Straight Talk with
Bob Haozous
Interview by Guy Cross
Cover Photograph by Jennifer Esperanza
Cultural Crossroads of the Americas, steel, 30’ x 26’, 1996
Bob Haozous: Yes, I am marginalized, and I accept that role. Even those definitions of being an Indian first or being an artist first are symptoms of the problem. All art comes from one’s cultural sensitivity and I am trying to define what my cultural sensitivity is. That’s been my goal for years.
TM: Do you consider your art to be religious or spiritual in nature?
BH: I don’t use those words. I’m trying to inspire people to come up with questions like: What is art? What is the value of art? What is the meaning of cultural art? I chose to be more than a decorator, or an illustrator, of Indian themes early in my career and have always attempted to inspire questions about cultural identity and purpose.
TM: Your art is politically orientated though, isn’t it?
BH: Absolutely.
TM: Talk about the political implications of your older work—like the piece at the University of New Mexico and the new work you are showing at Shidoni.
BH: The piece, Cultural Crossroads of the Americas at UNM, is concerned with the loss of the Mother Earth consciousness—it’s about the child of nature coming to the North and losing something important. The premise of the artwork concerns the migration of indigenous people to the North—to America—where you don’t need a mother.
TM: Why wouldn’t one need a mother, and when you say indigenous people, do you just mean Native Americans?
BH: I use the metaphor of the mother to denote the earth relationship that defines all life. Indigenous man commonly shares a multi-generational relationship with the earth that extends over a long period of time. Modern man’s identity is commonly called two-generational. We are all modern man, or becoming so.
TM: What is the two-generational viewpoint?
BH: The two-generational viewpoint is about caring for yourself, your children, and your elders, and having no concern beyond that. It ignores the long-range relationship of seven generations of the past and seven generations into the future that should define mankind. Instead, it’s a viewpoint based on individuality, ego, and economics.
TM: Are you saying that the seven generations viewpoint has been lost?
BH: Not lost, becoming lost. My statement is that indigenous man is becoming two-generational. For my exhibition at Shidoni, I am showing a limestone sculpture called Two Generation Woman—a woman who has gone from a seven-generation to a two-generation viewpoint, to the viewpoint of modern man. The seven-generation concept is based on a position of environmental responsibility that frames the compromises of destructiveness, necessity for our survival, and stewardship of the earth. The two-generation concept has removed the long-term obligation we have to the earth and places the focus on self. The woman is pure on one side and decorated on the other side. One hand is holding an object and the other hand isn’t. And the viewers can decide whatever they want.
TM: The new chrome- and gold-plated pieces are completely different than the limestone works—they’re circular, totem-like shapes with highly polished surfaces. The reality is that wherever they are shown, the surface acts as a mirror. Is what is reflected in the surface of the sculptures, which always changes, a part of the piece?
BH: Absolutely. They are a statement about identity. In the past I’ve worked with the Walt Disney depiction of an extremely sexualized Pocahontas that was forced upon us and has become a part of our contemporary Native identity. I mean, what can you do? That’s the way they think about us. My goal is to look in the mirror and not to see myself. Indigenous man sees everything that makes him, but the White Man sees only himself and he doesn’t see what makes him. I want people to understand that we are not standing on this earth—it’s holding us up. I also want to see the problems of Indian people—diet, alcohol, drugs, diabetes, suicide, violence, and ignorance, among other things—come through Indian people as a healing element of their art, because those things are such a prevalent part of our lives.
TM: And if that were accomplished, what kind of changes would occur in the world?
BH: I don’t know. I’m not really worried about that. I just think that the arts should play an important role in the education and redirection of Indian people into a positive and important future role concerning environmental philosophy. My current work is focused on an anti-war statement that should hopefully bring up questions about our participation as Native people in this nation and its continued war policies. When I asked a tribal chat group why we were fighting in America’s wars, worshiping America’s religions, and desperately seeking economic answers by parroting America’s destructive environmental and economic positions, I was quietly ousted from the dialogue.
BH: I mean the White Man in all of us.
TM: Are you saying that there is a White Man inside the Native person, and a Native person inside the White Man?
BH: There is the potential for both. We can go back to an earth relationship from either side. Native people are losing that relationship, and the White Man is farther along in that loss. It’s human nature to separate from nature because of our ego and self-worship. The tribal chat group on the Internet offered an opportunity to talk to one another and so I started asking the central questions an older person should ask younger people.
TM: Questions like?
BH: Is it your bloodline or skin color that makes you Apache? If not, what is it? Why do we think we are no different than those of our Indian past even though we don’t have the same nature-based values of our indigenous ancestors? Instead, we now base our identity on money, history, and ego. They got angry when I questioned their Christian values, which are human-based. All modern religions are based on the needs of humanity instead of nature. And yet all religions come from a nature basis. That basis is what is being lost. At the same time it’s something you really can’t lose because nature is the ultimate basis. If you breathe air, you’re a product of nature. But we pretend that we’re not a product of nature because our ego tells us that we’re superior or dominant to nature.
TM: Back to the circular shapes.
BH: I use the circle and the sphere as the female symbol or the living earth concept. And I’ve decorated it. The decoration is in the reflection of the viewer that includes our physical image and all that surrounds us. Long ago, I painted beautiful woods white and called it whitewashing, simply because we think that we control nature and in doing so we whitewash it. People actually think that the white concept has to do with skin color, but it doesn’t. We’re all the same. I use pure gold, which is the most hated object of the Apaches, on the reflecting surfaces. The nature standard is being given up by most indigenous people and replaced by a gold standard. We have accepted gold—or casino profits—as our identity basis. So we stand in line with our hand out because we have a bloodline right to take the money without earning it. Working for it means returning to a consciousness of the importance of nature and then actively repairing the damage. There is still a chance to do this.
TM: Do you think the casinos push Native people further away from nature?
BH: If it is acknowledged from the beginning that the casinos are just a way of making money dependent upon human weakness, then no. But it certainly seems to put you further away from nature. What really bothers me more than anything is that Native American art is based on the history, romance, and decoration of the past, or on the art dictates of modern man. Our art isn’t dealing with the profound problems or the complex people we are today. Why shouldn’t an honest self-portrait be the foundation of contemporary Indian art today?
Head of the Universal Savage (La Tête Sauvage Internationale), 24K gold plate/chrome plate/stainless steel, 60”h x 26”w x 19”d, 2003. Photo: Karen Availa
BH: Of course. But the real reason is that we’ve gone through a forced cultural alteration. Indigenous man had a sense of tribe, and that sense of tribe was not just people, it was all our relations, our connections to nature, to life. The modern world has made the same demands on all indigenous people, demands that have forcibly disconnected them from their cultural resources. We have had to change our focus from a tribal awareness to a family awareness. The loss of the sense of tribe is a symbolic loss of everything. The next step is the focus on individualism. That focus is what I was born into. With my art I am trying to tell our people that our elders are extremely damaged and it was their elders or grandparents who had a sense of tribe that included a profound knowledge concerning our place in nature.
TM: From what you’re saying, it seems that things are going backwards. We go from a sense of oneness or completeness—the tribe—to a sense of isolation where the individual is cut off from the tribe and from nature.
BH: Of course. We pretend that modern man is the apex of growth, intelligence, and wisdom, of evolution. That may not be true. The Manifest Destiny concept doesn’t say that we’re on top; it just says that destiny is manifest. In other words, we can’t be on top and continue living with the conveniences we enjoy while destroying this
planet. Eventually we must come back to balance.
TM: You curated the recent alumni show at the IAIA. Talk about that show please.
BH: As far as I’m concerned, the art submitted by the alumni was just not up to standard—it didn’t say anything except “This is who we were; this is pretty; this is how talented we are; this is our technical proficiency.” And that did not impress the jurors. So we decided to do a show based on Shonto Begay’s painting of trash over the environment—about the trashing of nature and our participation in the problem. I wanted to trash the whole gallery, but that idea got lost because you have to have a language to work together communally. A lot of my pieces are now made with a non-language—a lost earth language—a language that is now gibberish.
TM: What do you mean by a lost earth language and what do you mean by gibberish?
BH: We now only have traces of the philosophical depth that defined us as unique and indigenous people. The languages based on nature’s laws no longer have any value in the modern economic world. There should be an international language that uses the earth as a basis instead of the conveniences of mankind. My artwork now uses a gibberish language to symbolize the loss of that more important means of communication.
TM: Back to the alumni show.
BH: The curators and artists didn’t have a language developed to work together and allow us to fully develop new concepts. Plus, the school didn’t want us to do that kind of show with the alumni work.
TM: Was the IAIA against the show?
BH: I really don’t know and I didn’t ask if they were against the show. I just know that the IAIA’s focus from the beginning was to teach Indian people how to make money in the arts. The old VoTech concept. This concept is that the money made in the arts would somehow trickle back down to the tribes and would stimulate economic growth for Indian people.
TM: Sounds like you’re saying that the IAIA is part of the problem, certainly not the solution.
BH: I suspect that the solution may be philosophical instead of economic. The IAIA is a school with tremendous potential, but they have never taken the next step.
BH: How do we get Indian people to come back in the circular direction instead of becoming linear? And what is it that we have to offer the world as Indian people of more importance than our natural talent in the arts?
TM: What if you were in charge of the IAIA?
BH: I would never be in charge of the IAIA; I would only be an advisor. My ideas are just observations. I’m not a teacher. I tell people that I am a “teacher’s teacher.” That’s what I do and these ideas may be irrational in today’s political climate.
I firmly believe that honest observation and portraiture can be an important artist’s role in any culture.
TM: What Indian artists are making important contemporary art right now?
BH: I don’t think there are any Indian artists making important contemporary Indian art. And that’s because we don’t have a cultural language to speak from. All of the identifiers of our contemporary art are Euro-American based, or are lacking cultural depth for indigenous people. Maybe we deal with issues and create wonderful art from a reactive position, but still we haven’t developed a clear cultural method or language that helps us make contemporary art that deals with real issues proactively.
TM: What about your language?
BH: As I said, my language is gibberish. But I am laying the seeds for a cultural language—a language about who we may really be and one that may make sense in the distant future. Our artists should be expected to produce an art form that demands a different sensitivity of self, a sensitivity that goes beyond the historical and romantic. Perhaps our primary question now is: Who should we be?
TM: Your prognosis for Mother Earth?
BH: I feel the same as most of the elders I’ve heard speak on the subject. They say that when we’re gone, Mother Earth, if we can call it that, will still be here. If we will leave this horrible footprint of environmental destruction, that will also remain here too. Indigenous people tell me that a respect of nature’s laws is what indigenous man has to give to the world. But we’ve made a transition from nature’s laws to man’s laws, and this transition denounces the importance of nature. And we Native Americans are using blood and romance as an excuse for denying our responsibilities. Perhaps we’ve gotten lazy.
TM: What do you think your dad [Alan Houser] would say about your current work?
BH: He always loved my work.
TM: And what do you think of your dad’s work?
BH: The more I know of his life cycle, his time with us, his desire to create his statement from his experience, the restrictions and the things he came up against, the more I love his artwork. My dad was constantly changing until the day he died. As I hope to.
TM: Do you live in the present, in the now?
BH: I try to live in the now, but who knows? Who really knows? (Laughter). s
Guy Cross is co-publisher of THE magazine.
Cultural Crossroads of the Americas, steel, 30’ x 26’, 1996
Two Generation Woman, limestone, steel, mixed media, 35”h x 14”w
x 10” d, 2003. Photo: Karen Avila
