Oral history interview with Roy Boney

Little Thunder: My name is Julie Pearson-Little Thunder. Today is Friday, January 29, 2016. I'm interviewing Roy Boney for the Oklahoma Native Artist Project sponsored by the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at Oklahoma State University. Roy, you're a visual artist, writer, and animation film maker, and your art often combines technology with language preservation. We're here at the Cherokee Heritage Center [in Tahlequah] and we'll be looking at some of your art here in a moment. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me.

Boney: I'm glad to be here.

Little Thunder: Where were you born and where did you grow up?

Boney: I was born in Claremore, Oklahoma, at the Indian Hospital there. I grew up in Locust Grove.

Little Thunder: What did your mom and dad do for a living?

Boney: My dad is retired now, but he was a construction worker. He did heavy equipment operation for concrete and my mom was a homemaker.

Little Thunder: Brothers or sisters?

Boney: No brothers or sisters. Just me.

Little Thunder: Lucky. How about your relationship with your grandparents on 1:00either side?

Boney: I didn't know my grandparents on my father's side. They died before I was born. On my mother's side, my grandfather's name was Toodie Henson. He passed away a couple years ago now. But my grandmother was named Sarah Henson, and she passed away about twenty years ago now. My grandmother actually had a pretty big influence on me in terms of being an artist. She used to always bring me--she'd go to the mission over in Pryor and get used books and stuff, and she would bring me these illustrated story books of Sherlock Holmes, War of the Worlds, and stuff. She was always feeding my imagination with that kind of thing.

Little Thunder: Cool. Tell us a little bit about your exposure to Cherokee culture and language growing up.

Boney: I grew up in a home with Cherokee-speaking parents. Most of my family, 2:00aunts and uncles, everybody, they all spoke Cherokee. If they didn't speak it, they understood it and could respond back. I was immersed in that environment. There were certain things that I didn't know were distinctly Cherokee till I got older, like if you stub your toe, you say ai yo or ee ah. I just thought everybody did that. The first time I realized that, I was like, "Well, that's just a very Cherokee thing." So it was a big part of my life growing up. That's what informed why I wanted to do what I do now.

Little Thunder: How about any other extended family members who were artistically inclined?

Boney: On my mom's side, her first cousin is Brooks Henson, the Cherokee painter. I grew up down the road from him. As a kid, I would sometimes go down to his studio.

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

Boney: My first memory--actually growing up in Locust Grove, the big figures there are Bill Glass, Willard Stone, and Bill Rabbit. Everyone would say, "Indian art," and that's the first three names that pop up. I remember, quite distinctly, seeing a lot of their work as a kid growing up. They were examples, showing that you can do this. This is something that's a valid way to express yourself. But on the other hand, the other side of it, as a kid that was always drawing and interested in art, there were some people that would bring these touristy-looking magazine pictures and stuff, like the Indian maiden by the river, and they would say, "Oh, you should do this kind of art." And I was, "I don't like that. That wasn't my experience. I didn't know anyone like that in that picture." I always wanted to express and show the way I grew up and the 4:00people that I know.

Little Thunder: How about your first memory of making art?

Boney: That's an interesting question. That's one of those things where as long as I can remember, I've always been making art. I can't remember when I wasn't. My parents, though, they have the very first drawing I ever did. They still have it. It was of a tick. It was a round circle with a dot in the center with the legs. They said I drew that when I was about two and they've had it ever since.

Little Thunder: Wow. (Laughter) Art experiences in elementary school?

Boney: Yeah, I was always drawing. I was the kind of kid that sat in the back and would be doodling on pictures and would get in trouble. Sometimes they thought I wasn't paying attention. But I was also--a lot of times, if some project came up, they said, "You want to draw the story book? Or you want to do 5:00this poster for the school? You want to do this or that? I was the go-to person in school for a lot of that.

Little Thunder: You had some encouragement from the teachers?

Boney: Uh-huh. I had good--the teachers would always see that because I was always really quiet. That was the only thing anyone could really connect with me, in that level. So the teachers used that quite a lot to get a better working relationship with me as a student.

Little Thunder: How about middle school or high school? What were your art experiences there?

Boney: In middle school was when it kind of became more serious, I guess. Like I said, I was doodling and drawing and all that. I think it was the fifth grade at Locust Grove. That's when they started junior high, and I moved to the other school. There was a teacher there named Mrs. Roland and she was the art teacher, but she was also the journalism teacher. I was in the art class and she 6:00encouraged me to take the journalism class, too. In there, I wound up doing cartoons for the middle school paper. That's where I was, "This is kind of fun. Being able to do this. You draw something and it gets published." The next year in sixth grade was the next major event, I guess, you would say, is that I met James Sinclair. Mr. Sinclair is from Tahlequah, but he was teaching art at Locust Grove. From the sixth grade to the twelfth grade, he was my art teacher. He had a pretty big influence on me.

He's a ceramicist, but he encouraged--because I like to draw. I still draw. That's my main medium at the moment, still--but he encouraged me to do this. He'd bring me books and examples of different types of art and all this. So throughout the years, he always was my art teacher. Then in high school, no one in my family had ever gone to college. That was never even a consideration of 7:00any kind. Like I said, my dad was a construction worker. During the summers, I would work with him out on the road. My goal was to do that. I thought, "You make pretty good money here!" As a kid, you're "That's really great." I thought, "I'm going to do this, too." My parents didn't want me to do that. They kept saying, "You need to do something different, but we can't afford to send you to school." Mr. Sinclair and his wife, Connie--she was the high school counselor--took it upon themselves get me college applications. They helped me sign up for scholarship opportunities and they also took me on a tour of different colleges in the area. They really encouraged me to do this. So I wound up being accepted into Oklahoma State.

Little Thunder: That's wonderful. Yeah, I was wondering, what drew you to Oklahoma State University?

Boney: I wound up there because when I was in high school, trying to figure out 8:00you're going to do, drawing, like I said, was my always favorite thing to do. At that time, I was really into comic books and illustration, like book illustration and that type of stuff. I was looking at colleges and no schools had that type of degree program. There was fine arts and there was commercial art, but nothing specifically in that vein. If it was, it was way far off, like in California somewhere. At that point, I wasn't ready to go that far from home. I'd never been anywhere, either. I'd always lived in Locust Grove. Locust Grove is pretty close to the border of Arkansas. Arkansas was the only state I'd ever been to, just right across the border. So I wasn't ready to go that far. When I applied to these places, at Oklahoma State at their program, they had a graphic 9:00design program that had an illustration component. That's what really drew me there. I think OU has one like that now, too. At the time, when I was applying, no schools near had that.

Little Thunder: What were some of the standout teachers there for you?

Boney: One of my favorites was Carey Hissey. She was a professor in the design track of the school there. She, initially, she comes across as very harsh, I guess. She's from England so she has a different way of expressing things. She's very forthright. A lot of the students in the program were intimidated by her, kind of scared. Once you get to know her, she's a wonderful person, a great teacher and she really encourages you. She and I worked really closely together. She had a background in illustration, too. There wasn't a lot of people that 10:00were just straight illustration yet. I wound up taking a lot of classes with her, especially in the later part of the college career because she taught most of those independent studies. So she had a pretty big impact on my studies. The other person I remember quite a lot was Mark Sisson, the drawing instructor. Again, drawing is my forte, my favorite thing. He recognized that, too. He worked with me quite a lot to expand my vision of what I thought of as drawing. A lot of people will initially think of drawing as trying to reproduce exactly what you see. That's one method of drawing, but you can go beyond that and get really expressive with it, with the different lines and mark making. He's the one that introduced that concept to me.

Little Thunder: Do you remember your thesis show? Was is focused on graphic arts?

Boney: Yeah, the thesis show--I think we had like seven or eight students in it. 11:00We, as a group, as the design group, we had to put together the show. We went with the theme of old sci-fi monster movie posters from the '50s and '60s. I think it was called The Emergence of the Undergrad or something like that. (Laughter) I did the illustration for the big poster and some of the other students did the design of the texts and all that. No, that was called The Creation of the Undergrads is what it was. It was based on these old movies like the Creation of the Humanoids. We riffed on that.

Little Thunder: How funny. What happened after you graduated from OSU?

Boney: One thing I will add in here before I move on to that. When I was an undergrad, I got the apprenticeship--I don't know if they still do it or not--with Bill Goldston. They did the Universal Art Limited Editions apprenticeship at the printmaking studio in Long Island.

Little Thunder: Oh, wonderful.

Boney: Yeah, I got that, more towards the end of my college career there. It delayed my graduation by a semester, but I really wanted to do this. I went to New York for a semester. Bill Goldston, he's got connections in Oklahoma. There's why they have that at the university, or they did. At the printmaking studio, we got to work with some pretty major artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. We got to work with them making prints. That was amazing.

Little Thunder: Wow.

Boney: I got to work on a big print with James Rosenquist for a while. This is like a dream come true. It was really great. While I was there doing that, that 13:00really sparked my interest in graphics even more and printmaking. Then I came back and that semester after that is when I graduated.

Little Thunder: Were you doing any Native imagery at all?

Boney: Not a lot. Not any with printmaking. Just in terms of drawing and sketching, I was doing that. But I hadn't really focused on any of it seriously yet. I was still trying to find my voice as an artist. You're still thinking, "Can I do this? Should I do that?" My primary focus at the time was I wanted to get into comic book illustration. A lot of my work was geared toward that and more toward the independent type of publishing. That actually leads into what happened after I graduated there.

I graduated in the spring of 2002. I was looking for a job and all that, once 14:00you get out. I got a job as a graphic designer called at a company called CellMark. It was a biotechnology company in Hot Springs, Arkansas. They specialized in cell staining. I was the designer for the company. I would do the logos and the catalogs, the website and that kind of thing. It was a very corporate structure and that wasn't what I was wanting to do, looking for. After hours, I was still working toward this whole comic book idea. Around this time, the Internet, it had been around a while, but it was really taking off. So I started doing web comics. I did several Internet web series of different stories. I had started one when I was still at Stillwater. It was called Plug in 15:00Boy. It was about a robotic boy that lived in the basement that was plugged to the wall. He couldn't leave. That gained a small following and I kept going at it for a few years.

When I was in Hot Springs, working for this company, one of the readers had contacted me out of the blue and he said, "I'm a writer. I've got this script. I'm looking for an artist to illustrate it. I really like your work. Would you consider this?" It was one of those things that you were, "I don't know if this is legit or anything." So he sent me the script. I read it and I really liked it. We started corresponding back and forth. We hit it off. His name's Matt Shepard. He's from Canada. I still have never met him, but we still correspond quite a lot. We start hashing out this idea. The basic story is, it was a horror story and it was about zombies, but rather than the zombies being just creatures 16:00or monsters, in our story, the zombies retained their thoughts and memories of who they were when they were alive. The flesh was rotting away, but since they still were people in a sense, they formed together as a civil rights groups to fight for their rights as zombies. We shopped it around to different publishers and we got rejected quite a lot, but a company that was called SLG Graphics out in San Jose, California picked it up and we had a pretty good run with them. We did six issues. It got collected into a graphic novel. We went on the comic convention circuit, doing books signings for a while. That was really fun, but I wound up quitting the job at Hot Springs to do that for a little. That was fun, doing some freelance illustration and that kind of thing for a while, but then, 17:00like a lot of lot of things, it falls apart at a certain point.

Little Thunder: Right. You were getting some royalties?

Boney: Yeah. Yeah. It didn't last, but it was a good run. So I moved back to Oklahoma and I started working at--it was called the American Indian Resource Center. I got the job primarily based on my work as a comic book artist. It was run by Wathene Young and she was always looking for people to do these grants that she had. They were getting several grants to go in the schools in the area to work with students, to work with Indian students for some type of art project. The projects that we did focused on language and culture and history. What I wound up doing, I got the grant portion that went to the Creek Nation. I 18:00would go to the Creek schools and work with the students. Then we wound up making several short animated films in the Creek language. Then I did some in some Cherokee schools, too, so I had this mix of students that were working on these various language animations. Again, that was a grant program so the grant ran out. Wathene is a very resourceful person.

She basically came to me one day and told me, "The grant's about to run out. Here's an application to grad school." I said, "I don't know if I really want to go." She said, "Well, you really need to go. It was an application to the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. They had recently announced the fellowship for the Sequoyah National Research Center. That's what she had given me. She 19:00said, "Here's the fellowship that will pay for everything. Here's the application," she said. "Fill it out." So I did. It was another interesting connection after I sent the application in. I got a call from the research center a couple months later. It was from Dr. Dan Littlefield out there. He said, "We read your application." I thought he was going to give me the rejection thing. Then he asked, "Did you grow up in Locust Grove?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "I know your dad and his brothers and everybody." Because he's from Salina. He knew everybody. Knew my whole family. I said, "Yeah, that's who my family is." He was talking about growing up with them and everything. The he said, "If you're interested in coming here, this opportunity is yours." I took it and that is why I wound up going to grad school.

Little Thunder: That's cool. Just quickly, your work with Wathene, were you 20:00animation films? Yes or no?

Boney: Yes. At that--

Little Thunder: And you didn't have a background in that right?

Boney: Not really. In undergrad, I did a short animation that was an assignment to do a commercial. You had the option of doing a print campaign or something, so I did a little animated short using the Orkin Company as an example. I made this a little thing with bugs having a party in the basement and the Orkin man comes and runs them out. That was my first real serious attempt at doing any kind of animation. In the meantime, I would play around with just making my own shorts. Then I started doing stop-motion animation, and that led through the work at Wathene's, which most of that was the stop-motion animation.

Little Thunder: But you didn't do the Roe Rock [Incident] there?

Boney: No.

Little Thunder: That was a later product?

Boney: Yeah.

Little Thunder: But you kind of learned a little bit about how to do that?

Boney: Yeah, the animation you just mentioned was part of my graduate thesis.

Little Thunder: Okay.

Boney: Yes. When I went to the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, as a fellow for the Sequoyah Research Center, one of my job duties was to go through their Cherokee collection. The goal of the Research Center is the collection of Native American writings, whether it's a manuscript, newspaper, magazine. Whenever anything is written by a Native American, they collect a copy of it. But they also have a lot of historical records. They have a lot of microphone about the Trail of Tears and all of that. As a graduate student, I was transcribing a lot of that stuff. I was going through these actual rolls of microfilm, showing the 22:00documentation of moving the Cherokees from Georgia to Oklahoma, or Indian Territory. So I got really immersed in that story, just by seeing all these source documents.

In the art department there, as a grad student there, they were "Find your own way, your own project, what it is you're going to do." I told them, I'd like to tell this story, using technology in a digital format. I was getting more interested in that after doing the animations and the other things. So the program worked with me. They didn't have an actual animation program there. But the staff, they worked with me pretty closely and let me develop my own plan. I wound up writing a script. It was about the Cherokee Removal. It was telling the 23:00story of one family as they got moved out of their house and moved over to Indian Territory. Dr. Littlefield and I, applied for a grant through the Research Center, and we got the grant from the [inaudible] Foundation in New York to fund the Cherokee animation. So I did that.

Little Thunder: All done in the language?

Boney: Yeah, in the language. Actually, in that one, most of my family are doing the speaking parts in that. (Laughter) That led to doing the other animation in the Creek language, the Incident at Rock Roe. The reason that one got made was the Cherokee one had some success with it. The Sequoyah Research Center had--they still do have a partnership with the Arkansas Humanities Council. They wanted to--had this project in which they wanted to show the Arkansas connection 24:00to the Removal, which a lot of tribes passed through Little Rock on the way over. So we wrote a grant to the Humanities Council to fund this animation. This one, since we had already done a Cherokee one, they wanted to focus on another tribe. I, with my connections in Creek Nation, worked up this. We did the Incident at Rock Roe animation, which is a site in Arkansas where this occurred with the Creeks fighting against the government there, I guess you would say. Trying to remove them and all that, so that's how that project came about.

Little Thunder: I've watched them both and they're really wonderful. A friend of mine, Lillian Williams, is in Roe Rock, but I love that you took acts of resistance to tell this very simple story around these acts of resistance.

Boney: That was really purposeful in the sense that a lot of scholarship on the 25:00Indian Removal is done by non-Natives. They have a certain--while some of it is good scholarship and research and publication, they're lacking a certain connection to it. For me, having a direct connection to that as being a Cherokee in Oklahoma--because that's why my family's here. Seeing the source documents and what really happened versus an interpretation in the scholarly journal or book, had a really moving impact on me. I wanted to tell a story from the point of view of the Natives that that was happening to.

Little Thunder: After you graduated with your MFA, what happened?

Boney: While I was still in grad school, based on those animations that I was working on, I was invited to give a talk at the National Trail of Tears 26:00Association Conference, which in that year--it was 2007, I think. That's when I graduated. That year, they had it in Springfield, Missouri. I went up there and gave a talk about the work I was doing and showed the animations and there was a gentleman named Dr. Morton, Neal Morton, that was in the audience. He, at the time, was the executive director for education at Cherokee Nation. He came up to me and asked me, "Do you have any job prospects? What is your goal here?" I said "I'm from Oklahoma and in the area and I'd like to move back home." He said, "What you're doing is so interesting. We could use someone like you at the Cherokee Nation." I graduated and moved into that job where I still am at now.

Little Thunder: Still working in Language under the Department of Education?

Boney: Uh-huh. Yeah.

Little Thunder: Cool. You're continuing your studio art on the side this whole time, I assume?

Boney: Yeah.

Little Thunder: What was an early show or award that was important to you?

Boney: The first award that I remember winning that was related to Indian art, I was twelve years old, and I entered a piece in the Five Civilized Tribes Native youth art competition. The piece I did was called The Crawdad Hunters. It was these two kids in the creek, hunting for crawdads. It was a little drawing, not so big, but it won an honorable mention. I was, "That's kind of neat." I didn't expect anything out of it. That was always in the back of my mind. From that 28:00age, it wasn't until 2006, when I was in grad school that I entered another Native art show. That was because of being at the Sequoyah Research Center. The art collector, Bill Wiggins, has his collection there. He would come around and he would say, "You need to enter this art competition." I was like, "I don't know." I was really wavering on it. Like Wathene, he came in one day with an application, saying, "You need to do this." (Laughter)

Little Thunder: Nothing like pressure.

Boney: Yeah. I told him, "Okay, I'll enter it." I didn't know what to enter. I didn't have a piece ready. When you're in grad school, you're not the wealthiest of people in the world. (Laughter) I went to my apartment and had this application. I distinctly remember, it wouldn't be until a couple days later 29:00until I got paid. I had twenty dollars to last the rest of the week. I was looking at this twenty-dollar bill, and it's got Andrew Jackson on it, who was the main architect of Removal, and being, working with all that material related to the Removal at the Sequoyah Research Center, I just looked at it and said, "I can do something with this." I did a pen and ink drawing based on Andrew Jackson's portrait on the twenty-dollar bill of him as very monstrous and grotesque-looking figure. That was the piece that I entered in the Trail of Tears art show. I'd submitted the image and I didn't think anything about it. About a month later, the curator here at the Heritage Center at the time, Michael Yanz, called me and he said, "Would you be available, could you come to 30:00the Heritage Center on this date?"--whatever date the awards ceremony was. I was, "Yeah, I guess I can be there." Bill Wiggins, he said, "I can drive you over there." We rode over there together, and they started naming off all the winners. They went through everything, and I'm thinking, "I didn't win anything." Then they announced the Grand Prize Award and I won.

Little Thunder: Oh wow.

Boney: That was, for me, it was a big shock, but also, I see that as a show that put me on track to really start seriously pursuing Native art.

Little Thunder: Can you describe your style at that time?

Boney: I was working in a very graphic format. Still coming from a background as a designer and being influenced by the comic book style of illustration. I was 31:00working quite heavily in pen-and-ink at that time. The thicker piece is a pen-and-ink drawing. It does have the comic book look and feel. The comic book series I'd done had just come out a year and a half before that. I still had copies of the book laying around, too, on through and all that. That was about zombies and these scary monster things and that just all came together. That was a big influence on how that piece turned out because it was particularly influenced by that particular, I guess, American comic book style of art.

Little Thunder: What was the year of the award again?

Boney: Two thousand six.

Little Thunder: How important are galleries for you starting out?

Boney: It took a long time for me to get into a gallery. Starting out, initially, with the Grand Prize award at this show, that was my introduction 32:00into the art world, the Native art world. No one knew who I was. I didn't know anybody else. There are all these magazines and newspapers of doing interviews and articles about that particular show. That threw me in the deep end really fast. Bill Wiggins said--he still serves as a mentor to me. I still have a lot of contact with him--at that time, he kept saying, he gave a lot of encouragement to keep making more pieces and to enter more shows. As the--couple years later, I was still entering these shows and I was starting to build a reputation and winning some awards and things.

Little Thunder: Were you doing the Cherokee Art Market, too, at that point? And Cherokee Homecoming?

Boney: I didn't start the Art Market until a few years after that.

Little Thunder: Okay.

Boney: I was primarily doing the Trail of Tears show here and the Cherokee Homecoming Show here, and the Five Civilized Tribes show in Muskogee. For years, 33:00those were the only venues that I really did anything for. But on the side, I was still doing some work related to comic books. That was actually really getting more notice than the Native art was. At that point, that's when I decided I wanted to start merging the two together. I really started heavily using that influence of the comics into my fine art versus the commercial art I was doing, too. That led into, I did some contributing work to a graphic novel called Trickster, which hit pretty big. It got nominated for the Eisner Award, which in the comics world is like the Oscar, basically. When that happened, that brought a lot of attention to Native arts and just Native comic book art, which 34:00is still a fledgling movement that is really happening now. At the time, it was even more in its early stages.

When that happened, other things came along. I started contributing these stories and illustrations to these various anthologies about Natives and comics and that kind of thing. I guess one of the biggest, at that point, in 2011 or '12 (I forget when) '13, maybe--I don't remember the exact year--that's when Indian Country Today approached me. I did the cover for their magazine and I did an interior feature about the Cherokee language and the writing system and all of that. That particular cover was nominated for Magazine Cover of the Year by, I think it's the American Society of Magazine Editors or something? That meant 35:00it got put up with the likes of Fortune and Newsweek and all that. That provided a really big moment of exposure for me. It didn't win, but it was still--

Little Thunder: Fantastic. Yeah--

Boney: Yeah.

Little Thunder: You've been giving some comic book workshops, I think?

Boney: Yeah.

Little Thunder: Did one with Arigon Starr in Tulsa--

Boney: Yeah.

Little Thunder: What have those been like?

Boney: Those have been fun. It's interesting to see. And now that art form is recognized, it's a legitimate art form now. When I was a kid, it wasn't. It was still junk, throwaway kind of art. With people seeing it in different light now, there's a lot of people that come out that want to tell their own stories. There's a lot of people that--I think, in that medium, that's a way that people that normally don't get to tell the stories, can tell the stories that way. They 36:00have the potential to reach a really wide audience. So when we do these workshops, we focus it on being able to tell your own story, whether that's about your life, or whether you've invented this Native superhero, whatever it is, we encourage people to think about their experiences as Native people versus what they see as being published, and then, they can put their own twist on it.

That's the backdrop. We then go into the basics about visual storytelling, framing of the images, going from Point A to Point B, and all that. Talk about basic drawing skills and what kinds of tools you can use to add the text. We cover the whole start-to-finish idea of doing comics. In some of the workshops--I did one in Santa Fe a couple years ago--the people in it will come out with a short two or three page story that's complete. Sometimes they're not 37:00long enough to do that, but they get the basic idea of what they can do, moving forward. We've done some workshops with some language programs from other tribes, for them to learn how to make a comic book so they can do it in their language. That type of thing. It's been really fun.

Little Thunder: You've traveled out of state a bit to do that?

Boney: Yeah.

Little Thunder: What are some of the places you've gone?

Boney: I have been to Santa Fe a couple of times doing that. I've done it once in Seattle. I've done it San Francisco. I've done it in Chicago, doing that type of talk. It's a really popular topic. With Arigon, she's really successful with her Super Indian comic series, but she and Lee Francis, and Michael Sheyahshe and a few other artists, we've created the Indigenous Narratives collective. 38:00We're an organization of Native comic creators. We have writers and artists and everyone in between that wants to make comic books. Our goal is to publish comic books by Native creators. We're still a startup and we're still working towards that goal, but our first project was a small mini comic, which is about twelve pages long, just showcasing this idea that Natives can make comics, too. That led to the current project which is about the Code Talkers. Various tribes have their own code talkers and I'm contributing a story about the Cherokee code talkers of World War I. The actual book itself will be out this May. We're real excited. We're actually putting out a full graphic novel with this now.

Little Thunder: That is wonderful. You had a solo exhibition at Southern Plains Museum in 2013. Was that your first solo show?

Boney: Yeah, it was my very first one.

Little Thunder: What was that like?

Boney: That was pretty fun. They just invite you to come down to have the show. I'm still learning who's who and what's what in the Indian art world. I'm friends with Bobby Martin, and I told him about it. He said, "That's a big deal. You need to do it." He said that he had a show down there and that was one of his first solo shows, too. He said it really helped out his career pretty well. The more people I talked to, everyone had that same reaction. "That's a big deal to have a show there." So I put together the show--

Little Thunder: How many pieces?

Boney: I think it was twenty-four. For me, it was interesting, as an artist, at 40:00least for me, when you're working, you're just on that one piece or two pieces--whatever you're doing at that time--and it's rare when you get to see all your work in one spot. You start seeing the theme, I guess, or pattern in your work that, at least for me, I'd never noticed before. It was, "Wow, they have this this thread that I'd never seen before." (Laughter)

Little Thunder: What's one of the best compliments that you've gotten on your work?

Boney: One of the best compliments? I guess there's two ways to look at it. One compliment I remember--it's not really a compliment, but you can kind of take it as one--is I did a drawing of Senator Henry Dawes who was the architect of the Dawes Allotment. He basically took tribes for all their land in Indian 41:00Territory. I did from his official portrait. He was, basically, he was literally eating Indians. He had his hand in--it was actually in here, I think, up in the gallery. It didn't win anything, but it was hanging there and a lot of people were really commenting on it. Some really liked it, some hated it. This lady, I don't know who she was, she said, "Someone told me that you were the artist of that." I said, "Yeah." She said, "How could you make such an awful thing?" (Laughter) In a sense, I thought, "Well, she doesn't like it." But that was sort of a compliment to me, because that was the point.

Little Thunder: Right.

Boney: This was a horrible thing that he had done and I wanted to portray him as the monster he was. The other compliment that really sticks to me is a few years 42:00ago, I went to that exhibit in Paris. I forget the exact name. It was this real long name in French. Basically got the Salon there in France, so we had the Native American Indie Art Delegation. It was all mainly Oklahoma artists, not all of them, but most of them.

Little Thunder: Edgar Heap of Birds was there?

Boney: Uh-huh.

Little Thunder: Center.

Boney: Yeah.

Little Thunder: I think it's the Biennale--

Boney: Yeah. So I was in that. I went to Paris. While you're there at this show, it's this huge exhibition space, it's the Salon of history that you read about in history books. It's this really great feeling that "My art's in here now, too." Being there, you're in an entirely different environment than you would be here in Oklahoma. The people that would come through the booth to look at the 43:00art, most of them were expecting, since it's in Europe, they're expecting a certain image of art that they have in their mind. There's this one guy that came up and he really liked my painting that I had. It was a watercolor and it was an image of these figures wearing the Cherokee Booger Mask, and they're enveloped in a lot of smoke.

The idea of it is, it was about dreams and how they can be good and bad and how do you react and deal with that? This guy came up to me and he didn't speak English and I didn't speak French. But he had an iPad with him and it had the little translator app on it. He would speak into it in French and he would show me what he was saying. The first thing he said, he said, "I've always like 44:00Indian art. I've always been interested in Native history and that kind of thing." He said, "Then I see your piece, and it totally changed what I think of Native art can be." That really stuck with me, because I was literally a foreign land, not being able to speak directly to this person, and it still had this profound impact on him as a viewer. I thought that was pretty neat.

Little Thunder: That's very neat. What a wonderful opportunity.

Boney: Yeah, that was great to do that and go see a lot of the actual art that you study when you're going to college. You see these things in books, but seeing a lot of the real pieces is really nice.

Little Thunder: Right. You're working in the language program here at Cherokee Nation. How has your work, your day job, impacted your artwork?

Boney: They really complement each other. Initially, I was hired to do Cherokee language media projects for the tribe, which was animation and websites and that kind of thing. At that time, when I first started, the Cherokee Nation had started the Cherokee language immersion school. At that point, it was still relatively new because every year, they add a grade to the school. At that point, it was up to second or third grade, I forget which, but we were making all this content for the kids to use in the class, and things to watch. But then they reached that age where that stuff didn't really keep their interest, anymore. That led to finding ways to interact with them at their level. That why I moved into getting technology to support the Cherokee language. Getting ways 46:00to use the Cherokee on the computer and on their phones, because a lot of them have phones, no matter if they're still small, they still have a phone. Getting to that point, no one knew how. How do you do that? How do you get our language on that? Being an artist, coming from the background--one thing I took away from learning design is that, basically, as a designer, you're trying to solve a visual problem, essentially. That problem-solving skill still applies to everything else.

Trying to think of a creative solution of how can we get our students to retain their interest in Cherokee, in the world where they live now? "How about we do this? We'll get Cherokee on the iPhone or whatever." That led to those projects, 47:00and then in turn, impacts when I go make a piece of art, a lot of my art incorporates the language into it. I'm not a fluent speaker of Cherokee, like most people my generation. Even though we had parents that spoke Cherokee, we didn't pick it up. Sadly, it's almost a generation-wide issue. Having these new devices and tools that you can just have in your pocket, that has access to the language, I can literally text someone I know, a Cherokee speaker, a relative, co-worker, ask them, "How do you say this? How would you write this?" They can text back in the language. They can record it. They can say it. I can use those types of resources and import that into my work. As the technology evolved, I 48:00can actually do some of my drawing on these things, too.

I do a lot of my sketching on there, and do a real painting based on what I'd done on the phone or the iPad or whatever. All that revolves back into my day job, which, a lot of it is maintaining the relationships with the technology sector, to maintain our language in these products and keeping the technology world in at the same time, trying to keep it grounded within the Cherokee community. My job at the Cherokee nation is being there and making sure our community members can use it and keep in touch with the business side of it and bring it together. But that language is always seeping into my personal life and the artwork. I'm learning quite a lot of Cherokee and my parents speak. My dad's a fluent speaker. He can read it and write the language, so I can have a lot more communication with him, too, now.

Little Thunder: That's wonderful. I don't know if--I thought that you had been 49:00to a couple of Ted talks. You've been at Google and some other places. Were you involved at all with the efforts to put Cherokee on (Rosetta) Stone or Mango or anything?

Boney: Yeah, we did the Mango software, recently, where Cherokee's in that now. Rosetta Stone is a bit of a harder task because--several years ago, under the previous Cherokee Nation under the administration of Chad Smith, we were approached by Rosetta Stone to do this. But it led to a lot of licensing issues and copyrights and stuff that the tribe didn't agree to, so it got scrapped. We're trying again, but some of the same things are still happening. The Chickasaw Nation recently did it. I know the director down there of their program, and I've been talking to him. How did they go around this stuff?

Little Thunder: Yeah, what were the--

Boney: We're still looking at getting Rosetta Stone into it, but we have done Mango. There's another program called Duolingo that we've been looking at. On top of that, we have our own projects that we're doing, too, apps and that kind of thing.

Little Thunder: Cool. In terms of your animation films and casting--and I know you cast some of your family [in your Cherokee work]--but when you're casting a film or when you are casting for [Incident at] Roe Rock for Mvskoke language, do you want to hear people read? Do you go by references? Do you do combination of both?

Boney: It's a combination of both. A lot of it has to do with just knowing different people and they'll know someone that could do this or might be interested. It's a big combination of finding because--

Little Thunder: The voice has to work with the image too.

Boney: Yeah, because a lot of times, in Indian Country, if you put out a call for actors, not a lot of people show up sometimes. You've got to know where they live, basically, to go find them. Then, working with them to elicit a certain emotional response, that's another challenge in itself, too. Getting that side of it. There's another issue. Some people are not comfortable speaking their language because they feel they don't say it well enough. There's all these other issues at play, so you're working with all this, trying to get people to say these lines so you can make this project.

Little Thunder: Right. I was wondering, too, in terms of whether it's comic books or graphic novels, I know that often a book has to get reviewed to 52:00actually get noticed. Has it been hard to get people to review?

Boney: Not really. In a sense, these days, especially with social media, there's a lot of, I guess you could say there are activists online that really keep an eye out for these types of projects. They latch onto it and they'll review it and they share it and someone else picks it up. It goes viral pretty quickly. A good example of it, Debbie Reese. She does that blog about the American Indians in children's literature. She had picked up on the Code Talkers project that we were doing. At the time, we had plans to publish the book, but we didn't have funding for it yet. So we decided let's--I finished my story--and we said, "Let's sell that one as a digital download towards a fundraiser to help fund 53:00this book. Somebody posted a link, and she seen it and then she reviewed it. Her review hit all these other blogs, and all these other people, and then we got a lot of press out of that little thing just because of the social media thing going on.

Little Thunder: Right, that's just a powerful platform. You won Best of Show at the 2015 Five Tribes Show?

Boney: Uh-huh.

Little Thunder: What did that mean to you? You had a little bit of history with that show already.

Boney: Yeah, that was really a great moment for me, too. Like I mentioned, my first entry there was when I was twelve years old, so I had a good connection there for years. I'm always entering the show there, too. Again with Bill Wiggins, he's comes to these shows, and I think he's on the Board or he used to be on the Board at the museum there. He's always been a mentor, and he always gives me good advice and comments. I would enter my pieces there and he'd always 54:00tell me, "This museum has been here a long time." He said, "The viewership is more traditional, conservative." He said, "A lot of your stuff, I don't know if it's going to make it here," but he said, "Keep trying, keep at it, keep going" so I did.

I just kept doing what I do, and as an artist, you're always trying to improve your technique, your message. You're always after getting better, so I just kept doing my best to improve. Again, my favorite form of art is drawing because I think it's the most immediate. You make a mark and there it is. I did this drawing of Deer Woman, holding a figure that has a partially amputated leg due 55:00to all the diabetes and health issues. But it's based on the Renaissance theme of the Virgin Mary holding the body of Christ in her arms. I transposed that into using these images from Cherokee heritage and stories and things I was making a statement on where we are now as a people in terms of our language and culture, where were going, where we've been and what can we do to reverse the erosion of it. It was a drawing and historically, according to what people told me, I don't know how true this is, but they said drawings rarely win any Best of Show award anywhere. I didn't expect--

Little Thunder: Right.

Boney: --at that time, too, I remember I was really busy and I was thinking, "I'm not even going to go to the opening." One of my friends--her name is Verna Bates, she does a lot of gourd work--she sent me a text. She said, "Are you 56:00going to the show today?" I was, "I guess I'll go." I get there and they go through the whole, again, doing all the awards, and I didn't get anything. I looked at her and said, "Well, I didn't get anything." Then they announced the Best of Show and it was for the drawing. That really shocked me, but I was glad that they recognized me for that because it's something as an artist, it's nice to get that kind of recognition. Especially from that museum because it has a long history. Being able to be one of the Best of Show winners there with some of the greats, like Jerome Tiger, is really an honor.

Little Thunder: Right. We'll talk a little bit about your practices, creative practices. In terms of your studio work, is it predominantly pen and ink? Or are you using water colors sometimes or acrylics?

Boney: Predominantly, I use pencil, but beyond that, any type of graphics, I like charcoal, pastel, that type of thing is what I use a lot. When I was an undergrad, almost all of my work was exclusively pastel at that time. I still go back to that every now and then, but really, any ink drawing media, pen and ink. Sometimes I'll use water color, or pigmented inks, too. Then, after that, I'll move into painting, which I do mainly acrylic painting.

Little Thunder: Okay.

Boney: I still prefer--

Little Thunder: Acrylic on canvas?

Boney: --Uh-huh.

Little Thunder: Okay.

Boney: Yeah. Those are my two main forms of art is drawing and painting. Sometimes I'll do a digital piece and that's a whole other thing because some shows don't accept digital work. Some people don't think digital art is true artwork. There's this dialogue that's happening right now about that. I work in 58:00that quite a lot, too. Now, I'm moving towards--especially when I do a comic book project, it's almost entirely digital now. Because I'm working on one right now for Oklahoma Today magazine which will come out in a couple months. I'm doing a feature story in it. It's based on a Cherokee myth, but I'm illustrating it. It's going to be digitally painted. So, I veer between that and actual painting, but a lot of people don't still see digital work as valid artwork.

Little Thunder: Right, right.

Boney: They just don't see--

Little Thunder: But when you say digital painting and you're talking about reproduction in a magazine--

Boney: Uh-huh.

Little Thunder: --You're talking about [computer painting]?

Boney: It's a commercial project in a way, too.

Little Thunder: Right, right. I'll be watching for that. You've talked about how 59:00important sketching is to you. How about your signature? How do you handle that?

Boney: My signature is, it's all in Cherokee. It's my Cherokee name, which is Konig Kolaha, which means, Konig is the name of--it's a little berry that grows alongside creeks. It was also the name of my great- grandfather on my mom's side. There's that connection, but the other connection to it is they said my mom would eat those berries when she was a little girl. That's why my grandma named me that. The second word, Kolaha is literally it's boney or skeletal like. That's what that means. My dad's family named Boney, they say it's a mistranslation from the allotment era. The family was called Skeleton, but the 60:00translator who was taking the enrollment wrote it down as boney. But the other connection there is the word Kohlon is talking about the raven as well. In Cherokee stories and beliefs, the raven is often connected to the Raven Mocker story. There were stories going back on my dad's side that some members of the family, that's what they were. And that's why they have that name. That's the connection there.

Little Thunder: What is your creative process from the time that you get an idea?

Boney: I do a lot of research on my work. If I get an idea, I'll start looking for if there are certain visual elements that I need that might be historical, if it's a costume or something. Or if it's a turn or phrase and if I want to get it translated, I'll find, just like I described, the linguistic connections to 61:00it, if there is anything else that might connect to the image visually. I'll get all that and write it down and let it percolate for a while. Then, in the meantime, I'll do these sketches. Like I said, I'm always drawing and sketching. A few years ago, going back to social media on Facebook, I started a project where I do a sketch a day. That forces me to update and actually do it. I've done about 1500 sketches so far now and I keep throwing them up there. A lot of these are just ideas I'm trying to work out, but as I put them up now, people will look at them and they'll have their input, and I can pull some of that input into the pieces I make now. I'm getting community input from that into my work, so I'm not totally isolated over here. I'm trying to make the connection 62:00to the historical record, to the community now, and my experience growing up as Cherokee, and bringing all together.

Little Thunder: That's neat. How about your creative routine? Is it after [hours]? Of course, when you're working, you're working on your job, but like you said, there's overlap. Do you have a routine?

Boney: Yeah, what I do, is as I said, every day I try to get some time in, whether it's drawing or painting, or working on a project of some kind. I try to get some time in on it. A lot of that process is a lot of drawing. I go through, I don't know how many versions of a piece until I decide this is what I want it to be. I have all these discarded sketches, "That's not going to work. That's not going to work." Once I get to that final idea that I like, then I'll move either from a notebook, sketchpad, or sometimes I go outside, I do it on my 63:00phone or I'll do it on an [i]Pad or something. But I'll move from that to the final piece. Usually, I don't work on more than one piece at a time.

Little Thunder: I was wondering.

Boney: Yeah, that's never been--it doesn't work that well. Sometimes when I'll get a deadline, but a lot of times, I like to focus on one and get that one done. Then, I'll move on to the next piece.

Little Thunder: So aside from the nowness of Cherokee identity and the idea that Native People are creating and inventing and revisioning the world around them right now, what else do you want people to know about Cherokees in general?

Boney: I think, as a tribe, historically, we've always had this long history of being able to adapt and adopt and survive, which a lot of tribes have that, too, but for us, as Cherokees, we're one of the most heavily documented tribes in history. You can go back and look at all these notes from all these explorers, 64:00or whatever you want to call them. I think that's more of a friendly term to call them, I guess. You can read their notes and see what they were seeing and seeing how, as a people, despite all the intrusions and all the problems and tragedies and all that that was happening, we still were adapting and surviving and taking what we thought was best, using for our own purposes, and then, we would make it ours.

That's something that I think that we still do. That's the reason that I think, one reason, anyway--there's a lot of them, I guess--but people tend to see Cherokees as like a leadership role. Some of the things people may argue about and may not like--some people argue about the concept of Cherokee Nation adopting a form of government that was like the United States. But in other 65:00terms, that was a role in which the tribe played a part of leadership. I think again, as people, we're always willing to go there, whether if it's going to work or not, we don't ever know, but we're willing to take that risk.

Little Thunder: Looking back on your career so far, what was a fork in the road for you when you could've gone one way, but you chose to go another?

Boney: I remember, when I mentioned Dr. Morton who said, "There's a job here if you want it." At that point, I was thinking, "I don't know if I want to work for the tribe." Because as someone that grew up here--I guess it's like this in a lot of tribal communities--a lot of people don't like their tribal government. There's this love hate relationship that goes on there. I was, "I don't want to work at Cherokee Nation." And I just blew it off for a while. I was wanting to go into--actually, I had a job interview in Texas in Dallas with a video game 66:00company to do video design and art and that type of thing. I went down there and I did the interview. I wasn't guaranteed the job, but it went really well. I had a friend that lived there from college and I stayed there with him when I was down there. He was trying to make it as a graphic artist and he's having a hard time.

He's living in this little tiny apartment, and I was, "I don't know if I want to do this, either." You have that moment of revelation that maybe this isn't going to work. The game company sent me an email and they said, "If you're interested, you got the job." They had all these stipulations. One of the things that turned me off of it was I was not allowed to do any work on the side. All my work had 67:00to be with them and them only. So I turned it down. That's when I took the job at Cherokee Nation. But I learned, just a few years after that, the company went under. (Laughs)

Little Thunder: You were being watched out for.

Boney: Yeah. Yeah--

Little Thunder: What's been one of the high points of your career so far?

Boney: The high points. For one high point, when I got to go to Paris, that was a really high point. The other was getting to work with all these high technology companies. You get to go visit their campus and see what they do there. Seeing all this great new innovation that's happening and having the opportunity to actually talk to them about the Cherokee people. A colleague of mine, his name is Jeff Edwards, and I--I guess about two years ago now--we were 68:00invited to give a talk at Google. We gave, they call them Ted Talks. Basically, we just talked to Google employees about some aspect of culture, and we talked about Cherokee language and technology and all that. It got broadcast to all the Google employees which was pretty big deal.

Little Thunder: Very cool. How about one of the low points so far?

Boney: One of the low points? I don't know. I'm trying to think of something that was really--I think one low point was, I mentioned the zombie graphic novel? That was called Dead Eyes Open. It came out, I think, in a serialized format first and they went back and collected it into a trade paperback new version. When that happened, there was a producer in LA that was going to come 69:00down to the convention because it was in San Diego, the big Comic-Con convention. He was going to come down and meet me and the publisher about getting the rights, optioning the rights for some sort of either TV or movie thing.

We were all excited. I was, "Oh, this is going to be great." So we had this meeting set up at this restaurant and the guy never showed up. We were thinking, "Well, I guess [he was] another Hollywood type, just talking." But we come to find out, he was killed in a car crash on the way down. We were, "Oh." That was a big shock. We didn't see that coming at all. We kind of felt bad, thinking what we were thinking. But it was a big tragedy that that occurred then.

Little Thunder: Is there anything that we've forgotten to talk about that you 70:00would like to add before we look at your artwork?

Boney: Not that I can think of. I think we covered most of it that I can think of.

Little Thunder: All right, we'll pause a minute and get set up to look at some of your artwork. Okay, Roy, do you want to tell us about this first piece?

Boney: This piece is called Twenty-first Century Selu. In Cherokee stories, Selu is the First Woman and she and Kana'ti, which is the First Man, they're an origin story for Cherokees. Selu in Cherokee means corn. In a lot of the old Cherokee medicine formulas, and a lot of the old texts, they referred to Selu as Selugee, which means Corn Mother.

In this piece here, her arm, you see the letter forms there? That's Selugee in Cherokee, but that's in the old style of Cherokee. When Sequoyah first developed the syllabary, he had the cursive style and that's what that is. It's not the modern version that everyone is used to seeing. The piece itself is--a lot of my work deals with the concept of, as a people, where we were, where we are and how we got there. I like it to talk about the ideas of our things. There's a lot to talk about loss of culture and language and I like to have discussion. Obviously, some things have been lost, but some things change and modify through time, too. This piece is about that, how things have changed and how 72:00they're--are they being lost or are they changing?

That's what this is about. That is why you see the transition in her face, showing the skull to a face. The painting on her face comes from the ancient Southeastern imagery, and that's By Agadoli, "Forked Eye" they call it. Some people claim it's about knowledge while some people say it's about death. Again, it's that dichotomy. What is it and what isn't it? The heart, the heart is an image that I use quite a lot in my art, too, the human heart. It's about the concept of blood. There's a big talk about, is this a blood that makes you Indian? This is about the blood, pumping through our veins as Cherokees. Is that what makes us Cherokee? What is it that really does make us who we are? Her heart is exposed, so you can see where the source of where the blood and life is 73:00coming from. The tattoos on her arm, on the shoulder on the upper right arm there, upper top arm, I guess, the left arm on her, that's the Cherokee Booger mask, which the booger masks have the long history. Some say they're used to make fun of the European settlers when they first were coming in. Some claim they're used to fight off evil spirits or to represent sexualness, sexual power. I wanted to use all those concepts on there as for her as a female because a lot of people discuss, especially in Native communities, the power [of women].

Women are often the head of the family and in Cherokee society, we're matrilineal. Even though some people don't quite follow that belief system anymore, even if they don't, the women still hold quite a lot of sway in 74:00Cherokee families. That's a reference to all of that. The other tattooing on her arms, again, comes from the ancient Southeastern tradition of imagery, showing the mound culture and that type of thing. It's a call back to pre-contact times. She's dressed in more modern attire. You see the motif in a lot of the Southeastern imagery of the hand and the eye. Smoke is, in Cherokee and a lot of tribes, too, it's a method of medicine and communication. She's sending a message of some kind, but it's up to the viewer to decide what is it that she's saying. It's on paper. It's mixed media. It's graphite charcoal and ash. The regular shape of the paper, it's shaped like that because it was burned. I let 75:00it just burn around the edges.

Little Thunder: Right.

Boney: That is how it wound up.

Little Thunder: Nice.

Boney: I used the ash from the paper in the piece itself, too.

Little Thunder: Oh, cool. Okay, how about this piece?

Boney: This is called Seasons. This is just an all-pencil drawing. It's a Deer Woman holding am Indian man with the amputated leg. In the background, you can see another figure with a booger mask. He's a booger dancer. At the bottom, you see the old lady blowing smoke with the pipe. Next to her is, looks like a Cherokee warrior from pre-contact time. They are both Little People, which in Cherokee lore, there's the Little People. Sometimes, they say if you see one, you're going to get lost or they're going to lead you astray. There's some turtles way down in the left corner, again, blowing smoke. Turtles are very 76:00important to a lot of Southeastern tribes, especially on the stomp dance. They use the shells for that. This piece encompasses the idea of, again, Deer Woman is often seen or talked about as a predator in a lot of stories. But in a lot of tribal beliefs, there's never black and white. There's always gray between. She's not always bad. In this instance, she's helping someone.

The image is influenced from the Renaissance imagery of Mary holding the body of Christ. This is purposely taking on that image and asking, do our old beliefs, do they hinder us? Do they take us forward? And on top of [that], with it coming from a Christian image, it's superimposing that conflict that a lot of people 77:00have between ancient, early traditional belief systems versus Christianity. They're emerging from smoke, because again, smoke is a motif I use a lot. It's about the medicine, about message, sending a message. The owl is behind her. The owl, a lot of times, is seen as the messenger of bad news or death. But again, it's not. Sometimes the owl is just an owl. It's an omen of good luck, too. The whole piece is about, again, what's happening to us as a people. Are we moving forward? Are we stuck in the past? Is it good? Is it bad? There's a lot of complex issues at play and I'd like people to discuss that when they see this.

Little Thunder: Right. It's got a really nice graphic quality to it. Okay, you want to tell us about this last piece?

Boney: This piece is called Honorable. This is an homage to my father. He's 78:00still living, which I'm really happy for, but he's in really bad health now. He was in the Vietnam war. He was an M60 heavy machine gunner. In terms of what that means, he's lucky that he's still alive. That's not him, but I guess the image is influenced by him and his stories that he'd tell me about being there. It's an image of a Vietnam warrior filled with some of the elements of the ancient Cherokee warrior. The war club and the gorgets and the red painted skin, and the face paint and everything is taken from that idea. So it's the modern/ancient warrior kind of image. I know several Cherokee Vietnam veterans, and a lot of them seem to have been heavy machine gunners. I think that's kind 79:00of interesting. I don't know if it's been looked at or not. But why were they always on the--were they disposable? Did they think they could put them on the front line and it was--was that what was happening? I don't know.

Little Thunder: Right.

Boney: There's a lot of them that have that, but they all came--not all of them, but a lot of them came back. I guess for a lot of tribes here and for Cherokees, too, there's a lot of stories about when people were sent off to war like that, that their families were home praying for them. Whether one tradition or another, they were still being looked out for, and that's why they say a lot of them did come home. That's what this piece is all about. The media is the pigmented ink and colored pencil.

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

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