When did you first encounter the image of James Earle Fraser's End of the Trail? Do you remember how or what you felt about it then?

My recollection is that I encountered the image first or at least it sits that way in my mind, as a child, growing up in Oklahoma and visiting the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Somehow I associated with this as to that museum. My assumptions that they had a copy of it and I will say that how it impressed me at the time and this would be in the mind of a young child, probably less than ten at the time, is that being Indian and Native myself, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribes of Oklahoma. I felt a sadness in looking at it, it’s obviously in physical form absolute dejection, both the horse and the rider. That’s the impression that I took away from it, at the time and it is an impression in time, which is to say that I was a young child at the time, and growing up Native, in Oklahoma and it did fill me with a certain sadness.

Has your understanding or perception of it changed over time? If so, how or why?

I would say that my perception of it has indeed changed over time because in growing up I have gone beyond the first impression as I described a moment ago of sadness in looking at the image to know that it represented and reflected a particular perception of Native people at a time in history perhaps the clothes of the 19th century after the wars on the Great Plains. In which through military action, Native communities had been subdued and placed on reservations including my own, the Cheyenne and Arapahoe that were removed to Oklahoma. And so what impresses me now is the unit dimensionality of the image, in other words it was an image that was in the mind of the sculptor perhaps, rather than always in the minds of the people it depicted namely Native people themselves who might have taken a different perception of whether it was indeed the end of the trail just yet for them. And as an older person, that is how my perception changed because the fact was I was still here and I am Native and it is not the end of the trail for me. And so there is a disjuncture that occurred between what the artist may have felt and tried to reflect in the piece and what Native people themselves believed and felt about the future.

What are your thoughts about the impact of this image today?

My thoughts about the impact of the image today is that it is misleading and needs a broader interpretation, and it derives from the observation I made previously that the image is reflective of perceptions in artistic expressions that come from one side of the calculus which is indeed through the eyes of the sculptor, which is perfectly legitimate but is a particular lens brought to bear on the sculpture. And that there are other viewpoints that might differ from that perception and so the understanding and the impact of the image is not whole, in other words there is interpretation or representation of what is reflected in this sculpture that need to be put on the table along with the image which is almost unavoidable in looking at the piece of sadness and indeed endings (unclear), rather than persistence and survival and survivance.

What do you think visitors to the museum should understand about this artwork?

That’s a big question and it deserves a big answer of which I can’t do in the amount of time that I have here, but I will say this. Here’s what I think visitors should understand about this artwork, they should understand that it sits in a particular time and space through the lens of the artist who created it and his perceptions of Native peoples and communities in that space and time. And he in his own mind may legitimately have thought that it was the end of the trail. But as a responsibility to visitors, the museum needs to take on the task of expanding and rounding out the interpretation of the piece by including other voices in the interpretation of this object. Other voices that might include people like me, a Native person and a museum director who is looking at this object and believes in his heart and in his mind, that it indeed was not the end of the trail. It is those first voices, those originating (unclear) that also need to be invoked in providing for the visitors a much more holistic approach to interpretation and representation and that’s what I think actually is the value of this very project in which I am participating right now. Because the Denver Art Museum, I think is trying to round out in the interpretive and representational methodologies it is using. The experience for the visitors to make it more complete and more multidimensional than it may have been in the past and that is a noble path, in one of which I certainly approve.