Bob Haozous

Thank you for inviting me. When I was in New Zealand about eight years ago I was asked to speak in the village meeting house. The house itself represents an ancestral body with the ceiling beams representing the ribs. I don't usually speak publically about my art, but they said, "When you speak, don't worry about it, because you're not speaking, your whole tribe is speaking." And it just astounded me. I've always been proud I'm Apache, I've always claimed to be Apache, but I've never thought of myself being a representative of an entire culture. I take that very seriously. Later on, I talked to Oreh Lyons, who lives in New York, and he said that we are responsible for seven generations into the future. Whereas the Maori people said you represent six generations of your people, and I got to thinking that's a total of fourteen generations I'm responsible for. As an artist I've been taught to be an individual, to claim my individuality; to be much like the immigrants of this country, to be a self-made man, to really do it on my own; and then when I'm done, my prestige goes back to my people, because I've made it. I also, at that time, began to realize that I don't own myself. I feel awkward in signing my work, because I can't claim to be that unique individual that we Americans claim to be. So I usually introduce myself as Bob Haozous, I'm Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache. We're the people that are mostly related; everybody knows Geronimo or Mangus Coloradas or Cochese or Victorio, those are all our people. I named my daughter after Lozen, Victorio's sister, who was a woman who fought with the men, because I think we need people who will fight together to retain our cultural past, our cultural strength as we are today.

I want to show you a bunch of slides. It's kind of a combination; it's in no way a representation of my older work but there are some older works in here, just to show you what I learned. I do a lot of issues that hopefully slap you in the face, because they slap me in the face. My work is just a self portrait of myself, and then I put it out there. Hopefully it will trickle down to my culture, but so far it's a difficult thing to do, because artists in this country, and especially Indian artists, are really considered elitist and the only way they can reflect their own culture is by economic return and prestige. So I'll just show you my slides right now.

This is my first sculpture. I did it at California College of Arts and Crafts in 1967 and it was called "Introverted Man." I'll run through these fairly quickly because these are all older and I don't remember a lot of the names or what they're about. This is the second one I ever had in a museum show, the first one was in this show that I had at the Oakland Museum, and it was my first major sale, because this huge panel that it was glued to, or attached to, fell and crushed it, and the museum insurance company paid me off. But this is one I did in Santa Fe after I went to Santa Fe and saw the people participating in the market and not really analyzing their own cultural reality. This is an Indian head bank. I was working with a kind of racist guy in Oakland, who was my boss, and I did this Indian face, which to me is just absolutely ridiculous: the squinty eyes, the sloping forehead, the big nose, the braids. I resisted putting a feather on it because I didn't know how to do it at the time. But I showed it to him and he says, "My god, that's the most beautiful example of an Indian I've ever seen." And so I put it on this sculpture. It's a piggy bank, and you can hear money going inside. It evolved into many different directions after this because I always change my work as I go along.

This is called "Christian Girls." You can't really see them but there are little crosses around each ones neck.

This is the first major commission I did for the Daybreak Star in Seattle, and it was about Indians performing for cultures outside their own. There's a pueblo buffalo dancer, a Navajo Yei Image, and an Apache mountain spirit dancer, all from the Southwest. They are very serious spiritual representations. But behind them are all these faceless people. The men you can tell by their cowboy hats and the women by their breasts, and the clue to this thing is that right in the very center is a Mickey Mouse. At the time I called it "The Masterpiece" which is a bit presumptuous of me, if I took it seriously. But it's a masterpiece of self-deception, is what it was about. And the people at the museum, they see the mouse, and the first thing they think is, "Oh, this is an example of Indian humor." That's about eight foot by twelve foot.

This is called "Freedom Man." It's a man who received the Freedom Medal. It really comes from the way Indian people are some of the most brave people: they join the military, they're the first in battle, they're the first to die, too, for the country that enslaved their people and still continues to enslave their people. So here's a man who exposed his wife's or girlfriend's body, and he's doing it with resistance and great pain. I don't know where it's going to go, but my job isn't to tell you where it's going to go, it's just to portray who I am or who we are. This is only about eighteen inches tall. It's a black slate. They call it African wonderstone, but I think it was probably mined in this country.

This is "Indian Slave," I think the name of it is.

This is called "Phallic White Man." I think somebody finally bought this. I had this for years and years and all the sudden it disappeared, so I guess somebody owns it somewhere.

This is a serious piece. It's about alcoholism. My brother's a severe alcoholic. It's called "The Brother" and I intentionally made it so that you didn't know who the alcoholic is: either it's the support system, or the alcoholic.

I did a whole show in Santa Fe back in the late seventies/early eighties, and I did all these animals and showed them with these symbols–dollar signs, airplanes, just everything. And nothing sold, so as a test I took one home at a time and I polished off the design–this cat had the little dollar sign taken off–took it back, and it would sell. And it really shows you the restrictiveness of the Indian market. It just stifles any kind of creativity or new thought, completely. But I did it, I felt good about it, because I made the statement, and then I made another statement with it. It's easy to make money in Indian art. When I first started into carving stone, all the artists were looking for the prettiest stone, because you could polish it, make it beautiful, put an Indian face on it, and it would sell. And I used to make fun of that, and actually made jokes of it myself, but I didn't succumb to that market because it seems so demeaning.

This is "Woman With A Past."

This is "The Puppet Princess." It really had to do with a childhood memory of all the girls I knew who used to stand out on these lawns at this Indian school and they would practice doing the Lord's Prayer in Indian sign language. Most the girls I knew were Navajo, Apache or Hopi, and some Utes, and some this and that, but none of them used sign language to communicate. It was a Plains kind of a lingua franca. So I started making Indians into princesses, and making them manipulated and controlled. That's a fairly large piece. A lot of my pieces are female nudes, not only because I like the nudes, but because I'm trying to make a parallel to this concept of the Mother Earth. I didn't really hear of it until it became popular. I think it's a European concept. But every Indian you hear talks about the Mother Earth and that stuff. And it's certainly not Apache, or it may be, I don't know. But I began to realize that the earth is beautiful, and the earth is being manipulated, so I started making statements about a degraded or manipulated Mother Earth. The assistant to my father had a beautiful girlfriend who I saw at an opening, so I asked her to model for me. And her boyfriend told me she was a severe alcoholic because she was so beautiful that nobody wanted to talk to her, they just wanted to look at her, or have her or own her. And so I did the Mother Earth portrait; she's being surrounded by the ten little white men, and the clue (I usually put a clue in my pieces) is the rabbit. If you reach for the rabbit, it would run away. If you reach for her, she's available. It's just like we use the earth: it's just something that's available and misused.

This is one I did on my way to Dartmouth, as an artist-in-residence, in New Hampshire. All the way up there I was using my car and I kept thinking, it seems so silly to be making political or environmental statements, and using my car, and using this beautiful Honduras mahogany. So I made a statement about this Mother Earth, that had been painted pink, with a beautiful rainforest on her, surrounded by the cars. I over-made up this woman with too much makeup, and I gave her armpit hair, to show you that it was out of place with this image and it had to be removed. The real nature was the wood underneath.

Just an example of Indian art: at a federal building in Santa Fe, they offered artists space, and I put mine–mine is the white man with the puppet with the dollar sign, because I consider that's what happened to our sense of aesthetics, I suppose, or arts. And everybody else tried to paint something kind of Indianish, that really didn't relate to them, except maybe in ceremony, or historically, or emotionally. But the reality was that I think everybody should have been making my statement, because that's exactly what's going on, but we don't deal with it. And the idea of trying to relate art with community really is what brought me to this symposium. I did a show in Colorado and they said, "Do a bunch of little ones," because they wanted to sell. It really offended me, so I did a bunch of little ones, a bunch of little animals and people, and they said, "Great, great." I did it, but I had all their tongues sticking out. Not one of them sold, and it was just a great experience, I just loved it. And they never invited me back, either.

This is one that's a real turning point in my career. The gallery owner was a good friend of mine, and I said, "I want to paint your gallery blue." And he said, "O.K." So I painted it blue, painted clouds all over, and painted this whole show of artificial clouds, mainly relating to the way we don't really want nature unless it's pretty. Like Disneyland, everything's artificial in Disneyland, and you love it, but you forget that there are no bugs, there's no violence, there's no bad food, or it's all bad food, I'm not really sure. So I did this show, and people went to it. The clue was that outside the window was the real nature, which just made my artificial blues and pinks and yellows look kind of pale. And that was what I really wanted. But people would come to this show and say, "Oh, this is such a beautiful show, you must be very happy this time in your life," and that kind of stuff. I think that they liked it because it made them feel comfortable with nature. We're all terrified of nature, under our skins, I think.

This is called "Apache Pull Toy." It's a cowboy full of bullet holes. This is a show I did for Mexico City. They're all separate but I just put them on a cart and took a picture of them. And they all have little poems about a pilot bombing a village of women and children, and different statements, all done in Spanish. Which I don't understand, I had it interpreted, but the guy made some mistakes. But it didn't matter.

This is called "American Rocker." That's about sixteen feet tall, eighteen feet tall, total. It's just huge eye-beams that were thrown away by the Los Alamos nuclear testing area. I tried to make a statement with these things that were just considered waste.

This is called "The Bishop's Table." It's a photograph; we've all seen pictures of Indians lined up in the late 1800's, and sometimes you even see Indian women laying in these classical poses, and that's always been an inspiration to me, about how to survive, we'll do anything. The most modest people in the whole world will take their clothes off. And so I found this picture of these African girls posing and I put them around this table, and put this golden chalice in the center. It's about what you want it to be about, but to me it's really a powerful statement about what has happened to our indigenous people, how we've had to sell out.

This is basically the same thing but using nature and animals: the coyote as the symbol of the Southwest, the dollar sign. The clue on this one is that howling or screaming coyote on the bottom. On the very top is a Greek design for a blackbird, because I try to relate it, in my own mind, to where this concept of separation from nature came from, that we are so fond of in contemporary life. And I try to tie it back to the Greeks on this one.

This is a series of five airport pieces, at the Phoenix airport. They wanted me to use Indian symbols, so I used the Hohokam people, a very complex society, at 1200 B.C. or so, a tremendous society. But I put that in the center and I put the same Greek bird, eating the little bird from the Hohokam people, and it's surrounded by airplanes and pollution. This is a part of that same series. Those are actual Hohokam designs in the center.

This is my "Portable Pueblo." You know when you go somewhere and you find a pebble and you want to take it home, like if you go to Greece and you find a piece of marble, it's about selling and taking the Southwest away from itself, or taking the Indian culture without realizing the depth or the beauty of the culture.

This was inspired by a trip to Northern California, where I saw these huge gouges in the mountain, where they had dragged these huge redwoods out. They're just like scars. It was horrible, and quite beautiful at the same time. It was kind of inspirational. And so I did a portrait of a friend of mine, a South American lady, being pulled out of the forest like a mahogany tree, on her own logs. That's a huge piece. I had a big fight with some welders because they wanted to use that steel for a table.

I think this is called "Apache Skull." Inside the drawer are shelf casings.

This is kind of an interesting story. Mangus Colorados was my great-great-grandfather, and he had a large head. He went to some peace talks in 1865, and he was murdered, because they wanted the land and the silver, and the minerals from where he was. They cut off his head and sent it East to a phrenologist. Phrenology is when you test the outside bumps on your head, and if you have a big bump here that means that you're a good warrior, or something silly as that. Adolf Hitler used some of the phrenologists' concepts when they came up with the master race concept. It came right from this phrenology that was really raging through the Euro-American societies. They cut off his head and used it for lectures, because it showed that he was extremely intelligent, cunning in battle, and all kinds of things like that. We saw pictures of it, and he has a bullet hole in it. His head's disappeared, and I heard from somebody in California that it's in George Bush's father's collection, when he belonged to the Skull and Bones society at, I think it was Princeton, I'm not really sure where it is. It's one of those things that's impossible to trace because it's an absolutely secret society. But it just shows you that, here they were trying to subdue people who were some of the most complex and most beautiful people in the world. They used some of the most primitive people to do it, and that was the Skull and Bones people. But this thing actually opens up and it's a hollow space inside the skull where the brain is supposed to be.

A lot of people don't realize the devastation that the conquistadors caused to the Indian people. They came in and took anything they wanted, killed anybody they wanted, and went to the Zuni pueblo and, according to official accounts, (because everyone wants to be Spanish in New Mexico now, or have Spanish blood rather than Hispanic or Chicano), the Zunis resisted him and killed a few of his officers, so he attacked and finally subdued them. He executed 24 of their people, in retaliation. Everyone knows the 24 number. So the Spanish people in New Mexico say, "Well, they killed 24 people and they took the pueblo." But the Indians say that during the attack they killed 800 people: men, women and children, threw them off the cliffs, cut off their hands, cut off their legs, and then they punished 24 more. So I did a portrait of this guy, and I made it absolutely perfect: the beautiful horse, the sword, the cross. It's a stainless steel sword, it will never rust. It's called "The Discoverer."

But underneath, you see the real horror of our history, that we don't hear. What was really fun about this, was this guy named Cristobol Colon, who's a direct (we find out later, indirect) descendant of Christopher Colombus. He came to Santa Fe and was being wined and dined by the city officials. Somebody got him to stand in front of this and pose, and he was just pleased. I got a picture of him standing there, proud as he could be. Later on he found out what I had done, and what it was about, and he was furious. But I have the proof, and it was great.

What's really sad right now is that every pueblo in New Mexico, I've been told, has a similar story. They've been told, "Don't talk about it." My tribe too: "Don't talk about that stuff," because if you do, then they'll come back and get you, they'll kill you. It's still a fear today. It's really surprising.

This was just a piece called "Earth Image." It's just a big piece at a museum in Santa Fe.

I did this when I was at Dartmouth. I was walking through the halls listening to the students debate about the merits of abortion, or not to abort, and I realized I didn't have the slightest idea whether it was right or wrong, or ethical or moral or anything. It's just an issue I couldn't even think about. So I did a piece that I called "The Abortionist's Bed." You can't really see it but it's a symbolic female laying on the bed with her belly swollen, and on the very top where her head is, where her braid would be, are these spikes. This has traveled quite a bit, and now it's just sitting out in my field, getting more rusty.

I did a piece in Tulsa for a big sculpture show. It's 72 feet tall and weighs 18,000 pounds. What was really fascinating about it is that everybody volunteered. Everybody wants to see something from the arts, and they all want to participate. It's just fascinating. People with business suits were handling drills. They didn't even know how to do it but they were getting all dirty, with dust thrown on their wingtip shoes. The city volunteered the trains for our use; the Mayor came around, the Senator came around, all these wonderful people just wanted to do something. They all knew that it was a political statement, but they didn't really mind because it was something big they could get involved in. Finally we had the opening and the Mayor made this statement. He said, "I love this work, it's all about pollution. Of course New Mexico doesn't have any problems with pollution, it's Oklahoma that has all these problems." I had to hold my tongue, out of politeness. But it's really full of airplanes and people and hands and things that fall from this rusty old cloud. It's made out of a steel that rusts because it's intended to rust away. All of my steel is made so that in time, it will be gone, because that's kind of what we're setting up.

This is called "Border Crossing." It's about what we see, it's about entitlements, basically: how special and lucky we are, but we don't acknowledge where our luck comes from This country, it came from free land, which wasn't free land, we took it; free environmental resources, that we think are free, but they aren't free, we're going to pay the price in the future. But it looks good from where we are, it's kind of like a rose-colored glasses view of who we are. This is the other side, for instance, from Mexico looking in. They want in because of the money, the security and the support. But they also realize that we have a tremendous amount of problems that we're offering to them. I have another piece that relates to that concept. But it really doesn't have to do with Mexico, or even Canada, it has to do with what we set in our minds. The fact that we think we are special, or entitled to have more than anybody else in the world, is an unhealthy way of looking at our lives.

This is a big piece. I put a bunch of pieces together, and it's called "Mother." It's really about manipulation of the Mother Earth.

I did a few of these about umbrellas that protect us from nature. I've been trying to design in my head a piece that separates us from nature, that has everything, like a huge Disneyland with a roof over it. So you have everything you ever want, from a hotel to the plumbing, but it walks over nature so it doesn't leave any tracks, like a huge tank that it treads on. This is a part of the idea of protecting us from nature. We actually see the clouds, and they become more beautiful than nature itself eventually, because we won't have clear enough skies to look at the clouds anymore.

This is one of my first large pieces at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles. That's an Apache design. The people that designed this lived 150 years ago or so, and the design is so powerful and so pure, that I couldn't even touch it. I'm a good designer, a good drawer, a good painter, but I couldn't even touch it. So all I could do was bend it. I tried making bigger points, littler points, but I couldn't do anything, it was just too perfect. These people are just as complex and beautiful as we are. I made a statement about nature bending to technology.

This is one of my big arrays of all my pieces. I just make these things. I don't even consider myself commercial, because I make them for myself, and if they sell then good; if they don't, then I end up owning them. Eventually I put them together in arrays like this. This array is exactly the same size as the Stonehenge in England. We had a pagan dance on the day it opened. It was really kind of fun. It's a huge array. You can see the size of some of these: the little dolly on the left is about ten feet tall.

This was a project in greed. I did a hundred little buffalos and put a bullet hole in them. Let me take you all the way back: I was carving stone and somebody was talking about the market and how easy it is to make money. I said, "I could do the most horrendous thing to an animal design, put a bullet hole in it, and then I could sell it in one day," because at that time, that's what the market was like. They said, "No way, that's crazy, you can't do that. Nobody will buy that horror." So I did this beautiful buffalo, and drilled a hole right through the center. I did it all in one day. I took it to a dealer the next day and he bought it, for a good price, about three or four thousand dollars, which was a lot of money to me then. People don't care what you say when you're an Indian. They don't believe you have the right to be an intellectual. Not that I am; but they don't want it, they want what they know, a controlled market; they want design, they want beauty, but they don't want honesty. I think that's what Indian people have to offer to the world, is a sense of honesty in relating to nature. So I did all these little buffalos, had them all chrome-plated. They all have bullet holes in them. When I sold them I had an argument with my dealer. He said, "I want to sell them for $500 apiece," and I said,"No, no, I want the average man to buy them. I'll just go for $300 apiece." Which covered cost, barely. He said, "No, no," so I said, "O.K., how about $250," and he just shut up. I sold the whole show out in one day, and we had it all on videotape. There were people arguing and fighting, and switching numbers and prices. It was just great, it was a real study in greed. They didn't realize they were buying their own participation in the destruction of the buffalo. It was really fun.

This is my "Apache Holocaust" piece. When they proposed a new museum in Washington, the Native American Museum, I went to them and told them, "We have to have a holocaust element because Indian people aren't acknowledging what happened to them." I argued with them and argued with them, and nobody would touch it, because they're not controlled by their own people. They're controlled by the money, or the politics, of the outside. So I did one for my own tribe. Inside the windows are seven generations of people's skulls, the adults and the children, fourteen skulls. On top is a portrait of a man who I found in a photograph who was starving to death on the reservation so he sneaked off and maybe killed somebody, or killed some cows. They took him back and they executed him. I found several pictures of people in chains. Inside is an Apache god-spirit that you can't see, but if you look through the view-hole, you'll see the spirit that's still there. It's that same design, so powerful and beautiful. On the outside are the family names. This one is another one that I want to pursue and make a larger one. Eventually I'd like to make a museum like the one in Washington. Of course I don't have the funds or the prestige to do it, but I'd like to see Indian people acknowledge their own holocaust.

My "Chicken" series: I got involved with cowardice. My symbol for cowardice is the chicken. I have a dozen chickens, and if you raise your head, the chicken runs away. That's how we are when it comes to the environment. The real issues are right in front of us, but we run away, and then go have our cappuccino. This is the earth, it turns; and that's North and South America, and the weather patterns. It's covered with chickens, with positive and negative statements about who we are. It's an issue that's been sticking with me for years. When I was in the navy in 1965, we were off the coast of Vietnam, and we bombed this island, this coastal town. As I was sitting on the deck, watching these big cannons with big flames, everyone was cheering as we were watching the explosions and the buildings burning. The captain announced, "We just destroyed a North Vietnamese rest and recreation center." I got to thinking, "They don't have those things. WE go to Hong Kong, or we go to Hawaii; they don't have that. It's a hospital." I started telling people, "We just destroyed a hospital. That's against the Geneva Convention." Pretty soon I had the whole engine room warmed up about it. They were all mad and wondering, what's he talking about? They were all questioning the fact that we had destroyed a hospital. I got word from the captain himself. He said,"Tell him to shut up." My act of cowardice is that I did shut up. I should have followed through because as a human being it was wrong; we were wrong in doing it. I started questioning this act of cowardice that we see happening all over the world, from the Desert Storm on. Are we really preserving freedom, or are we preserving our way of life, our oil supply? Those kinds of questions are happening every day, all over the world. So I started questioning it, and using the chicken as an example.

I'll get back to the chickens in a minute; I have more of those. This is a show I did in Frankfurt, Germany. The German people are supposedly great environmentalists. They love the tree. They talk about, especially, the apple tree, the "apple baum." I was there for a month in Frankfurt, so I did a show on trees. The gallery director was so happy: "Oh, you understand the German people." But I did them all dead. They all had axe marks on them because I'd just come from Scandanavia, where the German technology is actually destroying the forests in Scandanavia. It's just blowing right across and killing them. All these forests are dying. Even the Black Forest is dying. I did a statement about the apple tree being killed. She was furious. These are all my dead trees. It was really fun. We had some great fights. Then I had the audacity to ask these factory workers to come to the opening, and even offered to serve them beer. These guys were from Turkey and East Germany. I told her, "If you don't let these people come, then I'm not going to show my work here." They had to let them come. Of course they got drunk, and they were rowdy, but it was a good old American opening, in Frankfurt.

I did this during the Desert Storm. I was in New Zealand and all the New Zealanders, the Maori people and the American people, they were all cheering when the planes would fly in at night with their super-technology. So I did a general's chair. I told these Maori people that the people being killed had the same color skin as we do. They didn't want to hear it, because it's like a football game, you don't criticize your own team.

On the other side of this is two men holding hands: a white man and an Indian. The white man's heart has a curse-mark on it, that comes from the old Kentucky long rifles. If you know of the history of The Longest Walk, and what happened to the Lennilenape people and the Delaware people, you realize this is a real powerful slap in the face of the people of that area. It's surrounded by planes again.

These are my chickens. This is another of the chicken series. There's a cowboy with the chicken shirt and an Indian with a chicken on his shield. It has to do with cowardice.

In the center of one of these shows, I put a picture of John Wayne that I found at some curio shop. I had myself pose next to John Wayne, as the ultimate cowards.

There was a show about Guadalupe, and I did my own version with an Indian supporting the whole concept. But inside I used a portrait of my friend. I truly believe that all religions have their roots in the earth. It's what we've done to them that pervert them, to separate ourselves from the earth, to make ourselves dominant. That's one thing that Native people still have, is an earth-relationship. I tied this original concept that was very pure and innocent to the reality of Christianity, which is the Mother Earth. In this case, the Mother Earth is a gay woman who's covered with tattoos, but she's also a very beautiful person. It doesn't make her less beautiful that she's gay or tattooed or tough, it just makes her more real to me. But to compare it to the original image is kind of a disgraceful concept. This is kind of like the Venus of Willendorf.

This is a sleeve I put over other living trees. You can see a little bit of green; I had some vines in there. They just took this up to Portland and put it over a big tree, and it was supposedly beautiful. I didn't make the show. But it's about all these little buffalos, about a hundred or so, cut out of these plates of steel. On the front is the word "extinct."

This is a piece I did for San Diego, for the GSA. They wanted me to do a piece symbolizing the border. They wanted a "coco pale", which is a fertility symbol, but they said, "No penis." It was really funny. So instead of doing that, I added the cars and the pollution. On the left is a little Aztec scribe; on the right is a screaming eagle, a Mexican eagle, an American eagle. Out of the center of this fertility symbol is coming smoke. This is right at a border crossing. After I put it up, they said,"We're worried about graffiti. Can you put some razor wire on it?" I said, "Yeah, I will." They wanted me to put razor wire on the columns, that would ensnarl these little kids with their spray cans. But instead I put it on top. It was such a powerful symbol of the border, of the separation, and this entitlement concept.

Later on I got this commission in Albuquerque. It was about the border. They called it "Cultural Crossroads," something about how New Mexico is a cultural crossroads. Instead of dealing with coming in, I was dealing with exclusion. I put this pyramid in the very center, belching out smoke, like the industries along the border. They get cheap labor, and they don't have the environmental restrictions, because they're across the border in Mexico, and Mexico can't afford to do those things. The whole concept is based on this lady on the left, which comes from these codices, of the Aztec. She's a woman who died in childbirth. From that death, I added these little feet, going towards the center, inside the snake. The two women bless this trail of the child. It's a child with no mother; in other words, it's a lost relationship to the Mother Earth, the lost relationship to your culture, the lost relationship to the wisdom of this earth-relationship. They're all coming to America to gain what we have to offer, and what do we have to offer? The McDonald's, the cross, the dollar sign, the Statue of Liberty, the pollution, the war machine, all these things that America has to offer the world and is well-known for. The clue in this one is that the little end-of-the-trail Indian has changed over to an end-of-the-trail cowboy. The last thing I did was to put the razor wire on it. The museum director came up to me and he said,"Bob, I'm having trouble tying the wire to this concept." I made him repeat it, and said, "If you help me tie it on, you'll have no trouble at all getting tied to the concept." Consequently, I've been waiting a year and a half, in a lawsuit against the university, to keep the wire on it. They won't do it. They want me to behave like a plumber or an electrician: you give a concept, and that's exactly what you do, and no more. Even though my contract allows me the right for a little bit of change, they say I've changed the concept. I'm going to take it to court, and say I did not change the concept, I enhanced the concept, and I have all these museum directors backing me. But unfortunately a university is a university, and their prestige is great. My mistake was in assuming that their prestige was well-earned. I think it was, and that this was just a minor problem. They finally said, "O.K., leave the wire up, don't change it, but admit publicly that you were wrong and we were right." They don't anything about Apaches at all. They just don't understand this problem, because it's not really a problem with the university, or of taking the wire off and changing a few symbols here and there. The real problem is that I want Indian people to be able to participate and not be afraid of who they are. If they want to make a statement about their color or their race or their spirituality, to go ahead and do it and don't keep behind closed doors. Indian religion is still underground, everywhere. It shouldn't be, it's just as beautiful as any religion in the world. Maybe even more so, because it still has the earth-relationship.

So I'm going to fight this as far as I can. Unfortunately, the university has a bankroll, and I don't. I think that's going to be the deciding factor. I've already built in the martyr side, because I'm planning on buying it back and taking it down. I like the idea: you know how when you're a martyr you like to see a little bit of blood. It's going to be kind of fun. It's right in the middle of the process. They're going to back down on me, I'll get paid, and I want them to pay my lawyer's fees, too. I'd like to see them fire their university president, and museum director, and a few other people, as I go.

I think that's the end of my slides. Are there any questions?

Audience: First of all, I think your work is absolutely marvelous. It's really, really great. I loved watching it. I have a specific question. I've worked the medicine wheel imagery since 1985, with abused children and degraded land, and then I came up against Ward Churchill and his feelings about any white people working with Indian material in any form. I've struggled since with being inspired by the metaphors, imagery, issues, concepts and history, and yet wanting to be respectful of the integrity of your traditions and your boundaries. I wonder what you think is the appropriate relationship for artists or others who feel inspired by your culture and want to find some way to work with you without in any way being disrespectful.

Haozous: I've heard of Ward Churchill, and I think that if he made you think, then he did a good job. The medicine wheel is not Apache; in fact there are a lot of tribes that don't have a parallel concept. I think they have Celtic concepts that have to do with the same thing. It seems to me that if you want to gain wisdom, you'll go to the source. I have a Spanish, English, Navajo and Apache blood. I'm directly affiliated with the Apache tribe, so that's where I go for any kind of depth of wisdom that I need. And I think that's true of anybody: you will want to go to the source to find out your answers. If the medicine wheel is in yours, and your religion came from the earth, find out where it came from, and then see where it goes. If you need a hand-hold along the way, then use other cultures. But don't end up there, because it's not yours.

Audience: I'm pretty interested in a lot of what you talked about, too, in the parallels between the Native American and the African American cultures. In terms of African Americans, they have problems dealing with the issue of slavery, and dealing with issues of oppression in this country. You say a lot of your work is about getting a dialogue engaged within your community, about those issues that have been so hurtful and so difficult for people to talk about. What I want to know is how effective has that actually been in terms of generating that dialogue and getting folks to be able to come to terms with those issues that, again, are causing so much pain within the community.

Haozous: That's the perfect question for me right now. I'm having absolutely no response from my own community. Right now, Indian people have been taught to go out and compete, to always compare yourself to white people, and make your money. Then after you make your prestige, your people will be proud of you. I disagree. It's a very complex problem for me to see all my peers, with whom I can sit down at a table and talk about the most complex problems, whether it's race, economics, religion or philosophy, and they all can communicate on an incredible level. But when it comes to art, Indian artists are called "interior decorators." That's what we've been restricted to. I say it's a perfect question because last year my wife and I went to the Venice Biennale, which is the art show of the world, for contemporary art, and we decided, partially because of what I do and partially because she's a doctor in anthropology who did her research on contemporary Native American art, that why not do our own pavilion? Why do we have to let American art determine whether we're valid or acceptable, like Robert Cole Scott? Why should we do that? Why not open our own pavilion? When you have a good idea, in a Native American way, answers come to you. So some guy from Switzerland comes through. He's a crazy guy who likes his alcohol. He said, "I know a guy who knows a guy." I found out that there's an Armenian who has a monastery who did a show on contemporary Islamic painting. If you know anything about Islam, there's no contemporary statement in a painting. So these guys are all expatriates who did a show in Venice because they can't do it in their own countries. But this guy understood the Native American experience because he lived in San Francisco, or Los Angeles, for a long time, maybe 12 years, and he said, "I like your idea; do it. You have my monastery." He was renting it through the funding of the Rockefellers. The idea is, for the first time, after being talked about over and over again by lots of people–somebody said, we talked about that two years ago–we're going to actually do a Native American show, curated by Native Americans with the artists selected by Native Americans, about our real human condition. You're not going to see buffalos, you're not going to see dances, you're not going to see pots, unless they really deal with the real issues. We got a community concept going, rather than an individual concept. It's really a community idea now. The idea is that we deal with issues like alcoholism, poverty, violence, loss of language and religion, philosophy, and the pain and the suicide. All that stuff is right there on the surface of Indian people, always. And the racism against us. We want the artists to talk about it. There are two big problems, and one you brought up. We gave it a title of "Cultural Responsibility," or "Cultural Participation." How do we get this show, by us, how do we give it for us? We don't know how yet. We know that the idea is good, but how do we break through to our own people so that they realize we are making a statement for us, and not for the world. We might be opening a new market for the world because the Europeans do have a communal understanding. They've held it for so many thousands of years, that they do know what we lost. There might be a market for a contemporary statement by us. That's the first problem; the second one is, how do we give the artists themselves the courage to make this statement? Even in my own tribe, they would say, "Don't do it, they'll shoot you down." I don't know whether we can overcome those problems. This will probably be the first step. It's just vital to me that Indian people start speaking to themselves. We have such a tremendous amount of genius that is just going out to some of the most ignorant people in the world. That's my answer.

Audience: I was wondering if you could outline in a little more detail some of the constrictive forces that are kind of keeping growth within Native American arts from occurring.

Haozous: That's only an opinion. My father-in-law's in Santa Fe right now, and he thinks he's a self-made man. He's very American, he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, he didn't live off of his Indian name and all that. Now that he's an elder and about ready to move on, he has no way of getting back to his own people, except on paper: this is who I was. There's no transfer of wisdom. But I can give you an example of my tribe. We were rounded up from New Mexico, Arizona and Mexico, taken to Florida, then Alabama, then Oklahoma. For 26 years, we were prisoners of war. In that time, we had taken from us our language, our religion, our land and our philosophy that we related to all those things. Yet we're still Indian. It's still strong in us. But we lost our sense of community. That's why I brought up community: it's so important to have an art concept that comes from everybody rather than the individual. America's based on individual gain, and not on communal thought. Now that, at this time, [the Indians] have accepted who they are, they don't really understand the depth, the beauty or complexity of the culture they had before. I read a book about Navajo cosmology and it was astounding. The Navajos are our first cousins; our tribe had the same thing, but you don't hear about it because it's been taken. It all comes back to a common sense relationship to the earth, whether it's extreme or conservative, it doesn't matter. It all comes back to how you deal with the earth, in a direct way. But our people can't do that. We're proud to be American now, we're proud to fight in the wars. To get them away from that is just like getting the American people away from it: how do you do it? I guess my opinion is that the constrictive forces are our own people.

Audience: Do you think there's a tourist imperative there that also closes down certain areas of commentary, or prevents new ideas from developing?

Haozous: Oh, absolutely. The market for Indian art is decorative. I've been doing this stuff for 25 years and I'm still hungry. Not that I should be making lots of money, but people don't want to hear Indian people that think. It's as simple as that. They want people, even in the contemporary art world, who are making statements that are acceptable. We're still, as the Germans say, sub-human. Another example is when I was doing a film in Norway, I said, "Let's go back to pre-Christian concepts." Up until then, they were fighting for me all the way: "Let's do this and that, let's bring back the Mother Earth." When I said, "Let's go back to pre-Christian concepts that really tie us more directly to the earth," it just killed the project, because the Norwegians are fundamental Lutherans, and there's no such thing as pre-Christianity. Isn't that silly? It undermined my position in the film. The director said, "They will kick me out of the state-run church if I make this statement about pre-Christianity." So what's the answer to that? Just keep working; we're trying to do it in our Venice project. We're trying to open the door a little bit to this awareness of ourselves. That's all.

Audience: My question, or maybe statement, is I want to find out what your impression is of photographers going into the community because they felt it was their responsibility to document the tribe. In doing so, they manipulate and romanticize the tribe. One of them is Edward Curtis; he even made a sign language movie of a particular tribe. I was curious as to what you feel about someone else coming into your community, into your space, and documenting, when they're not part of your people and/or community.

Haozous: I don't know, I like looking at the Curtis prints. It's kind of like buying a tourist brochure in Washington and seeing the President. He chose what he wanted, he put the clothing on that he wanted, and it was fine. I enjoy it, and a lot of Indian people use it as a reference for what they used to look like. But I would much rather see, even though I think it's fine what he did, Indian people documenting themselves, because they already have the language.

Audience: I think there's a stereotype among Eurocentric Americans that Native American art is grounded in craft, pottery or functional art. Do you feel that you have to distance yourself or your work from Native American traditions to prove yourself and your work as being art for art's sake?

Haozous: I don't concern myself too much with that. I think that how people determine who I am affects me economically, but my concern is how I determine who I am. If I want to use traditional materials or contemporary materials, that's my prerogative. I'd like to see other Indian people do the same thing. You can't do a portrait of yourself, today, without knowing who you are. It's easy to do portraits of who you were, and that's what Indian people are doing. That's what bothers me. What causes that, I don't know how to deal with. I just do my own work and I try to relate it to who I am today, assuming that someday they'll realize that I'm as Apache as Geronimo was. I don't know if that answers your question, but I tried.

Audience: I'm not sure how to say this, either, but one of the possible confusing factors is your referencing the dominant culture to make your message; which, I suppose, can be misleading in some ways, superficially. I was wondering, is that a consideration, at all, in Native American art, or I suppose in any culture that is trying to make a statement about their origins or heritage? Having to reference the dominant culture all the time, to make that point?

Haozous: Unfortunately, the dominant culture is what pays the bills. I think that in our Venice project, we're trying to establish a whole new market that is based on ourselves and our own self-portrait. But until that happens, we're going to always have to include whoever it is or whatever it is that's dominant. A few years ago, the Japanese came through and were buying a lot of Indian art. Before that, a lot of Arab people were coming through and buying it, and all art. It doesn't really matter who's doing it, there's always something out there that's dominant, until you claim that dominance yourself. And that's kind of what I'm trying to do now, is claim a dominance so that my art goes directly back to my own people. If outsiders want to buy it, that's all right, but the message is much more important to me than the sales. That's not very practical, and it's a difficult place to be, but I think it's much more healthy for my children, and their children, to know that somebody is dominant over who they're supposed to be. That scares me to death.

Audience: The dominance is the market place, isn't it? In Scotland, people want Tartan things; in Ireland, they want shamrocks. Here they want Mickey Mouse.

Haozous: I think so. The dominance is an attitude, that's all. A lot of Indian people have that attitude towards themselves. But where to go: it's more important to bring up the question in a debate than to try to come up with answers.

Audience: I have a question also about dominance, about your style. I think your style is really luscious, the colors are very beautiful and the design is very seductive. I was wondering if that's one of the things you had to maintain in order to get political issues through, to make them very seductive and beautiful. It reminds me a little bit of this sculptor, I think his name is Tom Otterness who uses cartoon figures and penny coins; he has very violent scenes in there, and makes yards for children to play with. They are actually really violent subjects, but because they are so very powerful, I was wondering if that was part of that dominant market of using those kind of (?) I don't know if I'm formulating it right...

Haozous: I think I understand your question. I don't know how to answer it, though. I like carving; I like painting. I studied painting, drawing and sculpture in school until the last semester, when they said that to get out earlier I had to choose one, and I chose sculpture. But I love painting and drawing. I like to take things as far as I can, because my instructors were very, very good. They taught me how destructive preciousness is in the arts. For instance, I did a piece–it was beautiful–it was a little piece that you're supposed to pass around the class, and I polished the brass and the ivory. All the way around the class I was watching people smudge the bronze, and tarnish it. All that polishing! Finally it got done and one of the girls said, "I hated to touch it (though it was made to touch), because I was tarnishing the bronze." The teacher said, "Well, Bob obviously knew that, because he's making a statement about preciousness." From that moment on, she was right. But up until that moment, I was really bothered. I'd made my own work precious. That's why I can use steel, and shoot it with holes; or get a piece and sandblast the color off. I can't be precious because I don't own myself. Another instructor, a guy named Joe Senile, an old man, drove to school, and gave us a short lecture. This guy is a commercial artist, about 80-something years old. He said, "On the way to school, I was looking at all the billboards, and I saw all this bad design. The human eye, every one of us, has the ability to make distinctions of a curve that's perfect. You can see it immediately, and if there's one little mistake, every one of us can see that mistake. Our eyesight is that precious, that perfect. Yet, on the way to town, everything was bad. It's like sticking a needle in your eye." And that just stuck with me–it has to be right. So more than the marketing, I just like doing that. My father was a talented man; I guess I inherited a lot of that. My grandfather was kind of an artist of his own. It's more of an inherited need. In a lot of ways my finishing techniques are restrictive in the market because that's kind of an old way of producing art. But I love doing it.

Audience: I have two questions. One is, are you ever surprised that people attempt to commission your work, and control it? It just seems strange to me that your work is commissioned with an attempt to control it, as if they were unfamiliar with your work. That, to me, is almost funny. It's surprising. I'm wondering if your courage in putting content in your work that deals with contemporary reality has been able to flow back to the people who have expressed fear to you, and if it has begun a dialogue that will move more people to be bold and courageous.

Haozous: I don't know what the effect of my work is, to tell you the truth. I think that most Indian people are really damaged people, and the idea of being a self-made man, or separate from your culture, is so important, that when somebody does something, that's what they're doing, that's their individualism. They don't really relate that it may be for them, for their education. I do it for my own education, always, but at the same time it's for Indian people. Or for all people, since we're all basically Indian people anyway. I don't know how to get across that community exists, unless I create one myself, which is what we're trying to do with this Venice project. It's difficult. The biggest thing we have to come up against is the ego. The thing about being a contemporary human being is that the ego is the driving force. It's not a communal ego. How to break that down, and bring in a communal idea, so that you give the idea and then separate yourself from it, is very difficult to do, especially for an artist. I've run into that problem over and over; I give ideas and then I want to claim it, because I want the glory. But at this stage in my life, I realize that that's meaningless. The fact is that if I give the idea and then we can develop it, it's much better that way. Why people commission me and then censor me, this is the first time I've had that problem ever. I think it's because I joked with a professor's ego. I told him to tie himself to the wire. He also wanted to put it north and south, because Mexico's on the south and America's on the north so naturally that's the way it should go. I said no, it's not what it's about, and I made him place it east and west, with a crosswalk underneath so you can transcend the border. Those two little things may have been just the reason he did it; his problem is ego, not mine.

Audience: I had one other question. I hear you use the terms "Indian" and "tribe." I know how often in the African American community we fought to get away from "negro" and "black" and what-have-you. I was wondering what is the so-called p.c. means by which others may talk about Native American culture. Is it better to say "Native American," or better to say,"Indian," because I'm just curious about that dialogue, and that whole capacity to claim and define who you are. The language is so important. What is the proper terminology?

Haozous: I really don't know. With my own people, it's just how you do it. It's only when outside people are involved that that issue comes up. I don't know.

Synopsis by Julie Eun-Hui An

Bob Haozous began his talk by telling the audience that he is a Chiricahua Apache Indian and that his artwork is rooted in his strong communal and cultural identity. He takes his role of being a "representative of an entire culture" very seriously. Haozous believes that the prestige he earns as an artist goes back to his people and, in a sense, he does not own himself.

Haozous gave the audience a retrospective look at his artistic career, starting with "Introverted Man," his first sculpture from 1967, to "Cultural Crossroads," which is currently inflamed by controversy and has gotten a lot of media attention in New Mexico. He said his work deals with issues that "slap you in the face." Although he showed more than twenty separate pieces, this large overview provided a background from which several very distinct issues came to the fore.

One theme is the various roles and/or stereotypes that the Native American assumes in contemporary American society. An extension of this theme is the aesthetic expectations put upon the Native American artist. Haozous claims that the market for the Native American artist exists in the first place because of the demand for romanticized conceptions of Native American people and culture. These are grossly inaccurate stereotypes, which the public demands and the Indians supply, in a relationship in which Native American community has voluntarily and shamefully forsaken its integrity. By selling out, he said that his people are "not realizing their own cultural reality."

Haozous said it is very easy to make money in this market. One of his earlier pieces is a bust of a stereotypical Indian that also acts as a bank into which to put money. The market for Indian art is in the decorative arts; the market does not accommodate critical thinkers.

Another recurring theme is humanity's relationship with the earth. Representations of the nude female body refer to Nature and Mother Nature. According to Haozous, humanity's tenuous and self-destructive relationship with nature lies in the fact that "we do not want Nature unless it is pretty and artificial," and thus safe and manageable. "The Puppet Princess" shows a woman, who appears beautiful and available, but also taken for granted and easily manipulated.

"Border Crossing" is a large sculpture depicting scenes of the United States which are juxtaposed to images of Mexican culture. Haozous said it was not so much a political statement about the United States and Mexico, but a commentary about the "sense of entitlement." He defined "entitlement" in terms of Americans' feeling as though they deserve more than everyone else in the world and that all the natural resources are free for the taking. In regard to the controversy over the razor wire, Haozous said he did not "change" the concept of the piece, but rather, "enhanced" it, and that his contract with the University of New Mexico allowed that. Haozous claims he will continue to battle with the University of New Mexico to send the message that the Indian people should maintain their integrity.

Analysis by Beth Peckman

Bob Haozous presents an Apache understanding of an artist's social responsibilities that challenge the notion of an artist engaging a community in dialogue as an outsider. Haozous' sculptures in wood, metal, stone and paint are self-portraits addressing six future generations and speaking for seven past generations of his people. Haozous, like many artists working in the public realm, responds to personal experiences, dreams, and memories in creating his work. He designs his self-portraits to reflect not only himself but his community, reaching into the past and extending into the future.

Haozous is always relating his art to his community. His practice of self-portraiture reflects personal beliefs and concerns for his people. Haozous deals with "the selling and taking of the Southwest and Indian culture out of its own world without realizing the depth or beauty of the culture." His work often depicts "the subduing of the most complex and beautiful people by the most primitive people." In his portraits he represents nature bending to technology, building mechanical trees that chop themselves down, and the powerful dynamics of greed in small sculptures of buffalo, each with a bullet hole through the head. Ultimately, Haozous addresses acts of cowardice and questions whether we are preserving freedom or preserving a way of life.

Haozous makes work that reflects his integrity. He does not need to prove theoretical authority to find value in speaking about his experiences. He does not attempt to be responsible to the world as a whole, he wants "Indian people to be able to participate and not be afraid to be who they are." Interestingly, his form of a dialogue through self-portraiture provokes fear and resistance from some members of Haozous' tribe. This resistance reflects larger questions to public art as a mean for social change. Is audience appreciation necessary to consider public art successful? Besides the public audience, who is qualified to establish the value of an artwork and whose politics are reflected in this choice? To what extent do we embrace the medicinal expectations placed on public art?