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.

Painting Petroglyphs

On the Trail, mixed media by Phillip Hoyle

    “I am painting petroglyphs,” I write.

     My niggling internal editor suggests, “Isn’t that painting pictographs? One chips away to make petroglyphs.”

     “No,” I insist. “I’m painting petroglyphs.” I work wildly, spraying a water mist on paper, splashing paints of various shades of brown onto the wetness, letting the colors run.

                                                                                         

     Occasionally I look up at the petroglyph rubbings that hang on the walls of my studio. I recall standing against the escarpment as I rubbed them, my skin getting burned in the western Colorado sun. The designs seemed so beautiful to me, carved on the sandstone walls and boulders out there under the blue sky, but so ugly when I wanted to hang them on the walls of my apartment. Crayon rubbings on yellowing newsprint. Pathetic looking. I had to do something artistic with these crude rubbings so I could continue to enjoy their beauty and celebrate the feelings they stimulated within me. Collage was my answer. I bought mat boards and started cutting, arranging, gluing. I replicated depth, depicting the rough texture and cracks in the rocks. I was full of ideas and enjoyed creating design, color, and contrast. I started becoming an artist so I could remember.

     While my paper collage contrasted greatly with the hard medium of the original creators’ work, making them did connect me with those ancient artists. They chipped away at the rocks to create an environment of ideas, mnemonics, and myths. I cut and pasted together a world of imagination that carried me back into childhood visits to my grandparents’ farm and forward into a life grounded in such memories.

     The parade of deer, moose, bears, horses, foot and handprints, lines, arrows, stars, medicine wheels, and unnamable creatures elicited an ancient world in my imagination. They conjured a life of wickiups and teepees, of cooking fires and ceremonial smoke. The wind that blew down the Shavano Valley seemed to carry the sounds of chanting, hoof falls, snorting animals, and playing children.

I found in these rock carvings a way to imagine

a life of the past;

I found in them a topic for research;

I found a subject for reflection,

An experience of beauty.

     Crude. That’s what W. C. McKern called these Ute petroglyphs. From his point of view as an ethnologist doing a study for the Smithsonian Institute in the early 1920’s, they were crude chippings of an inferior culture. His evaluation reflected an assumption of trappers, who contrasted their impression of Ute life with that of the Plains Indian tribes much more influenced by white trade goods and ideas. His judgment also reflected philosophical and scientific biases that, in my opinion, missed what these petroglyphs were in themselves and what they represented to the people who made them. The great problem with these markings lies in the fact that it is impossible to know what they represented. Even Native American scholars admit they don’t know. The passing of centuries created an impassable gap, leaving us ignorant, unable to guess with any kind of certainty at the meanings of these scratches. Their permanence laughs at the changes of the societies that made them and of those that still gaze upon them.

     There they remain on isolated canyon walls, colored only by desert paint in blacks and browns. I imagine them peopled, complemented by the colors of feathers and beadwork, by the odors of cooking meat and smoking tobacco, by the sounds of milling horse herds and the melody of a flute. As I rub them, I hear a truck pass on the road below, a hawk call in the sky above, a grasshopper’s wings crackle in the dry desert atmosphere. As I cut the images for my collages, I hear the furnace in the apartment click on and the rush of wind pushing through the vent. As I paint them on paper, I hear footfalls cross the floor above and the motor circulate water in the hot tub.

     I lift the edge of the paper to make the paint run and wonder what the Ute was thinking as he pecked away at the rock. What was his artistic concern? How long did he look for the harder rock to use as a tool? Perhaps he was trying to remind himself of the spirit of the animal he killed to feed his family, his chipping a prayer of gratitude. Maybe he was simply making marks to distance himself from the activity of the camp like a student doodling during a lecture.

     What am I doing? I am thinking about what colors to select to best leave the impression of sandstone. Certainly I am distancing myself from the others with whom I live, but I think I am doing more. I am creating a reminder of the valley, of its plenitude of deer, elk, plants, beaver, gushing springs, rugged rocks, and endless blue sky. I am recalling the past of my imagination to keep alive the leisure of childhood, its unfettered freedom, its sense of unlimited possibility. I am celebrating my connection with the past, with a human spirit that reaches far beyond my family, society, and culture. I made collages and now I paint to show my children and grandchildren life is more than making a living. It is also, and necessarily, an expression of spirit, of beauty, of art.

     I paint my petroglyphs, or more precisely my petroglyph designs, in a work that seems to me as ancient as it is contemporary.

Denver 2006

Paintings by P. Hoyle On the Trail (above) and The Hunt; photo of me in my studio.

The Hunt

Stories I Tell My Clients: A Massage and Just the Right Word

A middle-age woman I massaged at the spa told me she was an office manager and warned me of stressed muscles in her back and shoulders. I worked hard with her. Near the end of the session, I found her right forearm extremely tense and in serious need for deeper work. I applied a combination of Swedish massage, deep tissue therapy, and an interactive myofascial release technique. At the end of the service, she went out into the hallway and by impulse picked up a glass pitcher full of ice water and poured herself a drink. Then to her amazement she realized that she hadn’t been able to pick up and pour like that for several years. She thought I was some kind of miracle worker. I claimed to be doing only what my teacher taught me and expressed the hope that she’d find someone in her hometown to work regularly with her.



Dan and I drove into the mountains west of Santa Fe, New Mexico one afternoon to camp at Fenton Reservoir. He took along his male red Doberman pincer. We got up before the sun hoping to catch some fish. Dan fastened the dog’s chain to a nearby tree, and we threw our baited hooks into the water. After sunup, some unsupervised kids began running back and forth on a path near the dog. An hour or so later, their mom dragged herself out of her tent and hurried by on her way to the lavatory. When she returned, she approached Dan and asked if the dog was good with kids. Dan replied, “Sometimes.” Her kids quit using the path.

I found Dan’s answer was perfect for so many questions and helpful as an interpretation of massage. Sometimes this approach or that technique brings relaxation to muscles or relief to pain, but there are no guarantees, no imaging procedures, and lots of guesswork. We therapists prefer to describe our guesses as intuition. At least that’s what I tell my clients. If they have had a massage accompanied with one of my stories, I know I’ve shared with them an idea or two that I find true. In my version, massage is a rather simple process. Its effectiveness is enhanced by thorough preparation and intelligent decisions, but ultimately the loving handling of another’s pain is its focus and benefit. I love my work and the storytelling opportunities it affords. If my clients laugh, I tell them the endorphin therapy from it comes free.

Sometimes I feel sure I know what a petroglyph
represents. Not so with this one!
Mixed media on paper. Phillip Hoyle

Stories I Tell My Clients: Habits and Habitats

A muscular client complained of pain running from his right hand to his shoulder and neck. I asked him if he worked at a computer. He said, “Yes,” but explained that the pain didn’t occur when he was typing. I asked him if he spent time on line. “Yes,” he again responded.

I told him I had noticed that when I was waiting on a slow-responding program, I tended to get lots of tension in my right hand. I keep it poised over the mouse as if my diligence will save me time. He thought about his habits and realized he slouched and held his body on his elbows when he was on line. And he kept his hand over the mouse ready to hit the button. I suggested he let his hand drop to his side and let his shoulder relax while waiting for a download. I further suggested he get a massage from time to time. I share this story with many people and often have to remind myself.




While giving chair massages at an investment firm for two weeks following the tax season, I watched a room full of customer service workers doing their daily business. They had great work stations with plenty of room, ergonomically correct chairs, the best telephone headsets, computers with large screens, and if they worked one year, any keyboard they desired. But their comfortable atmosphere eventually failed them. I noticed that by three thirty each day they started slouching, crossing their legs, reaching too far for their keyboards. They were too tired, putting in too much overtime, and stressing as they listened to people complain about how their investments weren’t yielding enough (as if this representative of a mutual fund could do anything about that problem). Although the company’s practice of providing massage was a nice gesture, a reward for the workers’ persistence, I thought once a year seemed insufficient. I handed out my cards.

Stories I Tell Clients: Luxury Item and Left or Right?

I received my second professional massage at the historic spa in Jemez Springs, New Mexico. The therapist asked me if I wanted her to concentrate on any particular place. “My forearms,” I requested. I had tightened them up by obsessively playing computer games—the ones that go faster at each level. She worked deeply; I almost jumped off her table several times the pain was so intense. We made it through the massage, and due to her skill, I had three and a half months pain free, a respite for me to figure out how not to hurt myself again. That’s when I realized massage can be much more than a luxury item.


“Are you left handed or right?” I often ask a client at the outset of a massage. I asked that of a young lawyer with whom I had already been laughing. He didn’t reply. I joshed him, “That’s not a difficult question.”

He finally answered, “I was trying to figure out why you were asking.”

I reminded myself that he was a lawyer.

I tell that story to other lawyers or to people who ask why I ask. It’s because I want to know where to begin my work—I tend to begin on the side opposite the dominant—and how to assess the differences in muscle tone and size by whether or not they are on the dominant side of the body.

For the Utes Coyote was a trickster.
Mixed media on paper. Phillip Hoyle