Hippie Smiths

from a letter to Gerald Hausman (author of the new book "A Mind with Wings", a biography of Henry David Thoreau.)

Dear Gerry:

So a funny thing happened on my way to attempting to really *get* Indian-ness art-ness. I saw a job listed in the paper that I had to apply for - "downtown store seeks individual interested in Native American art and Mexican arts & crafts." Sounded like my job. I checked their website and found they dealt in original Curtis prints, among other items, and basically begged them for a job.

Six weeks later (I cannot believe it's been such a short period) I know more about Native traditional arts that I thought possible. I can spot a Phase One piece of silver at a hundred yards. I can tell the difference between Santo Domingo and Acoma pots at a glance. I am familiar with major names and families in the creation of everything from ceramics to cradle boards to tablitas. (I even know what a tablita *is*!!!) I know which kachinas appear on which mesas at which time of the season. I know which kachinas have been incorporated into Zuni ceremonies and back into Hopi. I understand how and why redware becomes blackware and which cuts infer a "traditional" pot from a sgraffito pot. And yet...

The thing that is interesting me the most at the moment (in terms of something to write about) are the Hippie Smiths. As you are probably aware (in spades!) the hippie smith arrived in the American southwest round about the early 1960s. Folks like John Ripple, James Reid, James Neely, Russell Greene, and Jerry Faires dropped out of whatever rock they were living under somewhere else, and came to New Mexico to learn this venerable trade, studying what books existed on the subject, talking to Navajos, etc. I think there's an interesting book to be written about the subject - particularly when one considers (as I only recently figured out myself) that Native Americans had been working silver for less than a hundred years, having picked up the trade from the Spanish settlers and Mexicano plateros.

I didn't expect to study to find "my own" heritage - (heh) - though as I may have written to you at some point, I interviewed this Commanche photographer named Walter Bigbee for one of my stories for the Santa Fean (I'll send you a copy, I promise) and he asked *me* some very probing questions about why I was spending time (like an anthropologist) studying other people when I could be studying my own past - I told him, point blank, that a) I was living in a community that contained Indians and would feel remiss if I didn't learn anything about them, and b) that my Celtic culture had been conquered and absorbed about two thousand years ago and the closest thing I could get to an indigenous past was Someone Else's Tribe.

But in any case - I seem to have stumbled on a thread that is potentially both "indigenous" and Anglo, simultaneously.

I am thinking about book proposals - can you point me in the direction of a text for non-fiction books proposals? I figure it's worth the exercise. Maybe it's something John Muir might like...

cheers
gregoryp(tm)