Inspiration

Ancient traditions of varying cultures assert that artistic gifts come from godly sources. It's in the language of inspiration, the muses, and the artist being gifted. I've thought about those symbols for my whole adult life and wondered at the history and interconnections of the metaphors. Then I finally decided not to worry myself over details and simply say I'm thankful for the gifts--large or small, real or imagined--that allow me to do art. It began with music and before too long expanded into writing, visual arts, multi-media, and so forth. I was mostly just doing a job or several jobs, ones I enjoyed and continue to enjoy every day. I'm not particularly pious, at least by some people's standards, yet I do recognize that in art something has to arise from somewhere to make possible the creation of beauty. May it be the god from within or without. I say this with a deep sense of humility and thanks.

A few days ago someone saw in my studio the crucifix pictured above. He was very enthusiastic for whatever reasons and made over what he described as the wire sculpture's beauty. I was a bit embarrassed. I made the piece decades ago in a workshop in which I also wrote a poem, probably the first one I ever wrote. Certainly it was the first sculpture I attempted. Only many years later did I work with visual artists to learn techniques and the like. I keep the spontaneous piece visible to remind me not to shut off whatever gifts or natural abilities I have in my work. And each day I do my artwork with a sense of thanksgiving.

I must add, just in case you are interested, I did not make the metal saints. They are New Mexico Hispanic pieces of Saints Maria Magdalena and Rafael.

Denver, 2015

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

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.