Indian Art Spokesman Marches to Own Drum

Paul Apodaca is not a person you can easily ignore or forget.

“People have no trouble knowing who I am, or what I represent,” says the 37-year-old curator of folk art at Santa Ana’s Bowers Museum in his characteristically booming voice.

“The moment I walk into a room, and they get a gander of me, that’s already a kind of statement in a county like this. People know that I’m not your typical white Anglo Orange Countian!”

Hardly.

His strong, blunt-featured face reflects his Navaho and Mexican heritage. His black hair, worn in a manner that suggests both pride and defiance, falls down around his shoulders and heavy beaded necklace.

And his message on the lecture circuit is not to be taken lightly: The plight of the American Indians, he says, is still a tragic one of economic exploitation, cultural denigration and cruel misconceptions.

This kind of outspokenness is typical of Apodaca, one of the most ubiquitous ethnic minority spokesmen on the Orange County arts scene. Each year, he brings much the same message to scores of groups, in settings from grade school and college classrooms to women’s clubs, corporate luncheons and arts workshops.

It is the kind of activism that has brought him recognition outside Orange County--he is on the multicultural advisory panel of the California Arts Council, and last year won an administrative training award from the Smithsonian Institution.

“Minority representatives in the arts are certainly more visible, and some of us now have the blessings of mainstream organizations,” says Apodaca, sitting in his small Bowers office. “In that respect, you can say that what is happening is gratifying.”

But, he adds, there is the flip side to this trend.

Although Southern California has the largest urban concentration of Indians in the nation, he says, they are still one of the most ignored minorities in this region. Orange County has an estimated 24,000 American Indians, Los Angeles County, 80,000, according to the Southern California Indian Council.

“In that context, you realize just how scarce everything really is--the handful of (Indian) studies programs, the tiny number of cultural coordinators like me hired to work in the mainstream. That, I’m afraid, is terribly unsettling.”

Apodaca’s operational base is his Bowers office. For 8 years, he has been affiliated with the city-owned museum in Santa Ana, one of the most venerable cultural-historical institutions in Orange County.

But not all mainstream institutions, he says, are as sympathetic to Indian arts as is Bowers.

“Within many art circles, there is still the feeling that Indian art is not worthy of study as great art,” says Apodaca, curator of folk art at Bowers since 1985. “People like to still think of it as ‘merely crafts,’ some kind of folk curios, and never more than that.

“But the art of the Indians throughout this hemisphere, and dating back hundreds of years, is one of high intelligence, sophistication and innovation--a historical fact that even now is rarely recognized,” Apodaca says.

Apodaca joined Bowers in 1980 as an artist-in-residence, a post underwritten by a California Arts Council grant. His specialty: re-creating the ancient Indian art of sand painting. These intricate works, involving powdered stone and dry pigments spread over beds of sand, depict human, animal, sun and other petroglyphic themes.

Apodaca also took part in key shows that sought to underscore the complexities of early Indian arts. He was an assistant curator of the 1986 “Colombia Before Columbus,” a Bowers project billed as the largest Colombian ceramics exhibit held in North America. In 1983, he assisted in “Ancient Skywatchers of California,” a touring show, co-sponsored by Bowers, about the role of astronomy among California Indians.

Then last year at Bowers, Apodaca mounted his own paean to the Indian past--”First Voices: Indigenous Music of Southern California,” described as the first full-scale show on the subject. His exhibit, an audio and videotape project, combined with displays of ceramics and other artifacts, focused on folk songs of such tribes as the Serrano, Mojave and Cupeno.

The images of Indian personalities, says Apodaca, are yet another matter.

Although there is an encouraging trend toward accuracy in some school textbooks, he says, “you still have books and other materials that perpetuate the images of Indians as shiftless and drunks--people wholly out of control.

“These are works based on some of the most distorted and demeaning accounts that go back to the last century and that haven’t been updated in the slightest.”

Hollywood, he argues, remains one of the worst media offenders. Stereotypes of the “same ludicrous types are still there, even in films purported to be more sympathetic to Indians,” he says.

However, the independently made “Broken Rainbow,” which won the 1985 Academy Award for best feature-length documentary, proved to be a milestone, says Apodaca.

The film, produced by Maria Florio and Victoria Mudd and featuring the voices of Martin Sheen and Burgess Meredith, documented the relocating of 10,000 Navahos from their generations-old sites on a Hopi reservation in Arizona. The motives behind the forced exodus, the film makers claimed, stemmed from moves to further develop mineral resources where the Navahos lived.

Apodaca not only wrote the music score for “Broken Rainbow,” but also performed the music, including the use of traditional Indian instruments.

“For once, we weren’t dealing in Indian stereotypes and simplifications, or trying to distort Indian values so they can fit into a white society’s way of behavior,” Apodaca says. “For once, we had an account that is a very real, accurate and subtle account of the Indians as a people, as societal victims--and as sacred guardians of the land.”

Apodaca was born into this kind of minority legacy--his father is Navaho, his mother Mexican-American.

Even at age 4, when his family moved from heavily Latino East Los Angeles to overwhelmingly Anglo Orange County, their sense of ethnic identity never faltered, he says.

His father took the three Apodaca children on visits to reservations, archeological sites, missions and museums throughout Southern California, and told them of Navaho and other Indian traditions.

“We came by (ethnic pride) naturally,” Apodaca recalls. “We never felt we had to look up to white people. We always had this sense of great heritages behind us.”

But school was a different matter.

“I was the only Indian in my (Tustin) grade school, and I was wearing my hair long even then, and with all the Indian ornaments,” he says. “There were the usual taunts--I mean, this was a time (early 1960s) when Orange County was even more Anglo than it is now. They (officials) were always demanding that I cut my hair.”

When he was a sophomore, he dropped out of school. “I had had enough of all the cultural rebuffs, the insensitivities, the little mainstream games,” Apodaca recalls.

For a while, Apodaca, who played the guitar and other instruments, performed with rock bands. (He did recording stints with the Grateful Dead and with Bill Medley). He also worked as a carpenter on interiors of yachts, racing boats and fishing vessels.

But increasingly, he found himself revisiting the Navaho and other reservations. And, more than ever, he was withdrawing into the world of Indian arts--his creative roots, he says.

“It was my way, artistically, of going back to the land--to the earth,” says Apodaca of his sand painting and his use of particles found in such areas as Southern California sea cliffs, New Mexico dunes and the Grand Canyon.

His sand paintings, along with his creations in basketry and bead work, made the rounds of Southern California galleries, including the Irvine Fine Arts Center in Orange County, Southwest Museum in Los Angeles and California State Indian Museum in Antelope Valley, as well as Bowers Museum.

His selection in 1980 as artist-in-residence at Bowers, which included giving workshop demonstrations, clinched Apodaca’s decision to “drop back into mainstream society.”

“I felt you can do only so much as an outsider. I felt I could do more good, to spread the word about Indian arts, by working within the system,” says Apodaca, who has hosted his own cable television show, taught at Cal State Fullerton and Orange Coast College and acted as consultant to the Orange County Centennial Committee and California Council for the Humanities.

A busy advocate, indeed.

Still, Apodaca says any assessment of the Indian arts movement in Orange County has to be highly qualified.

“If I were to size it up, I would say we have made a dent. We have helped enlighten people about our culture, and gained a degree of acceptance,” says Apodaca, sitting in the living room of his Orange home, surrounded by Indian petroglyphic works.

Then, in a booming voice, he adds: “We have made an imprint, and established a persistent presence. We have shown that we are here, that we have survived--and that you can’t ignore all of us!”