Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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No better example of that persistence can be found than that of the Apache painter, muralist, and sculptor Allan Houser. Born in 1914 near Fort Sill, Oklahoma, he was the first of his Chiricahua community to be born outside of captivity. He lived 80 years dying in 1994. He is a likely candidate for the title of “best Southwestern Indian artist of the 20^th century.” His materials are varied and diverse—sculpting with marble, bronze, alabaster, steatite, limestone, painted steel, wire, wood; painting in oils, tempera, acrylic, casein, pastels, and watercolors—and his themes are equally varied. His six to nine foot Ga’an statutes reflect the confidence of Apache spiritualism, and his smaller works depict family and everyday life. This is the optimism of the survivalist, not the pessimism of the defeated.¹⁷

This then is a two-part story, of a difficult and often unsuccessful struggle to overcome powerful, outside forces, and the contemporary one of an internal and cultural determination to survive in the face of forces seeking their destruction. From the struggle with surviving have come renewal and regeneration, and this new person called the American Indian.