Curator of T.O. museum works to better lives, understanding
http://www.vcstar.com/news/2010/may/08/protector-of-his-people/
By Brett Johnson
Posted May 8, 2010
Graywolf moves freely between two worlds despite the stark
disparities, tough history and all the blood that's been shed between them.
In one, Graywolf is an entertainer, an Emmy-nominated costume
designer and actor who made the Chumash bone hairpin that Johnny Depp
wore in all three "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies. He's a guitarist
who won a Native American Music Association award last year and has
played such legendary L.A. clubs as the Whisky A Go-Go and the
Troubadour. He's no stranger to limo rides but also worked for 37
years at Ralphs grocery stores.
Graywolf also is curator at the Chumash Indian Museum and tour guide
for the nearby Chumash Interpretive Center in eastern Thousand Oaks.
His ancestry is of the Yoeme (or Yaqui) tribe of southern Arizona and
Mexico, but he has Chumash in-laws.
It is important, he said, to tell the true story of the Chumash, an
intelligent and advanced people, and equally vital to keep telling
the stories of all Native Americans.
"In our way of thinking," he said, "we are not a conquered people. We
still have our culture, our traditions and our spirituality. We are
not conquered, yet."
Life's good for the 65-year-old Graywolf, an 18-year Simi Valley
resident who is married with three grown children and nine
grandchildren. But his thoughts are never far from the other world.
In one moment, Graywolf talked of his peoples' deep connection with
the land. Most people, he said, "live on Mother Earth. Native people
live with Mother Earth." In the next, he delivered hard-boiled
discourses on the poverty, alcoholism, suicide rates, casino
controversies and other issues facing his people.
Graywolf is an outspoken advocate for Native American rights on
reservations across the country for the idea of true sovereignty,
of being able to decide for themselves what is best for them. He
favors abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which "does not do
our people any good."
His work to free Leonard Peltier has not endeared him to the FBI and
others. He said he has received threats over his involvement in the
case of the American Indian Movement activist convicted wrongly,
some say of killing two FBI agents in a 1975 shootout at the Pine
Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Added Graywolf: "I've also had
run-ins, words, with the FBI, but so what?"
At times, his two worlds intersect. A decade ago, he and partner
Alfred Panther, a Simi Valley resident who is of East
Cherokee-Muskogee heritage, formed Graywolf Productions. They advise
Hollywood productions on accurately portraying Native American issues
on-screen and try to ensure that Native American roles are given to
such people.
Ancient footprints in our sands
On a late April morning, Graywolf led a group of third-graders from
North Park Elementary School in Santa Clarita on a tour of the
Chumash museum and site, part of his regular duties there.
"The Chumash actually lived here," he told the throng as they walked
through a grove of coastal live oaks one of the largest such stands
left in California, he noted to a replica Chumash village.
One such oak, he said, would supply the Chumash with thousands of
acorns; he explained how they made acorn meal after removing a toxin
found in the nuts. At the village, he pointed out a Chumash house,
called an ap, made of a willow frame tied with milkweed or yucca
string, thatched with cattail reeds (also known as tule or bulrush)
plucked from local lakes and adorned with deer hides over the doorways.
"The Chumash never threw anything away; everything was used for
something else," he said at one point.
Chumash women wore skirts made of willow bark. Graywolf wore a
handmade belt and explained that Native Americans carried fishnets,
blankets and other things on them.
Graywolf also told of how the Chumash used milkweed plants to make
rope, and how they glued together their wooden canoes, called tomols,
with naturally occurring tar they found along beaches.
The Chumash word for such tar sounds like Pismo, as in Pismo Beach,
he noted. Similarly, local terms such as Malibu, Mugu and Saticoy all
come from Chumash language, as does Ojai, taken from a Chumash word for moon.
Graywolf was engaging; the kids clearly took to him. They raised
hands en masse and bombarded him with questions about Chumash ways
and the wild animals found at the Chumash site.
He showed them the Chumash hairpin, made of deer bone, that Depp wore
in the "Pirates" films. He also explained how he "killed" a mammoth
on "Prehistoric," a Discovery Channel program that aired in March. He
stabbed at a blue screen; they added in the mammoth later.
Bright lights
When he's not at the museum or leading school tours, Graywolf makes
movies and TV shows, though Hollywood also has come to the Chumash
site. Two episodes of "Deadliest Warrior," a Spike TV show, filmed
there in late February. Discovery's "Life After People" also shot there.
Truth is, Graywolf isn't fond of his on-screen work.
"People ask me, 'Are you an actor?' and I say, 'Not if you've seen my
work,'" he said, laughing.
He and Panther, a longtime actor (who also goes by Alfred Mazza) in
New York before he moved to the West Coast, are veterans of Discovery
programs, as well as History Channel shows such as "Wild West Tech,"
"Comanche Warriors" and "Decoding the Past: Presidential Prophecies."
They were nominated for an Emmy (along with Jeanine Wiest) in 2005
for costume design for "Conquest of America," a History Channel
miniseries about Spaniard Francisco Coronado's explorations in the
American Southwest.
Graywolf and Panther did the Native American props for the film
"Hidalgo," which starred Viggo Mortensen, and a movie called "A Light
in the Darkness" with Karen Black.
On "Pirates," they got to meet Depp for the final costume fitting,
and were surprised he decided to wear the Chumash hairpin. One of the
hairpins was given to Rolling Stone Keith Richards, who played Depp's
character's dad in the most recent "Pirates" film.
Graywolf said Depp and Mortensen were "the nicest men."
"Every major star I've worked with has been totally kind and
respectful," he said. "Karen Black was so nice and gave me acting
tips because she could tell I was so nervous."
On the whole, though, Graywolf thinks Hollywood needs some work; it
might haggle over the accuracy of Native American garb but doesn't
care enough about the people who wear it.
Graywolf is proud of his Nammy, or North American Music Association
award, he won in 2009 for best blues recording for "Dancing in the
Rain" with his Graywolf Blues Band (which includes Panther). Graywolf
says he's played guitar for 50 years, from L.A. clubs to shows on
reservations. He used to play in a band with Native American actress
and former Ojai resident Irene Bedard.
Graywolf also ticked off other shows he's working on, specifics of
which he was not at liberty to discuss.
"People are going to see me a lot, probably more than they want to
see," he said, smiling.
Of his showbiz career, he remarked, "I never imagined this would happen."
Two sides of life's tracks
The farming-fishing Yoeme tribe lived in southern Arizona and north
and central Mexico. The border, Graywolf noted, cut his tribe in
half. His mother came Mexico, his father from Arizona.
Graywolf does not speak much of his biological father; he refers to
the man who raised him as his "real father." One of his grandmothers,
he said, spoke the original Yoeme language.
In the 1930s, his people were brought to California to be
farmworkers. About half settled in the San Jose area, the other in
the San Fernando Valley, then a citrus-agricultural region.
Graywolf was born in 1945 in a house in Richmond. Being born at home,
he said, is a custom of his people; to this day, he said, he's never
spent any time in a hospital and has never had a major illness.
He grew up mostly in what became city of San Fernando, though he'd
spend summers up north picking fruit. "Where I lived," he said, "I
was surrounded by my people, so I knew my culture."
Though Graywolf was brought up in traditional ways, his father wanted
him to grow up in both worlds and always stressed education, wanting
"me to survive in what he termed the real world."
Graywolf graduated from San Fernando High School and went to San
Fernando Valley State College (now CSU Northridge), where he majored
in English.
His people were not recognized as a tribe until 1978; they have a
small reservation south of Tucson.
Graywolf insists he has no other name, which he conceded has been an
issue on paperwork such as his marriage license.
Mostly, his adult life was spent raising his family, playing guitar
at occasional gigs and working at Ralphs. His 37-year stint there,
mostly in Los Angeles stores and ranging from checkout clerk to
warehouse manager, lasted through 2004. Graywolf has nothing but
positive things to say about the company.
Once, he said, they asked him to cut his hair. When he told them it
was part of his culture, they accepted it.
On the reservation
But it wasn't always easy. In 1964, Graywolf sat down to eat in a
restaurant in Sonora but was denied service based on his heritage
(his long hair likely didn't help). Not only that, the owner kicked
him out and directed him to escape. A crowd had gathered out front.
"They were waiting to beat me up," Graywolf said. "I had to leave
through the back door."
That, he recalled, left him determined to get involved (as did two
stints in jail where he was treated "very poorly," both times
stemming from when he was arrested but never charged for stealing
cars, one of which he says was his own).
Graywolf recently did a show in Sonora and returned to that same
restaurant. When he told the waitress about the time he wasn't
allowed to eat there, she was stunned.
Though he doesn't consider himself an activist, Graywolf knows a
great deal about issues on reservations.
They are supposed to be sovereign, but the government forces certain
things on the people and sets things up "to keep us dependent on it," he said.
Reservations, he said, are racked by up to 85 percent unemployment.
Drug and alcohol abuse is high. Native Americans have a teen suicide
rate three times greater than the national average, said Graywolf,
who is the founder-director of the Save Our Tribal Youth Foundation
that aids reservations and tries to keep young kids in school.
'"It's simple," he said. "If you force people to live in poverty and
feel there is no future, it leads to suicide and these other problems."
People, he continued, don't realize the abject poverty on many reservations.
"It saddens me that there is no national discussion about such
things," he said.
Contrary to widespread belief, Graywolf said, tribes with successful
casinos are "very few" and those getting rich off them are "in the
vast minority."
The Santa Ynez Chumash started theirs when it was still in poverty
and "that was OK," he said. "But now that they are successful, it's
not OK? People get mad when tribes get wealthy, but they don't get
upset when it's Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. I don't understand that."
Some of this is pointed inward. Graywolf decried the tribes who are
cutting people a practice called disenrollment so they have a
bigger slice of the financial pie, and charges that wealthier ones
are forgetting about conditions on poorer reservations.
"That," he said, "would not have happened in the old days."
He sighed. While he doesn't consider his people conquered, he
concedes that others around him can see the end of their days.
About 6 million Jews perished in the World War II-era Holocaust at
the hands of the Nazis, he noted.
"Maybe 20 times that number of native people were wiped out on the
North American continent (since 1492)," he said, "and we hear nothing of it."
Some accounts don't place the number that high, though some put it
close. And while some call it conquest or manifest destiny or blame
it on the ravages of epidemic diseases, others use much stronger
language. In a 2004 book, author David Cesarani said "in terms of the
sheer numbers killed, the Native American genocide exceeds that of
the Holocaust."
Author David Stannard called what happened to Native Americans "the
most massive act of genocide in the history of the world." Writer and
former Rhodes Scholar David Quammen, in a 2003 book, termed colonial
practices toward Native Americans "brutal, hypocritical,
opportunistic" and "genocidal in the fullest sense of the word."
Said Graywolf: "Intentional or otherwise, it is a genocide. I don't
think it was intentional, but it still happened."
'I'm a happy guy'
Populations today are a mere fraction of their zenith, but these
people are still around. California is home to 106 recognized Native
American tribes, many in the far northern and eastern parts of the
state; the number of unrecognized tribes, by Graywolf's count, pushes
the total into the 140s. Nationwide, 564 tribes are recognized and
about 200 more are unrecognized, he said.
In California and elsewhere, he noted, many were put on worthless lands.
Up until several months ago, he had an Internet radio show called
"Graywolf Uncensored." Despite all this, Graywolf insists he's a
happy guy. People, he said, misunderstand him. He's not angry or
hateful or a racist.
On the other hand, he added, "I don't want to tell anyone how to
live; that's not my place. But if something is detrimental to my
people, I have to speak out. If you don't speak out, you condone."
Doing nothing, he added, is not an option.
He loves his life, loves his family, loves what he's doing. He
contends he's as happy maintaining the grounds at the Chumash center
as he is "taking a limo to an awards show," and that he could easily
be among his people and go back to old ways.
Said Graywolf, "I am able to live in both worlds."
.
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