My exploratory work is based in reference as a place, its people, and the spirit of the wild. Sparsely populated, this state is socially isolated from mainstream America though rich and varied in culture of its own. From childhood on I have sought solace in open spaces, deep forests, and vast mountains. I have lived a life with the rare privilege of an inordinate amount of solitude in wilderness.

My artwork has been a vehicle for reconciling extremes of culture and place. These extremes exist in the world at large and within my personal experience of cross-assimilation with Native American culture and the integration of rural, wilderness life, with education and creative work in the artistic urban centers of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Currently, at age fifty-two, I reside on the Flathead Indian Reservation among the inland Salish, as I have for the past ten years. I lived three years on the Blackfeet Reservation among the Pikuni. For twenty-two years of my childhood and youth I lived near the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation outside of Havre, Montana. This place is the root of my affinity to Native Americans. My earliest memories of this lifetime are of scribbling. Having dyslexia, I was an outsider in grade school, thought much accepted by the Indian students.

My early work was concerned with realistic depictions of wildlife, landscapes, people, and events I have lived or witnessed.

Several opportunities influenced my artwork. I worked on farms and ranches, in construction, training horses, packing mules, and guiding in the wilderness. My art education took me to Los Angeles where I was immerses in urban culture and the international art world.

It came to pass that I deliberately sought academic Native American Studies and the council and wisdom of native elders on the reservations in Montana. Through time and successive ritual initiation processes, I became a dreamer, singer, and dancer. These disciplines and responsibilities have been entrusted to me on my path of cross-assimilation. These purposes are both for social and shamanic ceremonies. Recently I’ve begun the process of becoming a sweat lodge leader. I partake of seasonal ceremonies, rituals, and pow wows with tribes in the region. As well, I am requested for these skills to counsel people, and when they are in critical transition. This topic is profound, vast, and not to be taken lightly. As with my artwork, this path is a commitment of life̱s work. At time the two are inseparable.

The degrees of immersion into the native culture is accumulative and layered in learning. My path has been one that moves away from, and then returns again to these sources of power and knowing. This is so because of the intermittent excursions to the cities to find diversity, exploration of critical thinking, and the richness of the arts the cities sponsor. Both ways are invigorating an necessary for me.

I sang at Lother Baumgartin’s reception of his installation Carbon at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles, California (1990). The honor song for the elders in Baumgartin’s sound chamber resonated with the immanent presence of the victims of genocide. Simultaneously the descendents of the natives’ tyrannizers were harkened to confront the unreconciled questions. Having crossed a social, cultural barrier, I have been cued to ways of seeing and being aside from the conventions of Western perception.