Oral history interview with Murv Jacob

Little Thunder: My name is Julie Pearson-Little Thunder. Today is October 3, 2013, and I'm in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, at Murv Jacob's studio in downtown Tahlequah. Murv, you're not only a fine artist, but you've illustrated numerous books, many written by your wife, Debbie Duvall, and they've won several awards in the publishing business. Your poetic style often depicts various animal personalities in lush woodland environments, many inspired by Cherokee tales, traditional tales. You're also one of those rare artists who has been able to run their own gallery for almost thirty years. Now you've added a second one in Tulsa. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Where were you born and where did you grow up?

Jacob: I was born in a little suburb of Cincinnati called Glendale, Ohio. When I was born there, I was born in a little shotgun house. They've bulldozed all that stuff out of there. It's big ol' fancy houses now. I was raised, however, east 1:00of Topeka, between Topeka and Lawrence, Kansas, and spent my childhood in this kind of rural environment. My dad had a tree nursery, taught me the Latin name to every tree. While the other kids were coming home after school to watch TV, I was coming home to work and dig trees and move them around and learn how to drive trucks and tractor. I was an agriculturist as a child.

I actually grew up in a neighborhood full of Menninger psychiatrists. These were like the top psychiatrists on this little planet. Aldous Huxley used to come visit Bernard Hall every year. It was an interesting neighborhood, to say the least. We were kind of in charge of doing their landscaping and stuff, but they treated us--they were egalitarians. They were so far on the upper crust that 2:00they treated us as equals, you know, which is unusual on this planet. In fact, I remember Dr. Hall's secretary typed me up a bibliography back way before Google with all of Aldous Huxley's books on it, which I later read all of his books, which I have first editions of in the back of the studio at this point because Aldous Huxley was as important as John F. Kennedy wasn't. Anyway, that's where I grew up.

Then I later lived in San Francisco for two or three years. I moved out there about the time that the Haight-Ashbury was becoming a center for poets and artists and musicians. I lived in Texas for a couple of years where my daughter Jana was born. I lived on the Coast for a while. Then I moved way up in the 3:00desert where I met a lot of Mexican people. Then I lived up in New York state for a couple of years up in Westchester County above the city, and it was a writers' and artists' and actors' community. For the last twenty-five years, I've lived here in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, with Debbie Duvall. I'm sitting here looking at the microphone, talking to it, which is crazy. I'm going to try to look at the camera, but don't take that out because I think that's an important part of human nature, that when we're talking we want to talk to a microphone. (Laughter)

Little Thunder: So did you have any--you had brothers and sisters, I guess.

Jacob: Oh, yeah, but I'd rather, I think, talk about my dad. My dad was, he was Kentucky Cherokee and Alabama Creek. His mother was put into an Indian boarding school up in Kentucky as a child, where she escaped. He only went to the fifth 4:00grade because his father was arrested for running some moonshine up into Ohio from Kentucky, and the jail burned up while he was in there on a thirty-day sentence or something. My dad was the oldest of five children and had to go to work to support the family. He went to work for a guy that had a tree nursery, and that's why later on he had a tree nursery and I got to work for him. It was great.

My father was just about the most environmental, the softest-spoken, probably killed as many people in World War II as anybody that was fighting in that conflict but didn't start out that way. I mean, he just got pushed into a corner and started fighting back. I had a brother who died when he was about two years 5:00old, so my young childhood, a lot of it I didn't get to spend with my mom because she was at the hospital with my little brother, Johnny. I remember this just in bits and pieces because I was, like, three-and-a-half to five years old or something. I remember these big, friendly, outrageous country girls that took care of me because my mom was off at the hospital, kind of like bad nannies, you know. It was a great part of my childhood. I still remember it well, but I can't talk about it.

Little Thunder: What is your first memory of seeing Native art?

Jacob: Dreams, and, well, my grandmother had family reunions every year. She had 6:00them at the old mounds up in Ohio. We would go to Fort Ancient, we would go to Twin Mounds, we would go to the Serpent Mound. Every couple of years we'd have a family reunion up there at a different one of the mounds. That was the art I remember were those mounds. Then, of course, they would have little adjacent adjunct museums that had pieces that the people carved and stuff like that.

Then I got really enthralled by this crazy Wichita artist called Blackbear Bosin who was on, I think, the cover of National Geographic magazine with one of his paintings of a Kansas prairie fire that he did, and later got to know the guy real well. He was this barrel-chested, friendly guy who would give you a bear hug and make you feel like you'd known him all his life. Especially after I got 7:00to know him, we just got to be great friends.

Little Thunder: How old were you when you met him?

Jacob: I don't know. It was, like, in my late twenties, early thirties. I was living in Lawrence for a long time, and Haskell [Indian Nations University] was right there. Dick West was right there. I had a little art gallery of my own. I was precocious. I had an art gallery and showed Kansas modern art which is kind of folky, Thomas Hart Benton stuff to me, along with New York modern art. I was hooked up with some lady that had a gallery in Kansas City, and she was allowing me to show prints by [Robert] Rauschenberg and all the New York artists. I would, like, put these things juxtaposed, these Kansas paintings juxtaposed with these latest New York creations that were basically like anti-art to me. I've 8:00always considered the landscape the basis of art, kind of like Van Gogh did.

Little Thunder: Right.

Jacob: I always was much more impressed by Cezanne than I was by Jackson Pollock. I saw what Pollock was doing, and I thought it was like spectacular twentieth-century space cave painting, just going wild. That's all good.

Little Thunder: So you did know your grandma, though, pretty well, spent some time with her.

Jacob: My great-grandmother taught me to paint from the time I was eight years old with oils.

Little Thunder: This was on your dad's side?

Jacob: She was on my mother's side. She was a Brooks. She was a Hempstreet. She was an artist all her life back when women artists didn't get any recognition at all and was doing some damn good paintings. As I look back on them, I was pretty 9:00impressed. Until Frida Kahlo, there weren't any women artists of any magnitude because the male-dominated European art establishment wouldn't allow such a thing.

Little Thunder: So your great-grandma actually--

Jacob: She started teaching me to paint with oils--

Little Thunder: How old were you?

Jacob: --when I was eight years old.

Little Thunder: When you were eight.

Jacob: It was a mess, I'm sure, for her. I remember her rooms were always full of fresh-cut flowers. She lived at my grandfather's house and had kind of a suite of rooms on the second floor. I suppose she probably was the one that bought the house for him. She lived up there, and the place always smelled of oil paints, and linseed oil, and copal oil, and fresh-cut flowers. She liked painting big wads of flowers the same way Vincent did.

Little Thunder: Now, is this your earliest memory of doing art, is painting with 10:00your great-grandma?

Jacob: Oh, no, I remember when I was a little tiny kid, trying to scrounge pieces of paper from people so I could do drawings and stuff. People were always giving my parents paper, so I would have paper to do these piles of drawings that I used to do even when I was--I think I was drawing as soon as I learned to pick up a pencil.

Little Thunder: Did you have any valuable art experiences in elementary school or secondary school?

Jacob: Yeah, I liked the high school art teacher I had. She really encouraged me. Most of the kids were in the art class to have an easy class, and they were a bunch of idiots, but she saw that I was serious about art, even at that age. She really focused on me and threw me a lot of choice tidbits to get my brain going, and showed us films about Picasso and showed us films about Pollock and 11:00showed us films about Vincent. It was all good. Usually, it was hard to watch the films because other people were throwing things at each other. I was fairly large, so they didn't really throw stuff at me.

Little Thunder: But you took it seriously?

Jacob: Yeah, yeah, art--

Little Thunder: Did you sell any work when you were in high school?

Jacob: I don't know. Probably gave it away to girls I liked. By high school, I already had a couple of girls that were my models, and I did, like, nude drawings of them. A few years ago, my mom showed me these drawings that I did in high school, and they weren't too bad. I was having to kind of clandestinely bring girls around and draw them nude because my parents were fairly religious and that was kind of--but they never held it against me that I was an artist or that I liked artists and wild people. They always saw it as quite interesting. (Laughs)

Little Thunder: Now, you mentioned you ended up--you went to college, I guess, in--

Jacob: Yeah, when I was seventeen I abandoned high school, which was a lost cause. Went up there and passed the entrance exam and went to college for about a half a semester, and realized college was extended high school. At that point, it began to dawn on me that none of the great artists had actually gone to college, though college was more and more appropriating these guys. They were taking the stuff that they had done and wearing around their clothes, so they weren't really wearing any clothes at all.

College began to look more to me like ROTC training and how to build nuclear devices. It was just not something I wanted to be associated with at all. In 13:00fact, I guess I sort of dropped out of college completely after I spent two years living in San Francisco and up in Marin County, and hanging around with everybody from Jimi Hendrix--I probably hung out with Janis Joplin a hundred times, but we were both twenty-year-old kids. Jerry Garcia was an older guy. He was, like, twenty-two or twenty-three, you know, but we still hit it off really well.

Little Thunder: Were you playing an instrument? Were you active in the music scene?

Not at all. In fact, I did posters in those days which are still floating around. I was part of that art scene that did those fabulously overblown and overemphasized posters for people like Michael McClure, the poet. McClure was, like, the youngest of the beat[nik] poets but really wasn't like that. He was from Kansas, but he moved out there. [Allen] Ginsburg and those people loved him 14:00and took him under their wing. He began writing his beats poems and his crazy plays like The Beard. I did one of the posters for his play The Beard, which was never ever put on without getting busted at the end when Billy the Kid has oral sex with Jean Harlow. That, hence, was "the beard" because neither of them had beards. I got it. I got what he was talking about. I understood these beatniks.

I actually think I saved Ginsburg's life one night from a bunch of gypsy joker motorcycle guys. I've never liked bikers. If you're a biker watching this, I don't like you. You're a Nazi. You were wearing swastikas in those days. I've always been leaning toward--I always liked Fidel Castro better than John 15:00Kennedy. I'm sorry, but he was like a huge millionaire guy, and Castro was creating a place where people could live.

You know, if I'm Native art, it has to do with something bigger than one tribe. It has to do with the Americas being appropriated and the Mayans and the Aztecs turned into an agricultural work force, the hacienda system. I'm a partisan. I don't like the Koch brothers. Who I am is unimportant, though, but my artwork that I do--Julie [Little Thunder] will tell you that I stopped what I was doing to do this interview because I try to paint every day. I've had some health problems. I'm sixty-eight, but I still think it's important for an artist not 16:00just to brag about being an artist but to actually paint every day.

Little Thunder: Murv, did you get a chance--Native activism was happening around the ʼ60s, too. Did you see any of that scene at that point?

Jacob: I was about this close to the whole Alcatraz scene, but I had already moved up to Marin County and then moved back to Kansas when Alcatraz got going. Yeah, I've always totally admired Native activism, but what I see is a problem with Native American activists thinking that Mexican Indians aren't Native Americans and Bolivian Indians aren't Native Americans and the people crossing the border somehow aren't Native Americans when all of them are. They're the 17:00disjointed agricultural people that came up here to take care of the crops. I've always had the greatest respect for these people. I lived down on the Texas-Mexican border for a year.

Little Thunder: Now, how old were you when you were living down there?

Jacob: Probably thirty, and I was painting. I was living across the street from another guy who was a painter, and it was back in the days when Cormac McCarthy showed up in that neighborhood and started writing. He showed up from, like, Pennsylvania, and the distance and the sky and the people and everything just blew his mind. Cormac McCarthy becomes this totally different person after a couple of years down in that border country. I was living in No Country for Old Men in the time he was talking about. I was seeing the agriculturalism become 18:00the drug trade because it was so much more lucrative and the government couldn't boss them around.

Little Thunder: So you mentioned in Lawrence you had your art gallery.

Jacob: Yeah, it was called Seven East Seventh Gallery. That was the address. The guy gave me a real big break on the rent because he liked what I was doing. He was a visionary. He could see what I was doing. Just like this place here, the lady that owns it's pretty rich. She charges me less rent than most people around here charge for a decrepit, dilapidated, disjointed mobile home. She likes me, so I have a studio on the main street.

Little Thunder: So I'm wondering when you just really decided, you started exploring Native subject matter and got so--

Jacob: Oh, well, I am. I mean, that's who I am. That's where we went to our 19:00family reunions. That's where I first skinned up both knees and both elbows and my face, was falling down a mound.

Little Thunder: But you were exploring different subject matter, too, so when you really set on this path, was it when you were in Kansas, or after meeting Bosin, or was it happening the whole time?

Jacob: Yeah, it's not--you're trying to make it like I went on different paths, and it was all one totally unified path that I've been on ever since I was a kid.

Little Thunder: Right.

Jacob: Ever since I started reading good novelists, I knew it was time for me to make a dent in the crap going on, you know?

Little Thunder: Right. So how about your color scheme? Was it what you're using now, or when did it kind of start to change, do you think?

Jacob: I don't think my color scheme's changed at all. You can go back and look at the stuff I was doing thirty years ago, and I was very basically using the 20:00same colors. I basically like the colors of Cezanne more than any other artist. The colors Cezanne used influenced me as a kid, and they still do. Gauguin was the first Native American artist. He was one quarter Inca and one quarter Spanish and half French, so he was ostensibly the first Native American artist of any magnitude. If they'd known he was an Inca, they probably wouldn't have treated him with such deference.

Little Thunder: How did you end up moving to Oklahoma? What made you decide to make your way down here?

Jacob: I was coming down here to see a Cherokee artist/historian/culturalist named Cecil Dick. You can look him up on Google. He's there. He's probably the most important of all the Cherokee artists, though a lot of them think they are, 21:00but he was. He understood what being Cherokee was, and he liked me from the minute we saw each other. He was an ex-prize fighter. He dressed like a Mexican from southern California. He dressed like a Mexican-Indian. He wore Chinos and flannel shirts, and he just didn't put on any kind of airs at all. He could fight a guy if he had to, and he could win. He was an orphan from the time he was eleven years old, so he went through the most horrible of the Indian boarding schools of that period, like Chilocco [Indian School] and stuff.

We hit it off from the get-go. He said "I always thought it was going to be some full-blood that was going to come along and get what I do, but it was you." I said "Well, I didn't know who was going to be my real art teacher, but it turns 22:00out to be you." Cecil said, "Yeah, I studied with this guy who was a European kind of master artist, and he showed me about colors and stuff like that." Cecil had the notoriety of having been to Dorothy Dunn's Santa Fe studio and being part of the art scene at Bacone College in Muskogee. He was the only person that went to both of them, and he was just getting pretty damn old by the time I met him. I would have loved to hung out with that guy when he was a young guy out in California. That was back in the days of the zoot-suiters and stuff, I'm sure. He was born in 1915 or something. You can look it up.

Little Thunder: What did you get? What are the most valuable things you learned from Cecil Dick?

Jacob: To see what was Cherokee and what was sort of pseudo-Cherokee and what wasn't Cherokee at all. When they created AIM [American Indian Movement], there wasn't supposed to be a national AIM because every Indian culture is different. Merlin [Little Thunder]'s culture is different from--. Robby McMurtry's culture is different from--. Everybody comes, like, from a different culture. There aren't that many artists, and they come together, and they act as a unified body. The people that created AIM wanted to have local AIM organizations. They knew if they had national organizations, outsider government informants would come in and take up, which is what happened. Go look at it. I know those people. I know the ones that were real, and I know the ones that were government informants.

I'm not going to go into it, but they did that, and they're still doing that. 24:00Anytime anybody gets political, these people are going to go throw something on them to put out the fire. They're really afraid of the Indians because they took their land. They usurped all these resources. No amount of treaties is going to make what they did right. They took it and then said, "Here, sign this." Any court of law would say, "Well, that's not right," but the lawyers were born-and-raised descendants of the people that took the land here, so they don't even get it.

Little Thunder: So when did you first start entering competitive shows here in Tahlequah?

Jacob: I didn't really--the first show I entered down here was at the Five [Civilized] Tribes Museum. I don't have a tribal membership card. Some people take that very seriously, and others don't give a damn. Five Tribes Museum has never cared one way or the other if I had a membership card, even when they were 25:00under fire from David Cornsilk and his deranged cohorts. I entered a show at the Five Tribes Museum and won Second Place in painting and went, "This is fun."

Little Thunder: Was it your first competitive show, sort of?

Jacob: Pretty much, because I was just painting and selling paintings, so I didn't care about competitive shows. The whole thing seems rather academic to me, but I like the museum, and I like the people at the museum. At some point they made me a master artist over there. I think it was the tyrant Chad Smith that actually pushed for my nomination, which is kind of like having Napoleon make you governor of somewhere, Utah. Yeah, it's a great little museum, but then, of course, it's very exclusivist, and you're saying, "Well, these are the 26:00Civilized Tribes." Which meant what? They had slaves? I think so. I think that's why they considered them civilized: because they enlisted the help of black slaves, not the help but the forced slavery of black slaves.

Now, not all Cherokees did that. Not all Creeks did that. The MacIntosh Creeks certainly did that. John Ross, who they just built a new museum to out here, certainly had 150 slaves at any given time. The Keetoowahs formed up as an anti-slavery--they were the full-blood society. Their main thing was their opposition to slavery, and they did not see it as an option. They fought against the Confederacy in the Civil War to great advantage of the North. They fought well. Stand Watie, though, he had a few slaves and was a lawyer and was able to 27:00write titles for slaves and make up titles for slaves. He didn't go after those people because he determined before the Civil War that he wasn't going to fight other Indians. He would fight the Europeans, but he would not fight another Indian. No matter what their belief system was, he was not going to raise his hand against another Indian. Stand Watie was, above all else, a Indian and one of my heroes. Even though he dabbled in slavery, he always seemed to keep his head about him and not get pulled down into it like a lot of people did, a lot of people around here.

Then after the Civil War, they had the Dawes Enrollment. They lined the people up at the Dawes headquarters, and they had guys sitting there looking at the Indians. If they looked black, if they had the nappy hair, or they had the 28:00stripes on their fingernails, they would mark them as "F" for Freedmen and mark out their blood quantum and take it away from them. A lot of, like, three-quarter blood Indians that had a little trace of black blood were marked clear off the tribe and put in the Freedmen rolls. They still aren't back on them because of the extent racism of the 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s. It went way on up until World War II, the racism against black people. It still exists in the South. They still need the [Voting] Rights Act even though they've stricken a bunch of--. Anyway, yeah, I could talk about that all day. I guess it's not important, really, about what we're talking about, but I think it is. I'd like to see who the artists would be if they hadn't done that.

I got kicked out of the Cherokee Nation art shows about ten years ago for not having a card when they rebooted everything. I was rebooted out, myself, which is fine. I more and more see the Cherokee Nation as a tiny tornado in a teapot, a molehill amongst bloody Sierra Mountains, and the people running it are a bunch of white lawyers from Tulsa that wanted to have their own tribe and didn't have enough blood quantum to be Keetoowahs. I'm not sad to be--. Cecil Dick never had anything to do with what those people were doing. He was a Keetoowah from the time they created the band back in the 1940s, and he always wrote "Cecil Dick, Keetoowah." I somehow unwittingly made friends with some of these 30:00chiefs and stuff. I actually regret it to this day. I've really--it's kind of like, "Forgive me. I know not what I do." What the hell was I thinking? It still exists, but it's a joke, and it becomes more of a joke every day.

There are people now in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma that are 1/4,000 Indian. These are not Indians. I'm sorry to be the one to point it out, and it's not because I'm disgruntled. It's because I'm amused and amazed. How can they call themselves Indians? They've got people on the Tribal Council that are 1/256. They keep saying, "Blood quantum's not important. We're citizens." What crap! Of course it is! These laws and provisions and treaties were made for Indian people to help them adjust and be able to deal with what's going on in their world, or 31:00were they just put in place to pin their ears back? It's always been a debatable subject.

Little Thunder: What were some galleries that were important to you as you started entering shows and winning awards, or was gallery representation very important?

Jacob: No, it never was. I always wanted to represent myself. I always saw galleries kind of the way Merlin does, which is they take half the money for representing you. "Oh, thank you very much." It's kind of like I'm not paying enough money to survive on this planet as it is without galleries. That's why I don't have a bunch of other people at this gallery. If I lose somebody's painting, they're going to be genuinely pissed off at me. They're going to not like where I hung it. I just want to have my artwork and hang it where I want to. The gallery up in Tulsa's not doing any good. Tulsa used to be just 32:00dramatically rich, thirty, forty years ago, but now she's kind of like an old lady that used to be rich, pushing a shopping cart around, like a bag lady. There are some rich people, but they don't really care about the arts. They're vested. They used to care about art, but they're not very really interested in it.

They're starting to treat Woody Guthrie like a native son. They hated that guy twenty years ago. They tore his house down in Okemah. Now they have a festival. It's all crap. I like Tulsa, but as you know from living there, it's got an unbelievable murder rate. People just seem--they killed a guy because he charged them too much for getting them a car key the other night. Then, of course, he was in on it, too. He had a gun, and it turned into a Wild West gun fight. He 33:00was too slow, though. These gangsters out-shot him. Craziness. I'd just as soon be over here in the woods, but methamphetamines have taken their toll over here in the woods, though.

Little Thunder: How did you meet your wife, Debbie?

Jacob: I was delivering some paintings to a show at the Cherokee Heritage Center, and I took the paintings down in the--they said, "Take those down in the basement." I took the paintings down in the basement, and there was Debbie Duvall. I fell in love with her right that minute. We had a brief whirlwind courtship, and we've been together for twenty-five years.

Little Thunder: That's great.

Jacob: Yeah, she's just--I don't know. She's probably got an IQ of 200. I've probably got an IQ of 150, but I can put up with--she can put up with me because she's got an IQ of 200 and she's used to that shit. She's used to people being 34:00dumber than her. (Laughter)

Little Thunder: We're going to talk about your collaboration here in a minute, but I was wondering, the business part of art is sometimes the hardest to handle. How did you approach it when you started more selling and you were serious about selling?

Jacob: Well, when it comes to business, I'm going to have quote Rhett Butler from Gone with the Wind.

Little Thunder: How about when you got your first illustration job?

Jacob: I was real excited. I don't get as excited now. I'll tell you one thing that the artists need to understand, though: the bigger the publisher, the easier it is to work with the people. The littler the publisher, the more--they're so worried about this thing rising or falling. They're not going 35:00to throw the baby out with the bathtub like a big publisher. Big publishers don't really care. They're fun to work with. You can get away with anything.

I was sending them stuff to approve, and then they'd send it back. They'd tell me they wanted something else. I'd put something else in there, then we'd argue about it but not very much. I hid cryptic slogans. I've always been an illustrator, but a hundred years from now people are going to look at my books and find all these hidden figures and hidden slogans and hidden sayings. The Disney people caught up with me. The stuff I wrote about Disney in that book got me kicked out of the Disney stores, which is, like, the least of my worries. I had a meeting with--

Little Thunder: Is that because you had work in the Disney stores?

Jacob: Well, they had my books in the Disney stores, and then they found out 36:00that there were cryptic, underground jabs at Disney in the stuff they were selling, which apparently has happened more than they would ever want to admit. A lot of artists have found that quite easy to do. They're just such an obnoxious bunch if you meet them.

Little Thunder: That is funny. So some early books were done with [Robert] Conley and, I think, Gayle Ross--

Jacob: Yeah.

Little Thunder: --and then you started working with Debbie.

Jacob: You can take this part out if you want to, but Gayle Ross just wanted to squabble with people all the time. She liked to argue with people on the Internet, and she just liked to make enemies. She would pick on my friends if they came to a conference here. Then she went absolutely ballistic at the end there, backing Chad Smith, and did some really racist commercials they couldn't even show on TV. They're going after the Freedmen, "We're going to get the 37:00Freedmen." (Laughs) They just buried themselves.

People need to take a much closer look at Cherokee politics. It is a tempest in a teapot, but it's amusing as hell to see these people take themselves so seriously about a little dabble of government benefits, which is really just the government giving them back what they took from them.

Then the casinos, you know, the casinos here in the Cherokee Nation, they have a 38:00Cherokee Entertainment. They're a bunch of board members, and they hold court up there in Catoosa where the big casino is. There's a little ʼ50s golf course up behind it, and up on the second floor there's a meeting room with a table the size of New Jersey and tinted windows so nobody can see in. They kind of run things like a bunch of Mafiosos from up there, and they take all the Cherokee casino money and really, generally, spread it out amongst themselves.

Like, fourteen people get 90 percent of that money, and the other 300,000 so-called Indians get 10 percent of the money. It's crazy. They do it. Look it up. Go up there and look if they'll let you. They won't let you in. They certainly won't let me in. I've written about them, actually, in public. They wouldn't publish that in the Tulsa World because Tulsa World is so far up their 39:00behinds they're not going to say anything about the Cherokee Nation, it's crazy. What a planet. That's another reason to like Tulsa. What a planet.

Little Thunder: When did you and Debbie start to collaborate on books?

Jacob: Well, really, it was when Gayle Ross just became totally unpredictable and indecisive, and things were unmanageable. She was coming up with just lavishly inappropriate schemes for books that had no interest to me at all. One day I asked Debbie, "Do you think you could--." She started writing me some books, and they were flawless. She'd worked under, like, four different directors at the Cherokee Heritage Center, and she wrote all of them's letters. They can deny it if they want to, but everybody knows it's true. It was her that wrote their letters, and so when she started writing, she never used bad 40:00grammar. She won't cuss. I try to get her to cuss once in a while just to tease her, and she won't cuss. She's like this wild guitar player, free spirit. She's like an angel. You can't get an angel to cuss even if you try.

Little Thunder: Were there any challenges?

Jacob: She was the perfect--no. In fact, au contraire. We could be doing a lot more children's books if we wanted to, but, you know, you just want to do other stuff. I've worked on a hundred book and video projects, and none of them were, like, best-seller huge. Some of them were pretty well-received, though.

Little Thunder: And won some awards.

Jacob: Yeah, won some awards. I'd just as soon they went to somebody else. I don't need them. I never needed them. I suppose they've probably taken--I've won 41:00the Trail of Tears Art Show out there that the Cherokees have.

Little Thunder: You mean Grand Award?

Jacob: No, I've won--yeah, Grand Prize, Grand Prix. I've won it, but I'm sure they've taken my name off of their programs by now because I don't have the little magic card, that even if you're 1/4,000 that's what makes you a Indian. It's all fun to me. It's all fun and games.

Little Thunder: So do you kind of feel like illustrating might sometimes take away time that you would rather spend doing paintings?

Jacob: Well, we're working on a new book right now. I'm never not working on book illustrations. In fact, the painting I'm working on right now, actually, was a drawing I did for a book seven years ago that I always wanted to turn it into--when I worked on those black and white drawings for those books, I spent 42:00so long on those. They were so thought out. They're going to be around for a long time whether I like it or not, and all my flaws and all their virtues are going to be visible for a long time to come.

Little Thunder: And that was for The Grandmother [Stories], right?

Jacob: Yeah, and then The Grandmother [Stories] verged into these kind of Cherokee wonder stories that were in color and were mostly original stories that Debbie came up with that were along the lines of the ancient stories. Robert Conley took one look at a couple of them and said, "This is what shows that the culture is still alive, that you're doing new stories that still portray the ancient culture." I said "Did I do that?" (Laughter)

I've gotten some great kudos from people. I've gotten some criticism from 43:00people, but the main thing is, I've got this little guy inside of me that wants to paint every day, gets up and says, "What are you going to do today? What are you going to paint? How quick can we get rid of this mundane--. You've got to go to the bank and cash a check. You've got to go pay the car insurance. You've got to do that stuff, and then you've got to go paint."

Little Thunder: Well, I was going to ask--

Jacob: Any day I'm not painting, I consider a day of my life that is wasted. Though I know a lot of artists have drifted off into other callings, I'm not so sure that most of them were serious to begin with. They hit onto a little theme, and they just beat it into the ground. I get so many ideas for paintings I don't think I could ever--. I'd like to do some documentary film stuff. I'd like you to help me with it if you want to. The story of Spiro Mound, what happened over 44:00there was one of the most atrocious stories in the history.

What happened first was one of the most spectacular stories of mankind, when they were doing all the shell carvings, and it was the sacred burial place, and people met there for their black drink ceremonies and did engravings of the sky designs that they saw. Then these Arkansas guys get a mining lease on the place, and go in and just dig the stuff out of there, and throw the bones in the corner, and take all the shell work. Outside the mound is Gilcrease, OU, Peabody Museum at Harvard, Field Museum at Chicago. They've all got their reps out there, bidding on the baskets of goodies coming out of the mound, and the one that pays the most gets the goodies.

It's so amazing. One of the things, the Lightner (they call it the Lightner) fragments ended up at the Peabody Museum, OU Museum, and the Gilcrease Museum. Pieces of it came out in three different baskets that were purchased by three different museums. Then private collectors were bidding for stuff that we've still never seen. It wasn't bad enough that they just raped the mound. We don't even get to see the stuff they took out of there, assess its importance. On a scale of one to ten, it's a goddamn fifty. I mean, it has more shell work than all the other American mounds put together. The shells were brought all the way up from the coast of Florida by these proto-Mayan people. That's who the Creeks are. The Creek language and the Mayan language were one language two thousand years ago.

It's kind of sad, but it's good, I think, for people to get mad about what 46:00happened and see the thing. As you can see, I really want to do this. I don't know if I want to do it as a documentary, though, or do it as a Tarantino film because it really has a lot of weird drama involved, especially when you go back to the people that built the place in the first place when the Spaniards came through with six hundred pigs, Coronado, and spread fifty diseases to all the people living here, and where we're sitting now became the ghost lands. That's why it was so easily inhabited here, because the people had all died off from the diseases spread by the Spanish conquerors. This land was for the taking, as they say.

Little Thunder: You kind of mentioned the fact that you don't really carry a lot of other artists' work.

Jacob: Who do I admire? Is that what you're going to ask?

Little Thunder: Well, I was going to ask, I can see that one reason, maybe, for your gallery lasting so long is you can paint while you're here. That's an important factor.

Jacob: Yeah, it's really a studio. It's never been a gallery. That's such a misnomer out there on the sign. I've had a hundred people walk in and say, "Oh, I thought this was a business--"

Little Thunder: I was going to ask, is that a distraction?

Jacob: --and I'm going, "Well, it's not. It's a studio."

Little Thunder: Is that a distraction, when people walk in?

Jacob: No, I'm not distracted by people. I'm amused by people. I don't care. Sometimes I learn just what not to say, how not to act, what kind of perfume not to wear. I'm quite interested in people as a species, though I don't think they have much of a future. I think they've already worn out their options.

Little Thunder: You know, you talked a little bit about one project that you'd be excited to work on. Is there another one that you're currently working on 48:00that you're excited about?

Jacob: Oh, yeah, several. Some of them I just don't want to go into them because the people that I'm working on them with would get really upset if I talked about what we were up to. Mainly I've talked about the things that are my projects.

Little Thunder: You had a health scare, a bad health scare.

Jacob: Well, I got the typical disease of living too long. I got an arrhythmia. My valves were good, my cholesterol was good, but my heart, apparently, has two different congo players, one playing the top valves, and another one playing the bottom valves, and not playing the same tune at the same time at all. With a series of proper meds, I'm just having normal experiences at this point.

Little Thunder: And how has it impacted your art?

Jacob: I don't see that it has, but others might discern differences that have slipped by me because I'm just me painting.

Little Thunder: Well, let's talk about your creative techniques and processes in a little more detail. You work mainly in acrylic on canvas. Is that right?

Jacob: Yeah, I started out painting with oils, but I had an art teacher, Mrs. Billington, turn me on to the wonders of the new acrylic paints.

Little Thunder: Was this the high school teacher?

Jacob: Yeah, and she was right. They were fun to work with. T7hen later on when I did some tests with oil paints and acrylics, I could see by setting a couple of paintings outside for a year that the acrylics were going to last a lot longer than the oils. The oils were already breaking down after a year of the elephants, but the acrylic paints, basically I was winning prizes with things 50:00that had sat out under a walnut tree for a year. It's good to test your materials because I do want stuff to last as long as it can.

Little Thunder: You've also done a number of black and white, pen and ink drawings.

Jacob: Yeah, and they are pen and ink drawings. I would just really encourage people not to use markers and crap like that because they're not permanent. They don't last. If you can get some good ink and real ink pens, you can do some drawings that will last for centuries. I've got a pile of them back there.

Little Thunder: Have you ever experimented with any three-dimensional media?

Jacob: Oh, sure. You're sitting looking at it. I've done mostly little sculptures. There was a guy that I really liked as a kid who was a painter named Thomas Hart Benton, who lived up in Kansas City and became known as the absolute leader of the regionalism that was going on at that point. Benton would make 51:00clay models of his figures and light them with a clamp-on light to see how the light was going to go, and then paint that.

He made little dioramas, lit them, and then painted the dioramas, and then put in the detail. I could see, watching him do that, the idea that you wanted to really give your, how to give your paintings a three-dimensional quality which I don't always do. Sometimes I like the linear quality you get, emulating ink strokes with your paint. I never know what I'm going to paint until I start on that painting.

Little Thunder: I was going to ask if sketching is important to you beforehand.

Jacob: Well, yeah, like the painting I'm working on right now, I did it as an ink drawing seven years ago. I wanted to do it as a painting then, but I had a zillion other things I was doing. It ended up in a book, so I could look at the book later and go, "That would make a nice painting." I've got about seven black and white books with New Mexico Press that I would eventually like to do.

Little Thunder: So how important are titles to your work?

Jacob: Oh, just absolutely no importance at all. It's something that's been thrust on me by art buyers that think every painting ought to have a title, so I really do try to give them the honest titles I can hang on them.

Little Thunder: I know some of your imagery is drawn from traditional Cherokee stories and then also these re-envisionings of stories as Debbie writes them.

Jacob: Yeah, and I draw a lot of my imagery right out of the woods. I love to go study the woods. I'm more of an expressionist than an impressionist. I'll go out and look at the woods all day and then come back and paint some stuff. It looks like what I was looking at, but it doesn't, so it's expressionism. I'm more of an expressionist than an impressionist.

Little Thunder: Your signature is pretty straight forward. Sometimes it takes artists a while how to find out how they want to do that.

Jacob: No, right on I wanted it to be so simple that anybody that looked at it that read any form of English at all could just pick it up and understand what it said. I did a, basically, the Greco-Roman alphabet from two or three thousand years ago and tried to put it into it.

Little Thunder: It has such a nice graphic quality. What's your creative process?

Jacob: What's that mean? I get up, I take a shower, I brush my teeth, I take care of whatever mundane business is staring me in the eye, and then I try to paint all day. That's my plan. Then some people show up, and I end up doing something besides painting, just hanging out, talking about politics, talking 54:00about art. Basically the conversation we're having here today is the conversation I've had every day of my life. I get the same questions; I give the same answers. I have the same amount of fun doing it that I always do.

Little Thunder: What do you want your artwork--how do you want it to impact the viewer?

Jacob: I want it to be on spaceships, flying out through the galaxies in the distant future. They could look out through space and then look at that and compare the two and realize that I'm doing the same thing.

Little Thunder: Looking back so far, what has been one of the pivotal moments of your art career?

Jacob: Pivotal moments would include meeting Allen Ginsburg; meeting Michael McClure, the poet; meeting Cecil Dick, the artist; meeting just the hundreds of 55:00cool--. I met Jerry Garcia back before they changed the name of their little band to the Grateful Dead. They were still the Warlocks, which I always thought was a stupid name for a band. I love the Grateful Dead. I was there the day they changed it, as a matter of fact. That's the pivotal moments in my life, were, like, meeting Jimi Hendrix, meeting just--.

Little Thunder: What was it like meeting Hendrix?

Jacob: Well, it was like everybody was wanting to meet Hendrix, and it was like we just pointed at each other and knew we were heading in the same direction, and that we didn't need to over-amp each other. He had things--when Jimi Hendrix 56:00recorded Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" was the exact moment that world music was integrated as we see it now. I don't know if Eric Clapton would have done Bob Marley songs if it hadn't been for Jimi Hendrix doing that Bob Dylan. It was when things came together in the world. It was a black-and-white moment. I don't see either of them as actually black or actually white at all. I see them as people who integrated, pulled things together.

I'm sure that the Army intelligence people on the CIA killed Hendrix because his message was just way too much more than they could bear. Dylan was well 57:00ensconced and protected. He would never stay at a hotel. He would stay with his friends. He would move around. What happened to Marley, he went up to New York to sign some record contracts (this is according to Marley) and he was going to be there one night, sign some contracts, and fly back.

In the middle of the night he woke up because he was being held down by two white guys with crew cuts, wearing suits, and a third guy came across the hotel room and tore open a manila bag that had a plastic envelope inside of it, and then slapped him several times as hard as he could. As Marley gasped and took an inhaled breath, in a choreographed motion, he threw the powder in the envelope right into his face. The three of them walked over to the sink in the room, washed their hands, and left. That was Marley's description of what happened.

A year and a half later, this vegetarian, this Rastafarian suddenly had cancers 58:00forming all over his body. When he came back to Trench Town the next day, he said, "I believe I've been assassinated," because I had friends that were sitting there with him when he said it. He thought that it was because he'd done the freedom concert for Zimbabwe, and he thought they were a combo of American CIA and South African Secret Police. That was his take on who they were, though nobody will ever really know until we really do develop time machines.

Little Thunder: Well, we're going to look at your paintings here in a minute.

Jacob: Good.

Little Thunder: Is there a low point in your career so far?

Jacob: No, I don't think so. I've had lots of high points, though. I'm not much for downers. I don't drink much. I don't take downer drugs. I don't hang out 59:00with people that consistently drag me into where I don't want to go. I just kind of avoid them. When my parents died, I was married thirty years ago, and she died. These were the only low points, were when people that I loved that I was really close to were pulled away from me. There's no getting over that. That's permanent. Everybody has it. A lot of people let it tear them down. I don't know. I guess it's torn me down to a degree. I miss my parents, miss them every day.

Little Thunder: Well, we're going to look at some of your work, here. So do you want to tell me about this painting?

Jacob: Well, I think it'd be better if I was quiet for a minute, and you just 60:00focused in on certain areas of it.

Little Thunder: I love the three different worlds, in a way, the three different world views.

Jacob: The designs at the top are all from Spiro Mound here in Oklahoma. Those are Spiro designs.

Little Thunder: The clouds in the middle--

Jacob: Yeah, it was kind of an homage to wide-screen TVs. You flip channels from one to another. Why would somebody want one of my paintings on the wall when they could have a wide-screen TV that shows a billion images? That's kind of a question more than an answer.

Little Thunder: Well, it's a wonderful piece. I really like it.

Jacob: Yeah, I enjoyed painting it. It took weeks and weeks.

Little Thunder: Okay, you want to talk to us about this painting?

Jacob: Yeah, this painting, I've done a few paintings of the Cherokee Little 61:00People. Now, this lady represents the Queen of the Little People, and you can kind of tell that by her regal demeanor, but I think all of the Cherokee Little People women have that regal demeanor. I think that the queen might be an interchangeable position. Now, the Queen of the Ants that she's talking to is obviously the Queen of the Ants because she's got the wings in case she needs to make a fast getaway, because sometimes queens have to beat it because their colony is being destroyed. It's part of their survival technique.

Little Thunder: And you signed it twice, it looks like.

Jacob: I did, and I didn't realize that until I had it framed. I'll probably remove one of those, but most people don't notice that it's signed at all, let alone that it's signed in opposite corners.

Little Thunder: It's got some wonderful colors, and I love the imagery.

Jacob: I'm glad you caught that. (Laughter) I'd forgotten that. I knew I'd signed it twice, but--.

Little Thunder: And how about this painting?

Jacob: Well, it's one of my typical paintings, and it's got Rabbit and Beaver in a canoe. I put it up on Facebook, and the inimitable and famous Creek poet Joy Harjo saw it and said "I want that!" She's going to pick it up on the fifth of October which is just a couple of days. She already sent me a check for it, so it's real nice.

Little Thunder: And she does canoeing.

Jacob: Yeah. It's real nice when you're an artist and you sell artwork to poets that you admire. I'd rather give it to her than sell it to most people I've met. It thrilled me, and I recommend to anybody out there, they ought to read her poetry.

Little Thunder: All right, this is another piece.

Jacob: Yeah, and the painting you're looking at is two feet by two foot, but 63:00when you paint them that way, they're three feet across and three feet high. That's why I like doing the paintings as diamonds. What you're looking at there is one of my more or less typical animal dances that incorporate most, if not all, of the pantheon of Cherokee animal characters, from Rabbit who's the trickster messenger to--all the animals have a big place in the Cherokee stories. They're a lot more important than people. They always saw them as people, though. It was about the Bear People and the Bird People.

The animal people were considered as much people, if not more people than the people people. They would be the Bear People, the yona yunwi, the people that 64:00are bears. Anyway, I think that's going to be the cover of SAIL magazine, which is [Studies in American Indian Literatures]. I was kind of glad that it wasn't the Journal of American Indian Literature, which would be the JAIL magazine. The girl who's the editor of the magazine is scraping up the money to buy the painting from me, which I thought was pretty nice of her to do that.

Little Thunder: That's wonderful.

Jacob: I want to see it hanging on her wall as much as she does. It's real important to me where the paintings end up. Probably close to a hundred of my paintings have ended up in museums. Collectors who have bought my paintings donated them to museum collections. I couldn't afford to give all those paintings to museums. I've used the money to feed my family and help my friends 65:00for the last thirty years. I don't have any extra cash to give away paintings, but they're going to some pretty good people out there, good museums.

Little Thunder: Well, thank you so much for your time today, Murv.

Jacob: Yeah, hopefully some of the people before we wrap this up that have my paintings would consider giving them to museums so they will not just end up in some creepy little private collection. Anyway, yes, it was a pleasure talking to you. It's always a pleasure to see you.

------- End of interview -------