Fetish Artist Trading Cards

Artist Trading Cards, Buffalo and Bear, Phillip Hoyle 2017

I'm getting ready for an ATC swap and workshop coming up next week. The theme ought to provide some beauties and, perhaps, some laughs. That will be up to the imaginations of the artists. There is a lot of imagination in the groups I trade with. 

I've long admired the cultures and artwork of Native Americans. I get to look at the work, both traditional and modern, of such artists at the Denver Art Museum, the first American art museum to show these works as art. My work with such designs is a mark of my appreciation. 

Rabbit Fetish, Phillip Hoyle 2017

All three of these ATCs are inspired by fetishes by Native Americans. They are done here on water color paper grounds, collage, handmade papers, ink, feathers, and rafia.

Writing, Writing, Writing

12-year old Phillip in photo for BSA month celebrating
the American Indian subtext of Scout life. It was the
front page spread in February, scouting month and
shows my Indian costumes recalling all the fun we had
camping out there on the creek while working at home
in the city dreaming. 

I'm writing a lot these days, so much as to bite seriously into my art studio time. Still, I consider writing one of my arts so I am taking advantage of a Writers Workshop being held just two blocks from the house. My topic relates to my childhood and its fantasies and values related to my Grandparents' farm out on Clarks Creek south east of Junction City, KS where I grew up.

The place fostered plenty of images for my boyhood, ones that related to place, family stories, Boy Scout outings, and hours of reading books from the public library. I was a youngster serious about his fantasies. Now I'm an old man still serious about them but now as topics and stories to be written. And I admit, I still sometimes work with feathers and glue as I do mixed media pieces of art.

Denver 2016

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

I Was Wrong

The George Smith Public Library

     The librarian at the public library in my hometown introduced me to the Kansas Collection. She withdrew a key from her desk drawer and led me to an oak-paneled reading room. I had seen the room a few times, although its door was usually closed. Rare books were kept there in glass-fronted cabinets. Now I too was invited inside. Turning the key in the lock, the librarian opened a cabinet and withdrew a book, which she handed to me, an undersized volume titled Indians of Kansas.

     The librarian stood about five feet five inches, just under my height at the time. Although I don’t recall her name, I do remember she was always dressed in a skirt and blouse or a belted dress, her hair pulled back into a tight bun. To me she seemed as ancient as the library itself. She had been present every time I checked out books, stamping the return date on the flap inside the back cover, and telling me it was due in two weeks. She must have realized that I had read almost every book on American Indians from the library’s general collection. Now she handed me this rare jewel that in its faded blue cover seemed as precious as a sapphire. I could borrow it for two weeks.

     The librarian had plenty of chances to know me as a reader since, as a younger child, I had visited the library every Saturday. While Mom got her hair fixed at My Lady’s Beauty Salon, we kids would spend our time upstairs at the library. When we had selected and checked out our books, we’d descend the wide oak stairway into the building’s common hall, from which we could enter the back room of the salon through a screen door. Greeted by the sharp smell of chemicals, we’d make our way to the front, walking past a row of patrons having their locks shorn and styled. Others were sitting under beehive hair dryers—Mother often there perusing a fashion magazine or preparing her Sunday school lesson. Waiting for Mom, we’d begin reading from our week’s selection of books or sort through the variety of women’s magazines on a table by the front window.

     By my junior high years, I had read every Indian book in the children’s section, having taken them home Saturday after Saturday, memorizing their illustrations and, sometimes, the text. Then I started checking out the adult books, reading the Dewey-Decimal “970s” on Indians, their histories, tribes, and customs. I ventured into the American history section, reading about the Indian wars and studying maps and photographs from the Nineteenth Century. I read anthropological studies of Cheyenne culture, academic summaries of troop and tribal movements at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, handbooks on Indian crafts, and collections of Indian myths and legends. I even discovered a few biographies of Native American leaders.

     Although I read a lot, I was more taken by the pictures in books. Some photographs became like old friends who greeted me from the pages of several books I checked out often. To this day I love to come across historic photos of Sitting Bull dressed in a muslin shirt, an eagle feather in his parted hair, or Little Wolf wearing his otter turban with its silver cross, or Wavoka sporting his black felt hat. I am still moved by a candid shot in a National Geographic publication picturing a modern sun dancer with a plumed eagle bone whistle in his mouth. I shudder at the photograph showing the frozen corpse of an emaciated old man killed at Wounded Knee and am saddened when I see a familiar view of a line of Ghost dancers in a trance, stomping their earnest prayer for a new age that would bring sufficient food and an end to war. These photographic images burned their realistic impressions on my memory.

     Through books, I also started to recognize the world as seen through native eyes: the fear of antelope rushing from a prairie fire as painted by Black Bear Bosin and the grace of a deer leaping as depicted by Woody Crumbo. Interesting historical insights came from unknown artists who recorded tribal experiences and heroic deeds in ledger books and on animal skins. I studied their detailed paintings, available to me in library books, and discovered an unusual cultural and artistic sense of perspective, one that fostered my sympathy for Native American cultures and peoples.

     The books took me beyond themselves, helping me understand the stone artifacts found at my grandparents’ farm. They prepared me to enjoy the Indian powwows I attended in northeast Kansas and in Oklahoma. Their instructions and illustrations helped me create authentic costumes that decorated my bedroom walls. They helped me appreciate the Native American collections at the Kansas Historical Museum and the Denver Art Museum. The books gave me a growing view of the world as well as an appreciation of things past.

     The day the librarian handed me the small blue volume marked a change in my intellectual experience. I learned that some books were prized for their antiquity and rarity, others for their information. This book presented both. Being rare, the book was kept locked up, safe from candy-sticky hands. I was impressed by its Nineteenth Century publication date. Entrusting the book to me, the librarian warned me to be careful when I turned the brittle, yellowed pages.

     I carried the treasure home, where I looked first at the illustrations, line drawings that didn’t interest me much. To teenaged me, they seemed like poor substitutes for the photographs in modern books. Then I read the sections about the Plains Indians, my favorite tribes. The book revealed that the first group of Pawnee Indians to make their way north into Kansas were called the Skidi-ra-ri. My mind made a connection between that text and a small town just south of my grandparents’ farm. Surely Skiddy, Kansas, was named for the Skidi Indians that had camped there and planted their summer crops. As I read on about Pawnee life, the creek valley of my imagination filled with Native inhabitants raising beans, squash, and corn, holding harvest ceremonies in late summer, and returning to their permanent, winter camp about ten miles downstream to prepare for the fall hunt. Never again would I see the farm in the same way as before, never hear “Skidi” without seeing braids and feathers, never hold one of the arrowheads Grandpa gave me without wondering who had made it.

     I recall Skiddy itself. Grandpa drove me there in his dark green Chevy pickup, with running boards on the sides, gearshift on the floor of the cab, and dogs, Coalie and Jack, in the back. I went with him to pick up some part for a machine he was repairing. There was a store, a smithy, and a gas station. I saw a few old houses, not much. And that was fifty years ago.

     I started wondering about the place when I began writing these portraits. I searched the indices of a number of books at the Denver Public Library. Next, I tried their computer catalogue. It kept asking me to check my spelling. Finally, after several tries at titles, subjects, and words, I made a potential hit with a title about ghost towns in Kansas.* The book was located in a full-reserve stack. The librarian brought it to me to peruse in a huge reading room. Its paneled walls and old pictures reminded me of the reading room in my hometown library, but this time I couldn’t take the book home.

     I eagerly checked the index for Skiddy and found a reference. I was wrong. Long-gone Skiddy was not named for early Pawnees but, rather, for a wealthy entrepreneur who, in the late 1860’s put up money to route the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad through the village. In return, the residents promised to name the town for him. Skiddy flourished for a number of years as a farming and shipping center, but a newly constructed bridge moved road traffic away from the community, and their bid to get the Rock Island Railroad to come through failed.

     I imagine my sisters thinking this article should have been written years ago when, in their estimation, I was almost always wrong. They didn’t like my know-it-all ways. I was a curious young student but, apparently, too eager to share what I had learned. My siblings’ criticism was the occasion of lots of kidding and irritation, but it probably did help me monitor my enthusiasm when I was in school.

     Discovering that my junior-high logic was incorrect didn’t discourage me, but it did clarify why I couldn’t find direct Pawnee-related information in archaeological literature. In the late 1930’s several digs were made in the creek beds of the area, including Clarks Creek, but references to the finds were generalized as being of Hopewellian or Plains Woodlands groups rather than Pawnee or Caddoan. Fitzgerald’s article on Skiddy preserved local traditions of Natives in the 1860’s and 1870’s and mentioned a near-by spring where the tribe’s women and children often stayed when the warriors were away hunting. The written history of Clarks Creek places the Kansas there; reason concludes many of the relics from the Indian past were from the Kansa tribe. Surely the Skidis traveled through on their long journey north in prehistoric times, and other tribal groups roamed the area for hundreds of years before them. I still see braids, as it were, when I hear of Skiddy, but now they are on Kansa Indian heads, and I wonder if the spring where families camped and the fields they tended were on my grandparents’ farm.

     Libraries still call to me, intriguing me with information that enriches my understanding. I visit the 970’s now at a library that has more books with that number than the total number of holdings at the public library of my childhood. I love reading the shelves, glancing through books, stopping to look at pictures. In response, my imagination runs free with hints from them, ideas and images that bring alive the facts I read. Imagination enlivens the figures in illustrations and sends a deep thrill through my body as I join living scenes from the past.
Denver, 2004

* Daniel Fitzgerald, Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997.

Dancing with Indians

     At a park in Wamego, Kansas, the old park with the Dutch windmill, I became a Pottawatomie Indian. Bob Waters, a friend of my dad and grandpa, had taken his red-headed son and blond-headed me to an Indian dance slated to be held in honor of the town’s anniversary. He sought permission for us boys to costume and join in the dancing. We were invited in and with deep joy danced war dances and round dances alongside Indian women and men. With the rest of the crowd, we sat on benches to watch several Pottawatomie dances we didn’t know. Then the announcer called for an adoption dance and signaled the two of us to join them.

     As I recall it, the dance was a follow-the-leader affair, kind of like a snake dance. I carefully emulated the leader’s movements: stepping in time with him and the drum, turning my body left and right like his, stopping when he stopped, and dancing when he danced. The experience was more than doing steps learned from a book written by a White man. Here I learned movements of hips and arms, the position of the body, the interaction of dancer with dancer. I was encouraged by the approving nods of the Indian folk with whom I was dancing. I was thrilled to be learning a new Indian dance, but truthfully, I don’t recall at the time feeling anything related to being adopted.

     Later, as we drove west along US 24, back to our homes in Junction City, Bob reprimanded us boys for dancing the adoption dance. “It’s not appropriate to join a tribal ceremony,” he preached. “You didn’t even know the dance.”

     “But they asked us to,” we protested in whining junior high and grade school voices.

     “Okay, that’s fine,” Bob conceded, “as long as they invited you.”

     Due to Bob’s questioning, I started to wonder if I really was adopted by this tribe that had been relocated to Kansas a few years before my forebears imigrated there from Europe. Even though at the time I didn’t make anything of it, from then on I felt welcome when visiting on the Pottawatomie Reservation or dancing with various other Native groups in Wichita, Horton, Pawnee, or Ponca City. I enjoyed the hospitality of these Native folk, learned some of their traditions, copied their costumes, listened to their jokes, and ate their fry bread. Eventually I read Helen Hunt’s 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor, her stinging critique of US government treaty breaking and underhanded misuse of tribal goodwill and ignorance, and pledged myself never to take advantage of Indians for my own gain and their loss. I was serious in my resolve even if the Pottawatomi’s gesture of adoption was only a simple kindness to children or a goodwill symbol between the Native and White communities. Whatever happened there was fine with me, for in my mind I did become an adopted child of the tribe. From then on, their interest was my interest.


Denver, 2008

Native American dancers, photo I took when a boy.

As a junior high student I met a number of older Native American men with whom I danced as in the story above. These particular men pictured here were participants in a Kickapoo powwow at the Armory in Horton, Kansas. I took their picture with my Brownie camera, very interested in their costumes. Although the Kickapoo tribe was Eastern woodland in descent, these costumes show plains influence. I recall studying the black beaded vest that I used as a kind of pattern for a similar vest I made and beaded. 
I no longer remember which man is which but wrote on the back of the snapshot the following names: George Allen, Hamilton, and Sacqua. I was aware of and appreciative of their kindness toward me.

Indians on the Creek

Warrior from a Kansas petroglyph
Acrylic washes on paper by Phillip Hoyle

     By the time I started visiting the farm, its former Native American residents were a dim memory already generations old. I doubt my grandfather ever saw Indians there although his parents certainly did. They had arrived in the late 1860’s from Germany and Sweden eager to homestead in the fertile Clarks Creek valley. The Kansa Indians, the immediate former inhabitants, had lived until 1873 on a reservation a few miles away, just over the divide, on the headwaters of the Neosho River. Soon after my forebears’ arrival, the U.S. Government re-negotiated treaties with the Kansa tribe and accomplished their removal to Indian Territory far to the south. Seventy-five years later, when I went to my grandparents’ farm, the Kansa were only references in a few stories.

     The Indians left behind marks of their residency: arrowheads, knife points, grist mills, and corn grinders. These materials were a meager reminder of a rich tribal experience, but they were adequate to set my mind afire with imagined campsites, farming, ceremonies, and warriors. The place seemed alive with their lore and legends. I thought, “Isn’t it possible a lone Indian might still linger in the woods across the creek?” It seemed so to me, a kid who could imagine himself living away from his irritating sisters and sensible parents, enjoying the country solitude. Accompanied by my dog, I too could live by my wits, reaping the land’s bounty of rabbits, fish, and grapes. And, “If I were an Indian, I’d know a lot more. I could do it.” It seemed possible.

     A few years after my grandpa’s death, I spent several weekends camping at the creek with my Boy Scout troop. We set up our tents in a tree-sheltered area with the creek on three sides, just across the stream from the place that Grandpa claimed was an ancient ceremonial ground. During our campouts, I kept my eyes open for relics of the Indian past but didn’t find even one arrow point. Still, I wondered if an Indian family had camped in the same place and if their kids had smoked grape vines on the sly like we did. One fall afternoon we collected dried corn from the field above our campsite and that evening parched it over a small fire. Had a Native cook done the same years before? We studied the stars that guided the Indians across the plains at night, camped by the same creek, and probably dove into the same swimming hole. To my junior-high fancy, we seemed to share a lot.

     My imagination was fueled by my reading of Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest in which, Johnny, an Anglo boy was reared from early childhood by Indians. His return to the white world as a teenager left him longing for his former life among the Delawares, yet when he tried to return to it, realities of race and family intervened. The young man was left without a sure home among either people. I really wanted to experience Richter’s scenes of this sixteen-year-old boy and his Indian cousin living alone in the wilderness. No tribal or personal history dampened their weeks of utter delight in the bounty and beauty of the woodlands along the river and in one another. The young man’s life, caught as it was between tribal and white societies, matched some feelings I had as a teenager straddling my idealistic imagination and the reality of carrying out groceries at the store. Although, normally I attended classes at school, sang in the church choir, and lived at home, I longed for an existence in the woods along the creek, an Indian reality of my imagination. The Boy Scout outings at least got me into the woods and to the old campsite. But too soon, Sunday afternoon would arrive and we would pack up our damp tents, sooty gear, and mud-splattered clothes. Life resumed when we got back to town. There, alone in my room, images of the creek loomed as I recalled other passages from Richter’s tale or descriptions from James Fenimore Cooper about the tall grass prairies and the adventures of old Leather Stocking. I wanted an adventure.

     I imagined that one of the warriors who showed up at my great-grandparents’ homestead would scratch on my tent wall some weekend and invite me to follow him on his journey. I pictured him as a muscular, lean man, walking before me in buckskin moccasins and leggings, a blanket draped across his shoulders. His head was nearly without hair except for an old-style scalplock pulled back into a single braid. Beads strung on leather thongs hung from his pierced ears and swayed with the easy rhythm of his gait. He turned his dark eyes toward me and simply nodded, indicating that we should cross the creek and enter the primal arena of the crescent moon with its traditional rituals and mythical stories.

     He told me how his ancestors received the corn they planted in this valley. A warrior found red, blue, and white kernels of something that looked valuable to him. He hid them in a mound of dirt and some weeks later came back to see if they were still there. Instead, he discovered a cluster of green stalks growing atop the mound, and on each stalk, ears of fruit in the three colors. He took one ear of each color for himself and shared the rest with the people of his tribe. The next spring, they planted the kernels in mounds as had the warrior, and at summer’s end, harvested a multi-colored crop of the life-sustaining gift of the Waconda. As my Indian teacher knelt by a small fire, I noted his strong legs and the red wool of his breechcloth. The blanket dropped from his shoulder as he handed me some corn. I studied the tattoos on his shoulders as I ate the food. I didn’t understand the meanings of the designs, but they helped him appear fierce. I enjoyed the corn, which tasted better than what we scouts had parched, and I knew I had found what I wanted: a life that would take me far from the city, back in time to a carefree existence, and into a friendship with this wild man who seemed so beautiful. Then I recalled the stories of the devastation met by the very Indian people who formerly lived on this creek and realized I preferred to experience this idyllic existence as only an exercise of my imagination.

* * * * *

     Mother told me that friends used to kid my great grandfather, saying the reason he immigrated to the United States was because he didn’t want to march the goose-step in the Kaiser’s army. For whatever reasons, surely including a hope for adventure, he and other settlers moved to Kansas, a move that represented homes lost and found. As immigrants, they replaced Native Americans and re-lived the experience of barely making a living from the corn and other plants they harvested and the meat they took from herds they found or raised. Their life was always a challenge, with a few fat years and many lean ones. Although my relatives were pleased to be farming, they worked endlessly and didn’t even get to go on month-long buffalo hunts like the Kansa Indians. They had to stay home to milk cows and gather eggs daily. Still, the land sustained their lives on the creek, and they, too, thanked their maker for the gift of corn.

     Although the farm was homesteaded in the late 1860’s by my ancestors, it had already been a farm for hundreds of years. It remains a farm. As an adult, I cannot imagine living there, either in the woods or in a house, but I still feel a strong emotional connection to the place, to its traditions of farming and family rearing, and to its power to evoke memories of the past and to bring a sense of reality to the present.

Denver, 2002

Photo by my dad

As a young child I loved being at the farm with its old buildings, animals, crops, hills, paths, ravine, and creek. I loved being there with my grandparents the times I got to stay over and once when I spent more than a week alone with them. I liked when our family went out there for dinner or holidays as in this summer picture in summer when the wagon was being outfitted to serve as a hay wagon. Pictured here are my two older sisters and me probably watching barn swallows make their arced swoops hunting bugs in the sky of the barn yard. Simple pleasures. 

Cowboys and Indians

Author in Estes Park at age four playing the part.

     I was a cowboy before I became an Indian. Emulating my cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy, I wore square toed riding boots, western cut shirts, and bolo ties long before I donned a feather headdress. As soon as I ate breakfast and drank hot chocolate from my Hoppy plate and mug, I’d mount my stick horse to gallop around the house and yard. Out at the farm I sat on Grandpa’s wagons and gazed longingly at his huge horses. I rode a saddle pony at an Estes Park resort, round and round the ring, and was convinced I was a cowboy.

     From early on I heard Grandpa’s stories about Indians who had lived across the creek from the farm and who occasionally showed up to trade after Great Grandpa settled there. I was hooked, imagining myself meeting those strange and exotic folk dressed in skins and feathers, me wearing my cowboy duds. When I discovered books about Indians at the public library, I entered a world that gave new content to my childhood fantasies. Then I imagined being an Indian, not a cowboy. I saturated the new life with images from every Indian book I could find: the texts, illustrations, photographs, and maps from all the children’s books and then the adult books of history, anthropology, and biography. I especially loved volumes on how to make Indian clothing and crafts and began creating costumes, jewelry, war clubs, spears, shields, and the like. I ordered 78 rpm records of war dances and round dances and learned to dance them wearing my costumes. In matters of justice I took up a preference for Indians over the very settlers from whom I derived. The complexities of my Indian interest grew. I think I wanted an Indian hero.

     “Cowboys and Indians” was also a game we played as children. We would sometimes wear costumes, but mostly the game consisted of running around, lassoing one another with ropes, shooting play guns and arrows tipped with rubber suction cups, and arguing over who got killed. The deaths were agonizing dramas with great writhing and moans and eventual relaxation. We also played Army or Cops and Robbers, but Cowboys and Indians remained my favorite. It meant more to me than the other games.

     As my observations about Indians became more sophisticated, I realized they were not one but, rather, a lot of different tribes with contrasting reactions to the European invasion of their homes. Cowboys were latecomers in the conflict. They followed streams of farmers, land grabbers, state builders, and governmental representatives who often swindled Indians out of their homes. Settlers were more the focus of the conflict: the farmers, miners, and ranchers. Cowboys, by contrast, were a group of hired hands out in the late nineteenth century Wild West where cattle herds replaced the failing buffalo population. They had interaction with Indians, sure, but during their few years of driving Texas longhorns up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene or to some other railhead, most of the fighting with Indians was carried out by the US Cavalry or state militias. Still the historically suspect Cowboy and Indian pairing stuck in my mind as if it represented warring factions within me.

     “When I was a child, I thought like a child,” wrote Saint Paul. Eventually I followed the Apostle’s lead and left behind my childish things—well all except a couple of suitcases of Indian collectibles I kept at my parents’ house. I went to a church college and studied the liberal arts, concentrated on theology and music, and took a church job. A few years later, I furthered my studies at a Texas seminary. While there I almost became a cowboy again. I was talking with west-Texas twang, drawl, and vocabulary. I had started shopping for ostrich skin cowboy boots and a Stetson hat when I realized I had to move back up north before I converted, took up Texan, or became a cowboy. If the cowboy was still in me, what about the Indian?

     In my zealous quest for maturity I had easily left behind children’s things, but I couldn’t seem to get away from them. As I pursued my career in the church, the Indians followed me. They started introducing themselves as Native American elements in religious education resources I wrote. Sometimes they’d swoop off the mesas of my mind encircling our wagons of Bible stories and craft activities, like the time Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Story from Bear Country” insisted on being told alongside the biblical stories of Joseph’s coat of many colors, vivid dreams, and sojourn in Egypt. And then a whole host of Indian stories swept down from the hills to surround and threaten. Perhaps I had read too many books in my childhood.

     I realize most cowboys were no more interested in Christian ways than were most Indians, but the cowboys were mostly whites, my people. Perverse me, I found the Indians more interesting, their difference more challenging, colorful, revealing, and frankly, they were better teachers. Their primal relationship to myth showed me a new way to read my religious tradition. They taught me that I had my own tribal connection, a biblical one that survived as an ancient memory. The Bible stories I so loved came from that distant past—some written long before Greek logic could be applied to them, all told and believed centuries before the advent of scientific thinking. These stories needed a new consideration, so I re-read the Bible and in so doing discovered that the defensive posture of my enlightened eyes wasn’t necessary. What was I defending? An eighteenth century philosophy? A nineteenth century insight? A twentieth century dedication to development and progress? Finally, like wagon master Major Seth Adams on TV’s “Wagon Train,” I realized the Indians on the horizon were friendly, and I yelled: “Spread the wagons. Let ‘em in.”

     The Indians challenged not only my thinking, but that of anyone else who noticed. I recall especially those folk who tolerated such themes in Boy Scouts but judged them inappropriate in Sunday school or church camp. My Indians didn’t care and eventually went to Sunday morning worship. At one service a lone Native visitor showed up in the children’s sermon; then an Indian scholar made his point forcefully in an adult sermon illustration. Later a group of them appeared as the choir and soloists in a French Christmas Cantata. Bedecked in leather, turquoise, and hundreds of feathers, they sang, played drums, and danced in front of the altar. Like their tricky Coyote God, my Indians caused confusion.

     This aging cowboy-turned-Indian carried that confusion for years. Still does. When I lived in New Mexico, where I learned cowboy two-step dancing, I noticed that almost every Indian man I met wore cowboy clothes. Eventually I too bought cowboy boots and that Stetson I’d wanted in Texas, and by the time I moved to Denver, I even danced in them with an Indian guy in a cowboy bar. A confused life at times, but like my Indians in church, it was more confusing to others—my congregation, my family, and my friends—than it was to me.

     The Apostle Paul also said something obscure about how faith elicits faith. So for many years cross-eyed Lakota Holy Man Sitting Bull hung on my church office wall as an overseer of honest interpretations, open attitudes, and inclusive deliberations. Perhaps the old chief was a kind of Indian hero for me, one I’d admired in my childhood. Hanging there years later, he reminded me that stories of talking animals, tricky ancestors, and face-to-face interviews with angels, heavenly armies, and the Almighty were features of my Christian holy book. And their inclusion in both the Bible and Native American mythologies is still as much a modern Christian confusion as an anthropological one.

     I had to learn to play with religious symbols so I could approach them with awe and appreciate their majesty. I finally learned the playful reality of the divine and lost my apprehension of what had always seemed to me a kind of forbidden magic. In short, my cowboy learned to live at peace with my Indian. It makes sense to me. And think about this: I read somewhere that by far most real-life, working cowboys in America today are Indians.

Denver, 2009

Author as young teen at home entertaining his sisters.

Front room war dances seemed better than temper tantrums.

Watching Shavano

Antler Dream by Phillip Hoyle

All my life I’ve lived in buildings whether a single-family home, duplex, dormitory, or apartment; always a building except for a few days I lived in tents. Then I cooked over a campfire, slept on a thin mat on the ground, snuggled into my bedroll, and yearned for more comfortable accommodations. I’ve endured few days without running water, central heat, or electricity, days that taught me to appreciate my life of relative physical ease.

     But now in Shavano Valley, I sit alone on a low sandstone outcropping looking across to the desert-painted escarpment that defines the valley’s northern edge along Spring Mesa. I can make out the old Ute trail that climbs the steep slope amid boulders black, red, and tan that for centuries provided shelter to people who camped there. The people came and went, staying a season, chipping stone tools, hunting deer and elk, processing nuts and berries, weaving baskets and mats, and making ready for the challenges and opportunities of the seasons to come. They followed predictable migration patterns year after year. These people, who included the precursors of modern Utes, found reasons to return to this spot on the eastern edge of the plateau lands that stretch far to the west. While they camped, they marked their habitation not only with castoffs but also with hundreds of petroglyphs. I sit here trying to imagine their lives.

     I know my contemplation is hardly more than speculation. I have little experience in common with my subjects except to know how the desert sun burns, the rocks hurt, and the cacti prick. Summer days here are usually hot; the nights cool and sometimes chilly. The daytime sky is almost always sunny; the nighttime sky brilliantly full of stars. Daytime reveals grasshoppers, dragonflies, black flies, bees, and small clouds of gnats; nighttime swarms with mosquitoes. I guess without screens, the place might become pretty uncomfortable. I live here in a house with screens.

     For nearly forty years I have read about Native Americans but don’t know much about the Utes, particularly the Uncompahgre band, who lived in western Colorado near the San Juan Mountains and used to stop here. So this summer I’m supplementing my knowledge by reading all the books Montrose Public Library offers on the tribe and its several bands. That’s not much. A 1920s study, Western Colorado Petroglyphs, includes a chapter about the stone carvings in the valley where I now sit. On my first try to locate its reported petroglyphs, I found a group of two carvings un-catalogued. The author, W.C. McKern, and his team of archaeologists and anthropologists probably needed another day in the valley. He reasoned both early and late Utes were nomadic, but the eariler limitation of foot travel made for more consistency in technique in the pre-horse society. The later petroglyphs display a great variety of techniques indicating for McKern changes in Ute culture due to the increased mobililty provided by horses. The new hurry-up society took less time for artwork and borrowed time-saving techniques from tribes they had never before known. I have gained perspective for my consideration from this and other books and recalled two titles about Utes I read when I was young: Ouray the Arrow and The Last Indian War. Books and my memories from books are aiding my understanding.

     Place names on maps and in local lore have provided a few clues for my consideration. I’ve walked the Indian trail up the side of the mesa, gazed at Indian Lookout on the edge of the valley just a short walk from where I sit, drove the ten miles up Colo. 90 to Arrowhead Springs picnic area, and visited the city of Ouray about thirty miles to the south. I’ve looked trying to imagine the Utes there but think this valley is my best place for contemplation. So I’ve clambered over the boulders around Picture Rocks and made rubbings of many petroglyphs. I’ve searched other outcroppings in the valley hoping to discover more petroglyphs. I didn’t find any. None appeared at Indian Lookout, but I did discover great views of the valley. I climbed another, taller butte about half a mile away where there was no evidence that anyone else had climbed it (well, this is a fantasy of discovery). A shed snakeskin lay beside a small pool of water, an observation that brought caution to my steps and the good idea to climb back down to the road. But first from this high point I took in the vista that included the valley’s far north end. A scout could sight intruders or visiting friends from sufficient distance to alert anyone living near Picture Rocks, but he’d have to run.

     Sitting here on my low rock, I wonder if the concentration of petroglyphs across the valley ever served as a place for vision quests. I imagine I am an older man (not too difficult for one in his mid-forties) who watches from the distance to be sure the young man in his charge doesn’t get into trouble during his vision quest. I am alert to the possibility of other tribes moving through the area and want the youngster to be safe. I sit in solitary far across the valley out of sight in the shadows of these rocks. The young man has no idea I watch. At that distance he appears to be about the size of a tiny ant.

     I realize the fantasy is probably off course. Any young man seeking the power of the spirits would surely be unafraid of other possible dangers he might encounter. He seeks power for protection, motivation, and personal strength and would not tolerate the unnecessary care of some tribal elder. I don’t have any idea if this is true and wonder how customs varied from tribe to tribe. Did the Utes even have vision quests?

     The books. I’ve read nothing actually written by Utes. I have found some traditional stories collected by ethnologists and several accounts of Ute encounters written by early settlers. These latter were mostly observations about how different and primitive the Utes seemed to them, stories about fears and about meeting fears. I hope someday to find more such resources and possibly tribal histories written by Native authors.

     Although there were few written records, there are things the ancient residents left behind. I look for arrowheads on the hillside above the canal road. After a rainstorm a couple of years ago my nephew found a beautiful point just below here on the road. I search the top of the hill where some large rocks and a scattering of junipers and piñon pines could have sheltered a family or two. About halfway down the hill I find a rock that may have served as a pestle. Its river-rock shape and igneous origin differ from the sandstone all around. I’m sure someone left it here. I search under trees, among boulders, in full sun and shade, and find several chips of hard rocks that contrast with the sandstone. Finally I locate half of a broken arrowhead. Did a lone watcher sit here making points for his arrows while a young vision-seeker or a cluster of families lived across the valley beneath the escarpment? I don’t know the reasons why, but I do know someone was here. Perhaps many people over the ages called this valley home.

     History depends on things read, things found, and ultimately, things imagined. I wonder how to envision what is not here and how to see what I cannot imagine. My wife’s uncle, a very successful Paleolithic point collector, once told me he always went collecting with a buddy who could see the tiny points that he himself could never see. His friend always overlooked the larger points. Between them they reaped a generous harvest of things left behind by an older culture. I’m out here alone and wonder what I’m missing; surely it must be plenty.

     In this valley, white settlers enthusiastically erected buildings, dug wells, strung fences, and planted fields once the Utes were forced to move away to Utah. Yet these pioneers were latecomer recipients of the valley’s fertile offerings. Before their exploitation began, the valley had given up harvests of reeds, succulents, and cacti; flowers, herbs, berries, nuts, seeds, and roots; deer, elk, beaver, and rabbits; and much more. The petroglyphs on boulders and cliff faces celebrate the plants and animals along with other wonders. People had been coming here to hunt, harvest, socialize, dance, and thrive for centuries.

     Shavano Valley had many artesian springs and, still sixty years ago, according to my father-in-law, lots of wetlands. Beaver lived here, but farmers wanted more land to plow. They filled springs with rocks, drained bogs, and otherwise prepared the flattest portions for cultivation of crops: potatoes, onions, corn, beans, and grains. They killed off the beaver, but before long more of them would move in and burrow into the banks of the drainage undermining valuable farmland and damaging roads. The farmers here continue to wage war with nature to wrest out an uncertain living. That’s one of the things farmers do.

     Now as a citified adult on sabbatical from my life-long church-related career, I am in the valley considering the past and my own past. I write, read, hike, and help out with Grandpa, who is afflicted with some type of senile dementia. I refinish furniture, keep the yard and flowers near the house, and even chase the cows out of the green alfalfa. I am pleased to be doing all these things. The leisure of it has taken me back to childhood, to my early loves as I walk the valley and simply watch.

     With too few facts and too much imagination, I sit here weaving images. I really can’t imagine myself living in a brush wikiup or in the shelter of huge boulders with a roof of sticks overhead, a rush mat beneath. I don’t know what I am looking at. If people lived a few feet away from where I found this arrow point, just where did they build a fire, erect their hut, or lay out their blankets? The attempt to picture it seems the proper outcome from my having lived as a wanna-be Indian, but I realize I cannot know. The problem with my efforts is the superimposition of my own experience and values. I wonder if there is any validity in my ideas, and I wonder about my theme of protection. Probably this latter is a projection related to the fact that from my rock I can see the house where my son, daughter-in-law, and several grandkids live. Part of my vision includes my intergenerational concerns. I want my kids and grandkids to gain visions here for their lives, to gain dreams of possibility and hope.

     I feel small in this valley with its huge boulders, steep escarpments, and awesome breadth. I feel unprotected. Who is watching out for me? My father died a few months ago, and my mother and in-laws are aged and frail. I sit on the cusp of becoming an elder watching a generation pass as a new generation grows here. I wonder how often this ancient place has watched such developments. It’s seen the change of ages, the archaeologists’ Archaic-, Proto-, Prehistoric, and Historic Utes, then Whites, and now my wife’s family’s fifth generation! But this last is little, as small as I am in the landscape.

     I think of my months here as being an in-between time similar to the Native vision quest. I am nearing the end of my career. I’ll give it one more shot hoping to work in churches until retirement. But I know I will never do this work in the same way, with the same meanings, or to the same ends. My Shavano break is for me definitely a visionary time for gaining a renewed personal insight into what I have and have not done, a chance to explore other themes of importance. It offers me power to live in a new way. I laugh at my self-important language. I am simply having a plain old midlife crisis. I really love not going into the office, not attending endless meetings, and not delivering sermons and speeches. I like tramping around the hills with little schedule or responsibility.

     Watching Shavano, I experience the exhilarating excitement of imagination mixed with the dulling realization of not knowing. My attempt to correlate these experiences has been a life-long try. Had I never lived in a house with electricity’s advantages, I think I wouldn’t question myself so thoroughly. I view Shavano, the valley’s shortening then lengthening shadows, its contrast of desert browns with plowed field greens, its variety-filled landscape, its constant flow of water, its maturing crops, and its abundant native plants; its changes minute and large. Watching, I place myself in a landscape of possibility and change.

Denver, 2010

Shavano Valley's Spring Mesa escarpment, home of dozens of petroglyphs