arising from Native American experience, helped me understand at least one important perspective of my development: the Indian represented my difference. Although I was unaware of the connection, the Natives kept living in my mind into my adulthood. During my undergraduate years, when I thought I had left the topic behind, I still treasured two suitcases filled with costumes I had made. In my mid-twenties, I discovered the literature of sexuality and threw myself into its mastery. At the same time, I found books by Native authors, gaining new and sometimes surprising images of Indians from their own testimony and perspective. In my late twenties I started reading several gay authors, whose books intrigued me with accounts of homosexual life. Some of the experiences described seemed attractive yet somehow impure. I persisted following the work Native writers, who for me represented a more pure type of difference although it too was often marred by alcohol and drugs, paralleling much of the gay experience about which I read.

     To my childhood imagination, Indian difference and independence, as interpreted by many nineteenth and twentieth century writers, had reflected my conflict as the only boy raised among many sisters. To my adult mind, Native minority symbolized my being somewhat gay among straight others. As an emerging gay man, I clearly resonated to the Native American commitment to arts, to their inability to become White, and to their choices to keep their traditional ideals and values. Their manipulation by others who assumed they knew best seemed similar to what I observed in church and state attempts to define and regulate gay life. These images kept me reading Indian literature while I forged a bisexual and then gay identity.

     Friendships helped change me even more. I loved an Indian man. We became friends through a common project and hung out together. He knew I was homosexual and would occasionally hold me. He didn’t kiss me, though, as he did his cousin (a fact that irked me). He loved me but didn’t want a sexual relationship. He was Indian but not gay. He was no idealized person, just a guy of average intelligence, conflicted over culture, religion, hopes, and desires. He was rather burned out from the drugs and alcohol of his past, in chronic physical pain due to an accident, and not very successful in relationships, but he was lovely in spirit and, mostly, he was accepting of me. I felt kinship. I felt love. Still, I realized the huge gap that separated us.

     A few years later, after I had left my mainly straight life, I met a queer Indian. This man’s lovely Mississippi accent melted my heart. His attractive body presented itself to me openly, invitingly. His religion, though, a central motivation in his life, became a barrier between us. I respected his spiritual search for its earnestness; his need to regain a Native grasp of divine realities made sense to me. But I realized its focus didn’t jive well with my own spirituality. I admired his commitment and his body. We had fun and still greet one another warmly.

     Indians in my imagination and experience have helped me understand and embrace my own gay life. I, who am living in relationship to my traditional family with ex-wife, kids and grandkids and to my life with another man, find a sense of kinship with Natives who have long bridged two cultures. Like Laguna poet Leslie Marmon Silko’s lost boy in “Story from Bear Country,” I had wandered among the bear people, had seen their beauty and already had started to become one of them. My bear people were the Indians of my imagination, a transformation of my sexual drives into fantasies of life in the wild, away from the stultifying influences of “normalcy,” and in an arts-centered and homosexual world. Indians—read gays—have long lived on the creek of my imagination, in both my earlier and present life. They symbolize a kind of individualization for which I have striven and a call for the perseverance, creativity, and fortitude required for my full development into a mature gay man. Perhaps someday I will understand this experience well enough to describe it in the third person, but not yet.

Denver, 2004

This mixed media painting depicts a deer hoof print. Still
when I look at it, I tend to see two people in conversation.
Acrylic washes, oil pastel, and Prisma color on paper.
Phillip Hoyle