Grand Canyon Speaks

Description:

In this episode, we talk to Grammy-nominated and award-winning Diné, or Navajo, musician Aaron White. The program was cancelled in person by lightning, so this is an online exclusive! Aaron discusses his career, growing up with music, and how he came to be a musician. Later, the discussion turns towards the Native American flute, which Aaron both plays and builds.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Aaron White: You know, music is a very powerful tool, and I'm just glad to be a part of it. I'm just a little part of it in a very big world that we live in.

Ranger Melissa: Welcome to Grand Canyon Speaks. My name is Ranger Melissa.

Ranger Jonah: And my name is Ranger Jonah.

Ranger Melissa: Hey, Jonah. Who is this episode with?

Ranger Jonah: Yeah. So, in this episode, I talked with Aaron White. He is an award winning and Grammy nominated musician. He also plays and builds the Native American flute, which is what he did when he came out here to the canyon.

Ranger Melissa: Yeah. And this interview is for your ears only. It was actually rained out in person. Inside this area we lost power that day for several hours and had to use flashlights to illuminate the space that we recorded with Aaron at. His music, though, is absolutely beautiful and mesmerizing. He doesn't even need electricity for his acoustics. But hearing about his life story while talking to you, it felt like it came straight from a rock and roll magazine.

Ranger Jonah: Yeah, absolutely. And Aaron also does the theme music for this very podcast series, so we were really honored to have him come speak as well. So, without further ado, Aaron White.

Ranger Jonah: Welcome everybody to Grand Canyon Speaks. This is one of the more unique programs that we've ever done. We were unfortunately stopped from our regular program time due to lightning. So, we are currently sitting in a living room doing this recording, and we are doing this recording because we have such an amazing presenter today. We are talking to the Diné musician and artist, flute maker, among many other things, Mr. Aaron White.

Aaron White: Hello. Good evening.

Ranger Jonah: Well, thank you so much for coming out and doing this. It is certainly the weirdest of the ones that we've done so far, but I think we're going to have fun with it.

Aaron White: I think we just got to take it with a grain of salt.

Ranger Jonah: All right, well, I guess my first question is, where are you from?

Aaron White: Well, I'm from the Northern Ute Reservation, where my mother's from, but I'm also from Kayenta, Arizona. My father is Diné, Navajo. My mother is Northern Ute, but I grew up on and off the reservation, northern California, the Bay area. I was born in Oakland, California, grew up in Niles, California, which was home to the first Hollywood. And I just recently found out I grew up right across the street from the Charlie Chaplin studios where they filmed one of their silent pictures called The Champion, which was black and white. It was a silent picture back in 1915, I think it was. It was a Charlie Chaplin film. But we lived right across the studios, right across the road.

Ranger Jonah: And you never got into filmmaking?

Aaron White: That never happened.

Ranger Jonah: You never got into making talkies?

Aaron White: No. How about that?

Ranger Jonah: So you were a touring musician for 13 plus years. So, how did you first get into music? Did you grow up with it. Was it always around? Of course, in the Bay Area I imagine you had some music around.

Aaron White: Yeah, I grew up with it as far back as I can remember. I was always doing plays, doing live performances. I did one of my first performances with a gentleman by the name of Roy Rogers who had a horse named Trigger. He came to our school and we did a performance for him in Roosevelt, Utah, and this was near the Ute Reservation. And I did a lot of performances as a kid with plays and things like that, but music, as far as I could remember, has always been a big part of my life.

Ranger Jonah: So when you were growing up, was that primarily flute music or guitar? Piano? What was your introduction instrument wise?

Aaron White: It was a little bit of guitar. I remember taking guitar lessons from a gentleman when I was probably, like, around six or seven years old. I first learned basic guitar and how to use my voice. I remember the first song I ever did was probably (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window? Which is an old American classic. And then I was doing a song by a gentleman named Glenn Campbell. Galveston was a piece that I had done, and my mother used to take me to a restaurant in Roosevelt, and I would sing for tips when I was just a little kid.

Ranger Jonah: So you really have been working as a musician since the early days?

Aaron White: Yeah, I never saw any of that money. (Laughter)

Ranger Jonah: Where did all that happen to go? So you've always grown up with music, and then, of course, your main touring group was Burning Sky, right?

Aaron White: Yeah. My first professional, I guess, gig was when I was in the military. I was 17, and I had a band called Excalibur, and I just recently had been in contact with an old drummer friend who was part of the group. And we were a military band that was based out of Schofield Barracks, Hawai'i. And we played at all the EM clubs. Kaneohe Marine Base, Pearl Harbor, Hickam Air Force Base, Barber's Point, around the island of Oahu. Then we also did some clubs in Waikiki and Pearl City and around the island, and we were only, like, 18 years old. We were playing in a rock band.

Ranger Jonah: Having a good time, I imagine.

Aaron White: Yeah, it was great. That name is Homero Chavez, and he got a hold of me through Facebook and found out he made a career out of music as well. So out of all the members in a band, two of us chose to have music as a career.

Ranger Jonah: Are you expecting a future collaboration to come out soon?

Aaron White: We talked about it; you know. He's out in L.A. He worked with a lot of different groups and recording artists, and we just kind of compared where we were at, and we met in Southern California. We were actually on a vacation going back to Hawai'i. And so, we stopped in and had dinner with him and his wife. So, kind of a little, you know, I was looking at old photos that he had of us, and I mean, we were just kids.

Ranger Jonah: Just rocking out!

Aaron White: Just having a great time and serving in the military as well.

Ranger Jonah: Well, so you're serving in the military. You're starting with these sorts of rock and roll bands in the beginning, and how does that develop from there? What's the next step?

Aaron White: Well, I had always played music, like I said, learned from a lot of different people. And being in the Bay Area, we were always surrounded by music. I remember seeing the Escobedo family playing at this place called Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland. The Escobedo family being Sheila E. And her family. Her father was a pretty well known musician and was playing with different groups. Malo, which was a very big band at the time. In the 70s, we'd see a lot of different groups that were up and coming. Some of the bands that came out of the Bay Area like Journey, Santana, Craig Chiquico from Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship. Just so many different people in the Bay Area. Such a big influence. We'd have bands come to our high school during lunch and they would play for the students. And one of those bands in the beginning was a gentleman by name of Brad Gillis, who went on to play with Night Ranger and Rubicon. I was always surrounded by music or musicians, and great musicians at that. Yeah, being there when people were first starting out, it's a pretty big influence.

Ranger Jonah: So how did they influence you? Did they influence you from a touring life perspective as you sort of saw them develop and grow, or from a musicianship perspective?

Aaron White: Just seeing them performing and them having showmanship and good songs and things like that.

Aaron White: Well, good songs do tend to help. Makes the music process a little bit easier. You know, you grew up with all of this different influence. What was the kind of music that you were listening to?

Aaron White: I listened to everything. I mean, I listened to everything from Tower of Power to Weather Report to Sammy Hagar, Black Sabbath, ACDC. Growing up, my father listened to a lot of country. Waylon Jennings. Just no matter where I was, I was always surrounded. Like I said, with music, music was just something that was always there.

Ranger Jonah: So did you tend to connect with one sort of genre more than another?

Aaron White: Probably. Rock music was a big thing. And being a singer fronting a band at the age of 18, it was an experience, you know, facing people. We played at some pretty historic places. The old Haleiwa Theater in Haleiwa on the north shore of Oahu, opening up for different people that came to the island, or playing in clubs where places would just be packed with people. There'd be two or three bands playing in one night, and in Hawai'i, the clubs back then would stay open until four in the morning and the legal drinking age was 18. So people who graduated from high school on the mainland came to Hawai'i to celebrate their graduations, a bunch of crazy 18 year olds. And then when the clubs would close down at four in the morning, people would pour into the streets and stuff. It was just pretty amazing time.

Ranger Jonah: Wow. Yeah, I'd say. I'm not sure where you can find that these days. So, what are your next steps? The group that was playing in Oahu that was named Excalibur? Where does Excalibur go? When does that start to phase into the next group?

Aaron White: Well, we all were finishing our military service, so we all went our separate ways and then I did a lot of solo things. I mean, I was playing.

Ranger Jonah: So, at the end of Excalibur, you knew that you were going to be a musician, this is what you were doing.

Aaron White: Definitely.

Ranger Jonah: You were filling the clubs till 4:00 A.M.

Aaron White: Yeah, and I moved back to the mainland after being in Hawai'i for a while. And then I got home to the Ute reservation, and I just started doing local gigs working with performing arts center in Salt Lake City. They had a big celebration for songwriters and things like that. So, I would go know, and it was a two-hour bus ride, so I would take my guitar and go out to Salt Lake City and do gigs every now and then with festivals, and then I would go back. And I knew that staying on the reservation, there wouldn't be any opportunity to play music live or anything. So, I moved to Salt Lake and started just gigging around different places, playing places for tips and things. And then I moved from there to Oklahoma City where my dad was living, and I was playing music there. I had a couple of bands that were just kind of just bouncing around playing music and everything. Then I moved to Southern California, and back to Northern California, and then I moved back to Arizona where my father was from and that's where I met my wife Marilyn, and she actually got me my first solo gig in Arizona.

Ranger Jonah: Oh wow. So where was the first place that you played in Arizona?

Aaron White: It was up on the Hopi Reservation. And my wife was a producer slash person.

Ranger Jonah: She had connections?

Aaron White: Yeah, she had a gentleman with Jacob Coyne that she had worked with. She was doing productions for models. She was doing some modeling herself down in Phoenix and she had done a production called It's Our Time and so that was kind of a big production that she had done. And she had moved back to Northern Arizona from Phoenix, and we met.

Ranger Jonah: It worked out?

Aaron White: She liked my music that I did. So, she got me this gig through her friend Jacob Coyne and then from there it just went off and we did our thing.

Ranger Jonah: Right on. So, during this time, are you still just playing acoustic guitar? Have you started to play the flute or has that not come into the picture yet?

Aaron White: No. We got married and we had kids, and I was just kind of milling around. We'd moved to Flagstaff, and I was milling around, and I had gotten a job working for Coca Cola Bottling Company and I had been playing on the side up on the reservation in Chinle, Arizona. And I was playing in Gallup, New Mexico at some of the clubs, just doing like some solo acoustic stuff. And then I was playing with a few people. And then when I finally just got tired of working the corporate life, I was going back and forth between Flagstaff and Chinle and I decided that if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it. So, I went and got somebody together, did a demo and had an idea of creating music around the Native American flute. So, I had mentioned to a friend of mine what I was trying to do and so he had directed an individual to myself named Kelvin Bizahaloni who was a flute player. And so, he came over to my house and we sat and I had him play some lines on the flute and kind of try to figure out what keys that the Native American flute could possibly be played along with guitar accompaniment.

Aaron White: And so, we did a demo and then we went to a place called Mudshark Studios in Flagstaff and we cut a two-song demo, a vocal song and a flute song. And so, there was a vocal song I had written a while back that I had recorded, and I thought probably be kind of neat to do it with a Native American flute. So, the flute he had was kind of based between an F sharp and an E minor. And so, I figured out the chord progression in what the scale was for a pentatonic scale. And then we went in the studio, and we did this recording and a friend of ours, a mutual friend, had heard the demo and took it down to Canyon Records and had played it for a gentleman named Robert Doyle and we ended up getting a record deal from it.

Ranger Jonah: Wow. So, you know, I think that leads straight into, you know, whether it be that demo or the work that you would go on to create later, what does the process for you look like to create that kind of music? To create music incorporating the Native American flute?

Aaron White: Well, for me, melodies always seem to come naturally and hearing each note that's played, whatever scale a flute is in, I always kind of imagine and can feel it and hear it and be able to express it in any sort of mode or shape or form musically. And the first record we did was self-titled Burning Sky. And all the songs on that basically were based around the guitar. So, the flutes, the percussion, and all of the music that had been done on the first recording had basically been coming from a couple of tours in California. The first gig we did was the Native American Music Festival. And the first gig we did as a duo was at this thing called Stars in the Desert in Tuba City. And then we were asked to do the music festival in Oakland, California. And then while we were in Oakland, we got a call from somebody because no one had really heard that music at that time in 1992. The only other person I think that was doing music similar was probably our Carlos Nakai with guitar and flute. And so, we flew down to Malibu and we did this festival up at this place called Wright's Ranch, which was Frank Lloyd Wright's place, the architect.

Aaron White: And so, we were there, and I think we had done that first show with Melissa Manchester and a couple of other artists that were pretty big in the 70s and 80s. We met a gentleman there by the name of Michael Bannister, who at the time had just finished a recording with a gentleman from a band called the Plimsolls. And he was from Buffalo, New York. And the gentleman's name was Peter Case. And the Plimsolls were kind of a big group, sort of like a 90s new wave or an 80s new wave band. And we met him at the festival, and it was just me and Kelvin that were just playing, so it was just flute and guitar. And then this gentleman just happened to be moving to Flagstaff, so we met him, and he was a really good drummer. I mean, he had played with Lucinda Williams, he had played with a lot of well-known musicians. And so we got together with him and I showed him the songs that we were doing and we added the percussions to it. And that's basically how the trio of Burning Sky was formed, right. Just from traveling around, meeting people.

Ranger Jonah: Wow. That's how all great things happen, right? There needs to be a little element of spontaneity.

Aaron White: Yeah.

Ranger Jonah: So, when actually you've got this group together, how do you guys begin to write your music?

Aaron White: Well, like I said, a lot of it was based around the guitar, so I would come up with the melodies and the different changes, and we would just add the flute and kind of direct the flute player through.

Ranger Jonah: Now, was this the same flute every time or did they use a different flute?

Aaron White: I was using different flutes, A minor flutes and Bs and different modes. Anything that the native flute was based off in those pentatonic scales. And so, we just began to just create. I mean, we did the first record, Burning Sky. We did the second record, which was Blood of the Land. And so, we had done six recordings with Canyon Records, Burning Sky, Blood and Land Creation, Simple Man, Spirits in the Wind. And we did another one for a bigger label called Rykodisc, which was Enter the Earth. And we had a lot of influences that came along with Spirits in the Wind. We had John Densmore from The Doors who did some percussions on it and did a spoken word on the recording and that was the one that we were nominated for a Grammy for. And then Enter the Earth we did with Justin Valenzuela from the Gin Blossoms and so he did some guitar tracks. And the second recording, Blood of the Land, we had rerecorded a song that was written by Bruce Cockburn called Indian Wars and we ended up doing that with him at the Verde Valley Show with Jackson Browne and a bunch of other musicians. So we were starting to really build momentum of playing in a lot of different places and collaborating with a lot of different people.

Aaron White: And what was kind of cool about the Jackson Browne Festival was Jackson had heard our music and Bruce Cockburn had told him about us and thought it would be great for us to open up the festival. And then after we got done with that, Jackson Browne ended up coming to us afterwards and offered his studio in Santa Monica and gave us like three days of free recording time at his studio. So, we did that and ended up recording a bunch of stuff at his place.

Ranger Jonah: That's incredible.

Aaron White: Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

Ranger Jonah: I bet. So, in terms of the music that's on these albums, how much did improvisation play? I mean, you're talking a lot about how you needed to form these songs around the flute, around these pentatonic scales, which for those on the recording that may not know what that means, it's sort of a simplification of a major scale or a minor scale. It allows for a lot of different variety because the notes flow together very easily. So, you are writing these songs. Does improvisation come into your songwriting at this point, or do you know what you're going to do and then put it down?

Aaron White: Yeah, I think the improv happens before. Because you're gathering ideas. Like I'll sit at home, and I'll tune my guitar to standard tuning, or I'll tune it to maybe a different tuning, open tuning, drop tuning, drop D, open G, even doing slide work with slide guitar. And I'll just come up with all these melodies and just work and I can hear what the flute is going to do with the chords that I'm playing. So, I'm basically feeling my way around it first in the writing process and then I'll come in with the flute after I lay down my guitar tracks and I'll just kind of direct if I'm working with another flute player. This is what I would like for you to do. I would like you to maybe play very slow here, let it drag out, play a little bit of fast here, maybe draw these lines and weave in and out of the notes and things like that. So, when I'm creating the music, I hear it all in my headfirst. Right. And then I start kind of just maybe improvising with myself. And then by the time we get to the studio, I already know what I need to do. And hopefully the people that I'm working with.

Ranger Jonah: Just lay it down. Don't want to waste Jackson Browne's time.

Aaron White: Exactly. I won't be wasting studio time or nothing. And the people that I'm working with, hopefully they'll consciously connect with that and stuff and it'll all come together.

Ranger Jonah: Right. And I'm sure that takes a lot of trust between a band to have a cohesive unit.

Aaron White: Yeah. You have to really feel it. You have to feel your way through it. It's almost like you just have to become... You have to have the same vision. In the recording process, there was a recording we did, which was the third record, and we did a piece for a winery in Santa Barbara, California, called Zaca Mesa Winery. They wanted us to do a theme of how they grew grapes. So, they grow grapes using earth, wind, sun, rain. So, there were four elements that were involved with it. And so, we created this thing, this…

Ranger Jonah: Tune?

Aaron White: Like a bouquet of songs. We put together the first intro, which was Earth. So that was the first time I ever used the synthesizer. I used the synthesizer to sync everybody together. And then we started with the flute with the synthesizer, then brought in the percussions, then brought in the guitar. And then after we finished that piece, we did a piece called Wind. And so, with that, we opened up with just the flute and brought in the percussions. And then I added some bass lines and then guitar. And then we did rain. And so, we created a piece that would have to do with a storm or something that would be a representation of water and moisture and things like that. And then we did sun, which was basically about growth and nourishment and all this stuff. And we put these four pieces together and we did like 15 minutes of each song, and we just went with this whole theme and we played it for the company. They loved it and they were selling it at their winery for their customers and stuff. So, it was a commissioned piece to do and then the record label ended up releasing it and that was probably one of our second best-selling recordings.

Aaron White: Wow. And all from the growing of grapes.

Aaron White: Yeah.

Ranger Jonah: The beginning of any great story. So, when you're putting this feel into the music, you're sort of looking to articulate the rain or the sun or the soil or the earth. What is the process for that? Is it just sitting down and saying, how can I represent this, or is there a more detailed sort of approach?

Aaron White: I think when I'm doing that, the themes that I come up with, with the music. What recording were you guys listening to?

Ranger Melissa: All of them.

Ranger Jonah: Yeah, we listened to quite a few. I think we listened to most of Simple Man.

Aaron White: Okay, so Simple Man didn't have any percussion in it. It was mostly just guitar, bass, and flute. And then there was a vocal piece at the very end, which is self-titled Simple Man. And so, what I did with that was I spent a lot of time using alternate tunings for some of the songs. And when I do alternate tunings, you have to go into a whole different frame of mind of using strings, drone strings, coming up with interesting chord structures, but yet it still has to play into the part of how's the flute going to adapt to this? What's it going to do with the flute? How is it going to change? Because the modes that you're using with the flute, to me, the Native American flute becomes like a chameleon. It shapes. When you take theory, there's a thing called a circle of fifths. So, you connect minor modes, sharps flats, quarters, eight, just different shapes of notes. And so, you want to keep it within that. But then also you let the voice of the flute kind of take hold of whatever structure that you're doing with chord progressions or lines that you're drawing, going from maybe a minor to a major and letting it just feel its way through, if that makes any sense.

Ranger Jonah: Sure.

Aaron White; But you really have to have an open mind and you really have to listen when you're doing it and making sure that it just really has a good flow, a really nice groove to it.

Ranger Jonah: Definitely. So, what role as you're developing this music, and clearly a lot of it is inspired by theory. The circle of fifths, the understanding of the flute through the pentatonic scale. How does Western or sort of the Western notation system interfere perhaps with your music? Do you write your songs down? Is there tablature for the flute or is it sort of just the base of understanding and then you work from there.

Aaron White: It's kind of just the base of understanding. I mean, I've seen transcriptions of my music and the time signatures, you know, that we're creating these into. You always want to try to not be redundant in what you're doing because sometimes in pop music, majority of chord progressions that are used in pop music are like two to three chords. It's very repetitive. And you don't want to do that with the flute. You kind of want to always expand and create space. You want to create a mood. And you're speaking without words. You're making somebody feel something without words. And it's basically through the melody and through the progression of how the song is and time signatures play a big part of that. Whether it's fast, whether it's slow, whether it's very soothing, whether it's very aggressive, however you want it to be right? All of that is creating a feeling and a language all its own.

Ranger Jonah: And it allows the musicians to communicate.

Aaron White: You play off of one another and everything and it all just falls into place.

Ranger Jonah: Absolutely. So, in terms of Native American flute music, as an instrument and as a culture perhaps around the instrument, the music the culture around the music. In a lot of genres, you have sort of the same tunes get played again and again. In Jazz, you have the Big Book. In Bluegrass, you have sort of a pretty set canon that people know and bring to the table. In the world of Native American flute music is it just individual artists writing their own songs and bringing it to the table or is there perhaps a culture or canon that everybody kind of relates to, songs that everybody knows?

Aaron White: Well, I think in Native American music you have your traditional set songs like, say, for instance, Zuni Sunrise is a common song that was played amongst a lot of different flute makers or flute players. R Carlos Nakai did it. There’re the older flute players that were Doc Nevaqueya. You had Howard Rainer, you had Red Ute, who was Eddie Box Sr. You had Sonny Tonikov White from Oklahoma. You had a lot of these old flute players, and they were very familiar with the traditional songs. Kevin Locke from the Lakota Nation. Robert Tree Cody. You had a lot of these guys that knew these traditional songs and they would play them in their live performances. And Nakai recorded Zuni Sunrise. And there's prayer songs, there's healing songs. There's songs of meditation and songs of love. Songs of compassion. Songs of a loved one passing. There are so many different meanings and different expressions of how a flute player would approach creating a flute song and courting songs. The Lakota Nation, the Plains Indians, even Navajo love songs. Zuni songs. Pueblo, Hopi. I mean, Apache. There's so many different types and genres of the native flute using a five hole, a four-hole, six-hole, three-hole flutes. There's so many different facets and I think what connects all of those is the social songs that are played. Or someone hears somebody doing one thing, they'll maybe change a little around and add their own little thing to it. Get inspired. Be inspired. And the traditional songs, they remain traditional songs. They're not changed in any shape or form.

Ranger Jonah: Right.

Aaron White: We were talking about the Hopi Flute Society. Up on Hopi. They have old traditional songs that are played only during the time when the Kokopelli deities come around during the home dances in the summer. Or you have the maiden songs, you have the sunrise songs, you have songs for harvest or birth and a lot of different meanings. And these songs that are played amongst the Hopi people, they're kept within the village. They're not played outside of the village or anything like that because they're considered very sacred. And then you have your improvisation. People just get up and feel inspired or something, and they just go with it. But there's just so many different genres of music within Native we're just talking just Native flute music. I mean, there's drum songs and rattle songs, bird songs, sundance songs, bear dance songs.

Ranger Jonah; Hard to define different genres.

Aaron White: Yeah, different for occasions. People don't realize how big or how much music there is amongst Native American music. I mean, I'm just talking southwest right now.

Ranger Jonah: Right.

Aaron White: You go northeast, west, whatever. There's just so much.

Ranger Jonah: Right. One of the things that you would later go on to do is actually start building these flutes. So, how did the transition go? Did you come off the road before you started building flutes?

Aaron White: Yeah, we had taken a break between recordings, and I'd always been curious on how the flute worked, how the tone was. And playing with Kelvin, I was always wanting to, you know, figure out different ways of expression. You know, for a flute musician to be able to play with accompaniment, whether it was piano, whether it was guitar, whether it was just percussion, and flute or bass and flute and even experimenting with harmonica and flute, saxophone, and flute. There are all these different ideas that I would have. And the only way I would figure out how it would work was by making them.

Ranger Jonah: Doing it yourself! Just like from the very beginning, you got to get out on the road and get it done.

Aaron White: So, I started just experimenting in my garage and creating the instrument. And the first ones I did were straight through. They weren't like the standard flute with the block or the bird on top. They were just like a little notch, kind of like a quena flute from South America. And so I just got what I had available, and I figured it out. I looked at the flute, and I thought, you know, I could figure this out. And so I did it, and just through trial and error, started creating it. And then after creating it and getting down the basics, then it came time for, well, I can make it sound better. I can make more clarity. I can make it to where it's not as wispy as some flutes were, that you had more wind and you could hear a person blowing, it'd be very wispy. And my whole thing was clarity. And so, I got to the point to where I was able to make it sound even louder, and you can make it sound really hard, you can make it sound really soft. You could do all these different things. So, it was a process. But after years of doing it and creating it, I went from making single flutes to making drone flutes. And the drone flute thing was strictly by experimentation. I don't think there was very many people at the time when I started making drone flutes that were making drone flutes.

Ranger Jonah: Could you define a drone flute?

Aaron White: A drone flute is two flutes in one, which basically you have one flute on one side, which is five hole or six hole. And the first notes have to match, completely match. Otherwise, there's a little wavering. It has to sound like one note. Then when you lift off your finger to form the second note, then the drone note kicks in, which is basically the lowest note of the flute. And then when you blow a little harder, you can kick up to an octave higher, which would be the highest note of a flute. So, you have that five note, that five scale notation. So, you had your lowest and your highest note, and everything in between would basically match what that drone would sound like, and it would give it a whole different sound. And, I mean, drone flutes have been around since the time of the Mayans and the Aztecs, even going back to the Egyptian Roman Empire, 300 BC. They were putting two reeds together from the Nile and creating, experimenting with dual sounds, dual tones and everything. Then the Mayans and the Aztecs were making clay flutes that were multi-chambered instruments, maybe a high pitch whistle on the side or a bird whistle, and then a deep sounding flute, and then a mid-range sort of tone that they were creating out of clay flutes and things like that. So, it just came from being inspired by wanting to create more sound.

Ranger Jonah: Definitely. And putting that pentatonic scale on the bass note. It allows for a variety of different sort of sounds and modes. I was wondering if you could give us an example of maybe sort of the diversity in sound, perhaps the different kinds of expression that you could get from just a few small tweaks.

Aaron White: So this is really interesting. So, we're talking like a drone flute. So, you have two flutes in one. One on one side plays like a standard flute. The other side plays that one drone note, whether it's low drone or a high drone. So, if you play the two together, I'll play the single note of the flute first. (Flute plays)

Aaron White: So, the bottom with the two together sounds like one note. It's a single flute by itself, both of them together. So, when I release that first finger, the first hole. (Flute plays) So you have this second note, and you have the drone, which plays the bottom. (Flute plays) Then if I blow a little harder, I could go an octave higher. So, it sounds the same as the highest note, two notes in one. So that's what you have.

Ranger Jonah: Well, I imagine that building one of these to make those notes sound, they have to be perfect.

Aaron White: They have to be perfect. And if you make a mistake, it's just firewood. (Laughter)

Ranger Jonah: Start again!

Aaron White: Yeah.

Ranger Jonah: So, when you first started building these flutes, you first started building them for yourself, obviously, like, something like this would be very calculated and making sure that all the measurements are right, right?

Aaron White: Yes.

Ranger Jonah: So, is that the same for the single chamber flutes?

Aaron White: Yeah, it's the same with the single chamber. For me, tone is everything. So, you have to have a really good tone. You have to have a really good sound. And when you're creating a flute, say, for instance, you have it really wispy sounding, so it sound like this. (Flute plays) But if I move the block back, I can make it a little sharper. (Flute plays, sharper.) So, you hear the wind a little bit in that. But when you are making it to where the pressure of how you're blowing doesn't become more of like a swooshing sound, you get more of a clear note.

Ranger Jonah: And you're all about that clear, that tone.

Aaron White: Yeah. The clarity to me is really important. The old traditional flutes, they were very wispy sounding because they were made with two pieces of wood, like a tree branch split in half. Then the inside was either carved out or burned out with hot embers from a fire. And then they would put it back together with tree sap. Then they would tie it off with leather straps all the way across. So, if you look at old photos of flutes, like from a collection, like maybe the Smithsonian or something, you always see strands of hide tied every so far apart. That's basically the clamps holding it together. Because tree sap would only last so long. Because you got so much moisture blowing through the flute. I mean, your body temperature is what, 98.6? So that's pretty hot, especially with moisture coming out of your out of your body. So that moisture has to dissipate somewhere. So, it would either dissipate through the walls of the wood, or it would just flow through. And then whatever's left, you have this leftover condensation and everything. So it's going to seep into the wood, and you have that enough times, your base is going to fall apart if it's not put together very well. And so the old flutes, they tied all those strands along the body so that would hold the flute together, and you wouldn't have as much seepage through it. And I'm sure somebody figured it out through trial and error, that the best way we can do this is you do it. Or some of the old flutes would split after a while from the moisture because they weren't maybe treated or sealed inside, or maybe they were still kind of green and then dried out a little bit or something. So there's just a lot of different factors that go in. But moisture plays a big part of how long a flute is going to last.

Ranger Jonah: Definitely. And you mentioned this before we started doing this taping about potentially using the human body to measure these flutes out.

Aaron White; Yeah, you know, there were so many different theories going back to the time of our ancestors, the anasazi. I was told through an old flute maker that using the hand and using the arm, the length of the arm played a big part on how the notes were formed and shaped. Using a fingers width between each hole, whether it was four, five, six hole flute, that the finger measurement between each hole would be consistent. And that's how you were able to create more or less close to a pentatonic scale by doing that, and then maybe a measurement of a whole hand's width to the very first hole, and then however long you wanted it to be from the stem, from the block. So that's the old method of creating them. Now, of course, you just measure it off and, you know, how far get the holes need to be out. Yeah, but, I mean, again, if you want to talk about old tunings of them, there was really no tunings. It was basically, however, people felt that the flutes were made and everything, so that played a big part in how the sound would be. Lakota flutes were five hole flutes. Plain's flutes were five hole flutes. Six hole flutes didn't really come around until maybe European influence during the time after the 1400s and going into the 15th, 16th century, 17th century, the 18th century, I think, really started to change because there was more Europeans coming to the Americas. And their influence, the theory of music, of western music and things like that. You know, they were taught to maybe Native people that maybe had a talent that they saw, and they were more fascinated by the music than anything. There was a lady by the name of Francis Densmore who was an ethnomusicologist for the Smithsonian from 1910 to about 1932? 36? And she basically recorded any music that Native American people were making. So she traveled around the country with the Edison machine, horseback, buggy, train. She hiked into thick wooded areas to see a medicine man or a medicine woman to record a song. She was the only, maybe, white person that was able to attend a ceremony because they knew that she was doing something of importance by recording it. And so the term was people singing into the can or the flange, whatever. And she would use the old black cylinders, and she would hand crank, and then she would take them back and catalog them at the Smithsonian.

Aaron White: She would transpose the rhythms and the patterns onto sheet music so American composers could use them in creating new works of orchestrations and things like that. So she played a big, vital part in preserving a lot of music. And so, as the years went on, I think the Smithsonian, somebody went back to the archives, and they wanted to pull out one of the wax cylinders and found out they were deteriorating, so they had to digitize as much as they could. Smithsonian Folkways did a great job. And you can listen on Smithsonianfolkways.org and listen some of the old recordings. You can hear the crackling of the wax cylinders and things like that. And I think the first Native American flute song that was recorded was 1932 or 34 from a gentleman from Montana. Very simplistic in his delivery of how he played the song. He thought out the notes that he would choose to play and everything. And there's just so much history that's based around a very simple instrument.

Ranger Jonah: Absolutely. And who knows the sort of unsaid or untold influence that those recordings would go on to have over the course of the entire world's music. So you're making these flutes today. What are these flutes made of?

Aaron White; The flutes I was doing today were made out of river cane. So I had come up with an idea of resources. I mean, wood is getting more expensive now. Price of things are going up. So I had gotten a couple of pieces of river cane from a friend, and he wanted me to see if I could make some flutes out of them. And so I had a guy that sent me some stuff from Florida, sent me some cane, and I thought, what could I use? What could I create out of these? And how could I go about doing it? And again, you know, I just figured through seeing some old flutes that were old Hopi flutes. And I actually repaired a ceremonial flute that the museum of Northern Arizona had in their collection. So I repaired it, and I was looking at it, I'm thinking, oh, this would be kind of cool. And you could tell it was carved by a knife with the holes and everything. And it had a gourd at the very end, like a sunflower. It was a ceremonial flute, it had some eagle feathers tied to it. And I repaired it and gave it back to the guy the gentleman had brought it over from the museum. And so I just got the idea. Nobody's really making cane flutes. I've run into a few guys that were doing them, and I asked them, how did you go about doing this? Sometimes they won't tell you what they're doing.

Ranger Jonah: Secrets of the trade.

Aaron White: Yeah. So I figured it out, and I started getting cane. And I was invited to do a flute making workshop down on the Yavapai Apache reservation. And so a gentleman by the name of Don Decker had invited me down, and I went and harvested some river cane, and I made some very small flutes for a bunch of kids in the community. And it was a summer program, so I just started from there. And then I kind of was playing music a little bit more, so I kind of put it on the shelf for a little bit, and then I came back to it. And the first ones I made were basically really different than the ones I do now. And so, I started thinking about how can I make it simple to where people could actually do a workshop?

Ranger Jonah: Right.

Aaron White: And so I just kind of went from there and started making them the way I make them now. And was able to make them a little faster, make them to where they sound good and everything. So people who take my flute classes, they see a plain piece of river cane, and then it's really funny seeing the expressions on their faces when they hear the first note being played out of something that they were helping shape and form.

Ranger Jonah: Which to them was just a plant they picked out a few minutes before.

Aaron White: Yeah, exactly. So, it just all went from there. And this is what I do today.

Ranger Jonah: So, you've gotten off the road, you're not touring right now.

Aaron White: I'm kind of on and off, not completely off.

Ranger Jonah: So, you're on and off the road. Where do you teach these flute classes?

Aaron White: I do a class five days a week at Clear Sky Resorts, which is over in Valley, and it's like an eco-dome glamping resort.

Ranger Jonah: Sure.

Aaron White: And then I do them at the Heard Museum. I get commissioned to do some flute classes for students from the surrounding communities. Gila River to O'odham, Maricopa. Tribes that are down there in the valley. Or I'll go up to Crazy Horse up in South Dakota. I'll go to the Southwest Museum in Tucson. The Petroglyph Museum in North Phoenix. Wherever people that want to do the workshops, I'll go there.

Ranger Jonah: Like the Grand Canyon!

Aaron White: Yeah, spend a couple of days and do things.

Ranger Jonah: Thank you so much for doing this interview, for coming to the Grand Canyon, for showing off your flute making, your playing, your instrumentation, and telling your story here, even when the weather doesn't maybe cooperate with the kind of program that we want to give. For our audience at home, I wonder if you have one final takeaway or one thing after listening to this that maybe you would like people to walk away and remember from having heard this.

Aaron White: I think preservation of cultural instruments is very important. Preserving the culture is very important. I think no matter what culture you come from; language is important. The history, learning and knowing who you are in this world and wearing it like a badge of honor, your culture, some people search a lifetime to find out who they really are. Sometimes you discover it through music, sometimes you discover it through literature. Sometimes you discover it through lost family members, loved ones. Sometimes you just discover it on your own. And to me, all of us are indigenous to this world, in this planet. We all have a purpose, and we all have the power to preserve what is here. For us to preserve and to preserve for the next generation and the generation after that. We all are indigenous, we all walk under the same sun, we walk under the same earth, we all live under the same sky. And to me, music is medicine. Music is a blessing, and it brings people together. It breaks down walls and barriers of race and color and language when you play a note. And it's something that connects with another human being. That, to me, is probably the first step in communication with people that are maybe different, but maybe not so different. Music is a very powerful tool and I'm just glad to be a part of it. I'm just a little part of it in a very big world that we live in. And coming to places like this, like the Grand Canyon to share with people from all walks of life, from different countries around the globe, it's a beautiful thing. And I thank you guys for letting me be a part of it.

Ranger Jonah; Yeah, well, thank you for coming and thank you for being a part of everything here at Grand Canyon. We really appreciate it.

Ranger Jonah: Grand Canyon Speaks is a program hosted by Grand Canyon National Park and the Grand Canyon Conservancy. A special thanks to Aaron White for the theme music. This recording reflects the personal lived experiences of tribal members and do not encompass the views of their tribal nation or that of the national park. To learn more about Grand Canyon First Voices, visit www.NPS.gov/GRCA. Here at Grand Canyon National Park we are on the ancestral homelands of the eleven associated tribes of the Grand Canyon, these being the Havasupai tribe, the Hualapai Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe, the Pueblo of Zuni, the Yavapai-Apache Nation, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, the Moapa Band of Paiutes, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe.

In this episode, we talk to Gregory Hill, a Hopi carver and toymaker. The conversation revolves around Gregory’s efforts to bring back a forgotten toy, the Patukya. His toys work to bring adults back to feeling childlike wonder, and Gregory’s efforts have even encouraged other carvers to start creating tops!

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Gregory Hill: I turned to making these because I just want to have that feeling in the world, there's just so many crazy things happening, like now. And I want to combat all the negative things in the world by creating something that's going to bring joy to the world, you know?

Ranger Jonah: Hello. Welcome to Grand Canyon Speaks. My name is Ranger Jonah.

Ranger Melissa: And I'm Ranger Melissa.

Ranger Jonah: So, Melissa, you did this episode. Who did you do this episode with?

Ranger Melissa: Yeah, I interviewed Gregory Hill, who's a Hopi toy maker. I really enjoyed this episode because he dives into this concept of work leading to play and how we all should learn to be more playful in our adult lives and reach into that inner child, which he called kid magic. It was really cool giving this interview because even during this talk, he was actually making toys while we were talking to the audience. So, it's kind of cool and you might actually hear that in the recording today.

Ranger Jonah: Yeah. So, in fact, one of the things he talks about is how the toys that he makes are traditional, but recently they haven't really been made. They sort of stopped being made. It was sort of a forgotten toy. And Greg has a lot of passion for bringing this toy back, and that is just so cool.

Ranger Melissa: Yeah. He even said that by making these toys, other carvers in his community are also looking to bring these toys back, which is super exciting. So, I really hope everyone enjoys this episode. Without further ado, Gregory Hill.

Ranger Melissa: All right, everybody. Well, it's that time, so we're going to get started and I'm sure people will mosey on over. But my name is Melissa, I work here at Grand Canyon National Park. We have Gregory Hill right here. He is a self-proclaimed nerd I found out earlier today. He is also a twin which we just found out, which is really cool. He's from Hopi and he also makes tops. How do you say it in Hopi?

Gregory Hill: In Hopi, we call it patukya.

Ranger Melissa: A patukya.

Gregory Hill: Patukya. The actual spinning motion of it is called riyanpi. So, riyanpi is like that spinning motion that we make. Like if you stood up and start spinning- riyanpi. But this is the toy. It's called a patukya. So, the actual toy thing is called a patukya.

Ranger Melissa: Which is really exciting that we are exploring this because I also really enjoy Gregory's influence in terms of the power of play, really trying to bring play into art, which is really cool. We're going to explore this through a pilot program or a program we call Grand Canyon Speaks here where we invite people from the eleven traditionally associated tribes of Grand Canyon to share their voice and authentically be themselves with visitors like you all to Grand Canyon National Park. So, we will get started and I will start asking fun questions. And then at the end, I'll open the floor up for questions from y'all. And so, we'll kind of work through that together. My first question is, we keep saying Hopi, but could you explain where you're from and where that is located for people who might not know?

Gregory Hill: Gee, where are we at now? Okay, so Flagstaff, right? The San Francisco Peaks? Hopi would be due east right here, like, maybe 63 miles. You'd come upon a place called Tuba City. So, Tuba City is, like, on the Navajo reservation, but that's, like, the edge of the border for the Hopi and Navajo Reservation. So, highway 89 runs to Tuba City, but on this side of the road is the start of the Hopi Reservation. So, you'd come upon a village called Mùnqapi. So, if you keep going east on highway 264, you'll come, like, maybe 45 minutes further east, you'll come into another village called Hotevilla. And that's situated in an area that's called, there's three mesas that the Hopi live on. So, the Hotevilla and Oraibi and the village at Kykotsmovi, those are all on the Third Mesa, which kind of juts out. So, you got, like, Hotevilla and then Oraibi, then it's like a mesa goes down. And below it is Kykotsmovi. And then, so the road goes up further into, like, maybe another 10 miles up, you'll start going up into another mesa, that's Second Mesa. So, there's three villages situated up there in, like, rocks. From afar, it looks like a mountain. You get close, you start seeing houses and stuff in there, so it really looks like a big mesa. So those are the Second Mesas. And you go further down, you get to the first mesa, which resides the consolidated villages of Polacca. First Mesa consolidated villages. Hano, Walpi, Tewa, Sichomovi. The lower villages. This village is, like, totally on a big, giant, narrow strip of rock that goes up probably like 100 ft, at least. So, I'm from the village of Kykotsmovi, which lies in, like, a valley above the village Oraibi, which is one of the oldest continuously inhabited villages in the United States.

Ranger Melissa: Yeah, thanks.

Gregory Hill: But yeah, you go that way. That's where I come from.

Ranger Melissa: I like it. When you think of home, are there any certain sounds, sense of smell? Anything that brings up memories of home for you?

Gregory Hill: Yeah, the rain smell after it rains, that wet earth smell. Mostly things that I encounter in nature remind me of home. Like, there's certain bugs that I encounter that only come out up there, know, that you don't see in the southern part of the state where I live in Scottsdale. So, there's things that I see down there that I miss from home because it's like a whole different mentality. In the city, it's like every man for themselves. But out in Hopi, it's like a community, and people help each other. Everybody come eat. It's not like, oh, you can't come eat because there's whatever. If there's not enough, we'll make enough., But yeah, there's a lot of things that remind me of home. When I was in my apprenticeship, as a butcher, I used to live in Albuquerque, so I'd get like homesick because that was like one of the first cities that I moved to as a grown up. So, I would miss home but the pueblos around there, they have ceremonies and dances and stuff and feasts. So, if I missed home a lot, I'd just go to one of the pueblos and eat and watch the dances and whatever and that really took me home. So, I didn't have a lot of angst and all of that from missing home and whatnot.

Ranger Melissa: It's like a sense of community.

Gregory Hill: Yeah, exactly.

Ranger Melissa: That's awesome. Yeah. When you talked about your apprenticeship with being a butcher, that was before you started doing your tops.

Gregory Hill: Yeah.

Ranger Melissa: So, what made you switch from your long stint as a butcher to becoming an artist?

Gregory Hill: I never imagined that I would be a toy maker. Artist, toy maker. It was more like a hobby to me doing this. Because butching is my passion. I can do the whole aspect of it. Nowadays there's meat cutters. So, a meat cutter is just basically cutting this muscle that's coming already separated in a big box full of other same kind of mussels. You're just cutting it up into steaks. I know how to do the whole thing from the slaughtering to the processing to doing that part of it, taking the steaks apart. So I never thought I'd be doing anything else in my whole life. I had plans for opening up like a butcher shop and like a mobile butcher shop for people that are like game hunters and whatnot. So I had big old plans for that. If I wasn't doing this, I would have been like a successful butcher shop owner right now. But this started off as a hobby. But for one thing, my OCD won't allow me to stop making them because they all have to spin exactly right. And even if I have this right now, it's like I'm not going to stop until it spins. So that's one of my problems that I have with this, making these. Because I can't stop. But I always told myself that, okay, you can be an artist for a little while, but then it's not going to be really lucrative. And it's like I'm finding that out. Yeah. It's like I have to work twice as hard as I ever would as a butcher. I work 8 hours as a butcher. I work 23 hours as a toy maker. But before it was just like something to do. But then, now as I'm learning and evolving as an artist, it turned into something different. It turned into something that I'm creating. Something that's going to bring like, mirth and joy, happiness. Like a childlike wonder is what it is. That little kid magic that we all possess, but sometimes we lose as we grow up because we stop playing. So I turned to making these because I just want to have that feeling in the world. There's just so many crazy things happening, like now, and I want to combat all the negative things in the world by creating something that's going to bring joy to the world.

Gregory Hill: I think that's like a good mission to have. My mission is to recreate a dying toy and encourage the childlike mirth and others. So, I think that's like a good mission to have. I use my art to promote different conservation efforts like at the Grand Canyon. I work with the International Crane Foundation. I use my art to promote knowledge about the Whooping and Sandhill cranes, which are on the endangered species list. I work with a group that works with turtles, like the endangered species turtles into hatchings and whatnot. So, it turned into a good business for me. I started winning awards for my work. I thought that once I'm going to win an award, then that's it. I always told myself that over the years as I'm doing this. And I finally won an award. And it was funny because my brain shut off to doing this because that was it. And I couldn't think of ideas to carve for maybe three months. I was just like blank. I had like, artist block. And to me, I was like, well, you're finished, so why keep doing it? But then I had to challenge myself again, like, okay, well, you'd win this award, try to win first place. So right now, I got 1st, 2nd and 3rd place awards in my category, which is traditional arts. And I got two honorable mentions in fine art and a sculpture division. So that's different for me because I never think of this stuff as fine art or sculpture. But some of the ones that I really carve out really could be like, fine art and sculpture. My new challenge to me as toy maker and artist is to try to win more awards, like bigger awards. So that's my personal challenge. I could stop and not do it anymore. But at the same time, yeah, I'm setting my pedestal higher for myself right now. For one show that I've been attending for the past six years, I got 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. So now I just want to win the best of show, which is like the top prize. So that's my new goal as an artist, is to try to win more awards.

Ranger Melissa: Right. When we were talking earlier, you said one way you have done that is, you've passed on some knowledge of how to make this with your daughter. Do you want to talk through how that came about? How did you get her interested in what you're doing? What's that like doing a father and daughter duo?

Gregory Hill: Yeah. That's cool. Because this all started as a project for my little girl when she was in kindergarten. So, she would have been six, around there. She came home one day with the note and a little piece of cottonwood root. The note said that she had a pen pal in Zuni, New Mexico, which is east of us as well. As a way to share culture, the parents were instructed to create a patukya, carve out a top. At that point, I think I was into my journeymanship as a butcher, so I never carved wood before, you know? I was just carving meat all the time. But my twin brother, Jonah, he was a Katsina doll carver as I was a butcher. So, I had to go to him and borrow his carving knife. And I already knew what a top looked like in my mind because I'm a nerd and I know different toys and whatnot, but I didn't know anything about carving wood. Son my first top was really rough. I just used the knife for the whole thing and carved out the tip with this and then made a handle for it. And it was a top, but it was really rough and everything. I didn't know about rasps and files or anything like that. So, it spun, but it spun like this. It was wobbly. Yeah. And me as a nerd, I know that when a top spins, it spins straight up and down on an axis, giving enough torque to make it spin like that. So I'd be standing there cutting meat in the daytime and whatever, and just sitting there and then standing there cutting meat. But in the back of my mind, it's like it bothered me that that thing was spinning like that. So OCD kicked in, I guess. And I went back to my brother and asked him, can I learn how to carve wood from you? Nobody really knows how to make these anymore because at that point they were kind of extinct. I remember them, but I remember them when I was like a real small child and I couldn't go and ask, like, hey, man, how do you make a patukya? Because there was nobody to ask. So, what I did was went to the village and asked all the elders about them, learned that way, then took all of that knowledge and my knowledge of science, angles, height to ground ratios and all of that and put it into this.

Gregory Hill: But my daughter, she was the one that really evolved from it because when she was little and I got to a point where I started being able to sell them, which I didn't really know how to do because I wasn't an artist at that point. So, we go to these different shops and my daughter, she was the demonstrator. So, she would demonstrate the method of play with using a stick and a string with the Hopi style tops. I think I can probably do it right here in the sand. Should be able to.

Ranger Melissa: Ouu, a challenge.

Gregory Hill: So, a Hopi style top is, like, a really simple shape. It has a tip. I learned that we had to go to a rock, like a sandstone, because that's all there is here. And grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. I tried that one time when I was first starting out. It took me a day just to barely get, like, a little bit of a tip on there. That's why I only used hand tools, is to keep myself rooted to that aspect of it, where they had to work in order to play. But to me, it teaches craftsmanship, attention to detail, all of those good things. So, my daughter would be doing this. She'd be demonstrating. I don't think it'll work (in the sand).

Ranger Melissa: Maybe get some rocks out of the way.

Gregory Hill: Yeah, there you go. Yeah. She would demonstrate the method of play for the spinning top, and then nine times out of ten, that would be. . .

Ranger Melissa: Could you do it on the chair?

Gregory Hill: Yeah, I can do it on the chair. Yeah. So, my daughter grew up doing this, what I'm doing right now. I had to relearn how to play because we all stop playing as we grow up. So, it took me a couple of weeks to be able to learn how to play. So, you hit it and you hit it with the string, and it keeps it spinning. So, imagine like, a dozen kids all doing this at the same time. That's what I remember when I was a little kid. So, yeah, my daughter grew up, and now she's 23, she's going to be 23 in November. And I was having some health issues within the past couple of years. I think I had a detached retina, so I thought I was going blind. Everything was blur and I couldn't see anything. It was scary. I thought I was going to have to quit doing this because I can't see. So, I started teaching my daughter how to carve wood. And in the Hopi, it's taboo for the ladies to carve the Kachina dolls, so I had to go and ask and see if it was okay for her to learn how to carve wood.

Gregory Hill: They're like, well, as long as it's not a Kachina, she should be okay because there are women carvers. I didn't bring any of the real small ones, but the real small pieces that I have are her work. So, she does a lot of the real small stuff now, and I'm free to do the award-winning tops. If I wanted to, I'm comfortable to leave her at a show or whatever, whether it be a demonstration show or art show, like the Santa Fe Indian Market, something like that. I'm comfortable leaving her alone with the booth, and she'll do everything.

Ranger Melissa: That's cool.

Gregory Hill: Yeah. So, she grew up doing this. And she knows business sense and how to market, advertising, all of that cool stuff. So, I'm trying to make her go back to school to learn more about it, because one thing I hate to do is, like, paperwork, and I'm trying to get her to be my paperwork gal.

Ranger Melissa: Earlier when we were talking in the watchtower, you were saying at the beginning you'd split the profits 80 20, and then it was like 30-40.

Gregory Hill: Yeah, now we're 50-50. So, she grew up learning a sense of how to use money and how to earn money. Because we'd do a sale, and I would make like $100. She'd be right there. Where's my $20? And she'd be growing up every time that she started knowing when I promote her or whatever, that she'd do the math and everything. And as soon as we get done, where's my cut? She was on it. Now, for a while, she was kind of taking it for granted, automatically going to start making this much money and whatnot. But then now as an apprentice, I do it based on her production and everything and how much time she takes in doing what she's doing. If I set her a task, like that much, and then she'll say, oh, well, I want half. I'll go like, well, how much did you do? How much work did you do? I'm putuk-ing as a business, and she's like, my employee now, so I got to make sure she's doing the work. Otherwise, she's going to be lazy, and I have to carve out 60 tops, and she's going to want half of that when she only does maybe, like three. So, I'm going to teach her that. To be responsible in that way and set her goals and all of that.

Ranger Melissa: Right.

Gregory Hill: Yeah.

Gregory Hill: I think one day she's going to be doing what I'm doing right now.

Ranger Melissa: That'd be awesome.

Gregory Hill: Yeah. She'll carry it on, which is cool for me because that's one of my goals, is to revitalize and keep this thing alive.

Ranger Melissa: Yeah. And I'm excited she's going to start making more tops. And then you get a shift more into your creative brain and doing more intricate work. Could you explain where your ideas come from and your inspiration for what you're going to design on your top?

Gregory Hill: A lot of my tops and my top designs, they come from childhood memories, like things I experienced in nature as a child or things like conquests and even defeats and stuff like that as a kid. I'll carve it into these tops, and that way it lives on, not only in my memory, but as a way to keep my memory fresh. But a lot of my designs nowadays come from conservation efforts. I believe that much like a turbine can create an energy; a top will create an energy as it's spinning. So, now a lot of my designs are in hopes that these things I'm putting into and on my tops are going to materialize in this world somewhere. Like the bees are becoming extinct, so we need more pollinators. So, I'll put bee tops that are totally carved out with bees and hives, honeycombs, and flowers and whatnot. So, I'll do tops like that and that's where my ideas come from. Things that I want to materialize into this world by using this spinning energy. But yeah, for one of the rangers a couple of maybe five years ago, she liked butterflies. So, I created a top that was totally carved out, butterfly up here and the bottom part was like a lady, like a maiden. Like the butterfly was landing on top of her head. It was like really colorful and everything. And another ranger was part of the turtle group, and I made her a really cool, colorful turtle. Like the sun was shining through the water and hitting that turtle shell and all those mosses and stuff that grow on it. And it made it like a burst of color. So, when it spun, it was like really colorful and everything.

Ranger Melissa: Yeah. In terms of designing a top, there's two parts to it, right? You're not only thinking about what it is going to look like, but also what's it going to look like when it starts to spin. How do you decide or how do you even think like that? That is blowing my mind, because today you were even talking about like, oh, I'm going to use blue and red to design a top so that when it spins, it makes a purple color. How do those ideas come into your mind, too? Like the color play that you can do when it's in motion versus not?

Gregory Hill: I'm sure a lot of artists, especially painters, they have what's called a color wheel. So that shows you which colors are going to do which or whatever. So, I kind of like have a mental color wheel in my mind. And it's like I can't look at things now normally. Every time I see something in my mind, it's doing this.

Ranger Melissa: It's like spinning?

Gregory Hill: Yeah. So, I always wonder, like, well, what colors go with this color? But as I'm carving it like this right now, what I'm carving, I think I'm going to carve, like maybe a grasshopper or something. That's what I see is a grasshopper sitting right here. So, this is going to be like the back legs, the front legs, the head right here. This is all going to be cut away, and then it's going to be sitting maybe on a flower or something like that.

Ranger Melissa: On the flat part?

Gregory Hill: Yeah, it's just like a lot of times I don't want to make these things. It's what's inside the wood that I see. It's what the wood wants to be. So, yeah, a lot of times I just use my imagination and what the wood wants to be. I can't force it. And when I do try to force a design, they're never balanced. They won't spin at all. So, I know I'm going to change it then into something else, and then it works. It starts spinning again.

Ranger Melissa: That's cool. And speaking of the nerd inside you and the way it spins. Being able to teach this to someone, what's involved in learning how to make a top? Because it feels like a lot of art, but also a lot of math.

Gregory Hill: Yeah, it's math, its science, it's attention to detail. When I first started doing this, like I say, I'm a nerd. So, I was taking a lot of time to figure out the angle of the tip, 45-degree angle or like a 30-degree angle for best height to ground ratio and all of that. So, it was hard teaching my daughter all of that because she's not a science buff. And new math nowadays is crazy. It turned out to be really technical. Like using a compass and everything and a lot of different tools. Somehow, it evolved in my mind and in my hands that instead of doing all of that, like getting a ruler and trying to see if I have the right angle, whatever, it's all feel. By feel. I'm feeling the wood, and I'm feeling like if there was a little see, it's not even right here, right? It goes up, it goes down. You can feel it. Do this with it. Yeah, turn it in your hand. All those bumps and raises and everything. You guys want to check it out? Yeah, everyone feel it. Rather than being yeah, just get it and turn it in your fingers and you'll feel all of those bumps and raises and everything.

Gregory Hill: And that's what I kind of take away. Right, but now, yeah, I don't even use hardly any math or whatever. It's just all what I feel. But then only time I use math is when I inlay natural stones, like turquoise or opal or any of the natural stones. Sometimes I'll inlay them into the top, and then I got to use math because I got to take the weight of that stone counterbalance with the weight of the other stone that I'm using. Sometimes I have to use like two or three stones on this side to counterbalance that weight and then make the top so it'll spin using those stones for more momentum, for forward momentum. So, when I start to spin it, the weight of that stone will push the other weight of the stone and it'll cause a longer spin. So, then I got to figure out how many kilograms or micro kilograms. I got to figure all of that out. The most stones I've ever put on a top was 26 pieces of turquoise onto a top. And that spun for a really long time, because all that weight and the way I made it was shaped like a heart. So, all of the stones that were on this part of their heart counterbalanced these stones on this heart and made more weight as it spun. So, it was like kind of pushing it.

Ranger Melissa: It pushed itself, yeah.

Gregory Hill: And if it wasn't for friction, that probably would have spun for like half an hour. But yeah, it's always the friction that the two surfaces are touching that slows down a top as it's spinning. So, if there wasn't friction, theoretically a top would spin in perpetual motion, but there's friction, and that causes heat, and heat slows it down.

Ranger Melissa: Kind of like the world. Cause we keep spinning.

Gregory Hill: Yeah, exactly. The world's doing this right now. It's supposed to be spinning like this, but it's spinning like this, kind of an axis. So, it's like a wobble. It's doing like a wobble. I think it's like a 26-degree wobble. So right now, the North Pole used to be like this, but now the North Pole is more towards the British Isles. So, in the Hopi, we have a story about that, about what the Earth is doing. It has to do with twins. The twins control the poles of the Earth, and then when it gets to a point in time when the Earth is going to end, the twins go opposite and then they make the Earth shake and it gets wobbly, and then the Earth will crumble. So, I think that's what's happening now is because the Earth is doing that wobble. It's been wobbling since 2011, I think. So, my next really big, my best of show top that I want to do, is going to be like an eight-inch diameter top that's going to explain that story, and the twins are going to be on there. So then when it spins, it's going to like all tops that spin, they wobble when they slow down. But what's cool is that when a top does like a wobble, when it's slowing down, it's going even faster than when it first started. So it's all that energy that's going to build up, and then as it wobbles, it goes boom. It's like a burst of energy. So when it wobbles, it's going even faster.

Ranger Melissa: That's going to be really cool to see.

Gregory Hill: Yeah. So then that top, when it's going to stop, it's going to be like, the twins are making that wobble happen and the Earth is going to crash.

Ranger Melissa: That's cool.

Gregory Hill: Yeah.

Ranger Melissa: Will you have that done by Thursday? I'm just kidding.

Gregory Hill: In my mind, I'm carving it right now. Yeah, I'll have it done probably for the Heard show. That's the one I want to win. It's the Heard.

Ranger Melissa: At the Heard Museum down in Phoenix?

Gregory Hill: Yeah, that's the one I want to win.

Ranger Melissa: That's awesome. You know, we're kind of winding down on my questions, but I had one. We were talking earlier about tops and how you didn't really know how to appraise yourself, like, how much should these actually cost? And it was like bringing an idea into my head where we've had many cultural demonstrators come out and there's all this love and positive energy that goes into all this different art. But then when people buy that art, it kind of just sits on a wall or sits on a shelf. And I really appreciate your artwork because you play with it, you actually utilize it. You're not just admiring it from a distance, you're bringing out that positive, that kid energy, like you were saying, but it's also this very beautiful thing that you have just thought up in the wood. How do you envision yourself in that scope? Of trying to figure out the worth of what you're creating when you have so many more dynamic interactions with your clientele?

Gregory Hill: That was my biggest problem as an emerging artist and all of that. I didn't know the value of my own work, which is, I think, a lot of problems for a lot of artists and people that make crafts and whatnot. What am I going to price this at? What's somebody going to pay? When I first started out, these things were like $5, $10 like this.

Ranger Melissa: What?

Gregory Hill: Yeah. I didn't know that. I didn't know what it was worth or whatever. I was happy to be able to sell that for that much. But I'm a nerd and I'm a smart man. I have an associates in business, so I started using that towards what I'm doing now. I'm running a business; I'm not going to be giving things away. I put x amount of time into doing this, whether it's going to hunt for the wood, bringing it back, curing it, cutting it, making it into something that's going to work perfectly. In my mind it has to, or else I'm not going to sell it. So, I started learning about commerce and I looked how much a man-made, machine-made top was. Mine aren't machine-made. I put more effort into it. I put that into account, so started bringing my prices up and everything and I'm running a business now. But, the other side of that is I'm not greedy for money or whatever, you know? You saw yourself, I've given away tops here today, at least three or four today, because to me, it's not about the money. Sure, I can make money doing this, and I do make money doing this. But the feeling that somebody gets when they see this. Like an old person that hasn't seen a toy in 80 years is going to see this thing. And mine is going to go back to that time when he was a child. He or she was a child. And their faces change, their demeanor changes, they light up and they get this energy every time. It's like an energy; they stand up straighter. One time I had an 80-year-old gentleman come, and he said he used to play with the stick and a string top, and it took him, like, 14 times to get down enough to actually spin the top. But he did it. And as soon as he did it, his whole body just loosened up, and he was whipping it and playing with it. And it was cool to me to see that. So that kind of thing is like, the reward that I look for, and that's my reward for doing this. It's not about the money sometimes. A lot of times, yeah.

Ranger Melissa: And I think that brings a huge point. The pure joy that your art brings is kind of almost invaluable. Like even today, I know I was playing with your tops, and I forgot I was working.

Gregory Hill: Yeah, right.

Ranger Melissa: It was so much fun.

Gregory Hill: You were talking about something that sits on the mantle or whatever on the shelf. A lot of my award-winning tops do that, which is sad to me, because I make them, no matter what the shape, size, whatever, they're all made to spin. And a lot of my big-time collectors that buy my big ones, they'll just sit there on their shelf or whatever, and I ask them five, six years later, do you guys play with your top? Oh, no. It just sits on the shelf. I was like, can you please spin it like one time?

Ranger Melissa: Release that power!

Gregory Hill: Get some energy going.

Audience Member: Get the dust off.

Ranger Melissa: For the dust to fly off.

Gregory Hill: Yeah. One of my biggest collectors, she has a big bowl, has, like, maybe 15, 16 tops in there. She keeps it out for people to come and play with them and whatnot.

Ranger Melissa: Awesome.

Gregory Hill: Yeah.

Ranger Melissa: My last question before we throw it to the audience is, if you had one takeaway for all of us here in this community tonight, what would that be?

Gregory Hill: Never stop playing. The art of play is something that's dying out in the world thanks to these things (phones). You're hunched over. I'm playing. Don't bother me. Go do the dishes. I can't, I'm playing. That's crazy. To me, that's crazy. Because I grew up playing outside, running around, climbing rocks and doing all this stuff, getting into trouble and danger. So, when we stop playing, there's synapses in our brains that go dormant, and those synapses in our brains that are associated with play are also associated with memory. So, if you stop playing, those synapses are going to stop moving and stop firing off. So, you're going to start forgetting things. You're going to start having memory lapses. And it's a proven fact that the art of play, as well as music, is the most beneficial thing for your brain to do. No matter if you're 9 or 90, we all have a little kid inside. Never stop playing. You're never too old to play, no matter how old you are. So that's one thing I want everybody to take away is just to remember that little kid inside of you.

Ranger Melissa: I love that. Never stop playing. And I thank you so much for coming to our demonstration program, which will be in the watchtower tomorrow from nine to four, as well as on Thursday. So, if you want to see Gregory making more tops or ask more questions, you can visit there. But it's really great that you're here, and I'm happy to have met you because I also really appreciate the idea that you're bringing this back, like, bringing something that was close to being kind of forgotten back to life. And that's just really cool. How you're doing that through art.

Gregory Hill: It's cool to me because I noticed, like, a lot of Kachina doll carvers are starting to make patukya now.

Ranger Melissa: Oh, cool.

Gregory Hill: But I think I got it to a point where there's a patukya and then there's Hilltops. So, I kind of made myself higher in skill level and all of that. But it's fun to me to see that the carvers are making these, because, like I say before, when I first started this, nobody was making them, but now it's coming back, so I'm revitalizing it, which is my goal.

Ranger Melissa: That's so cool.

Gregory Hill: Yeah.

Ranger Melissa: I'm going to throw it to the audience if anyone has any questions, too. Thanks so much.

Gregory Hill: Oh, you're welcome. Thank you.

Audience Member: What type of wood do you like to collect and use?

Gregory Hill: Okay, so the wood that I use is the root from the cottonwood tree. So, the cottonwood trees, they normally grow, like, near a body of water or a river. So, the root system, it grows into the water. The water, when it's flowing, it'll break it off. Sometimes, I get 20, 30-foot lengths, and the water helps to straighten them out. So, I'll go and hunt, like, near rivers and whatnot locally and around. And I'll go hunt on the riverbeds and find these pieces of wood. I'll drag them out of the water, haul it back and take it home, dry it out, and cure it. And the better stuff, I can always tell because I'll put my thumb into it, and if I can really put it in there, then I know that's, like, soft, good, soft wood. But that's my favorite piece of wood only because it allows me to really carve into it and stuff. But I've used teak, ebony, ironwood, a lot of the hardwoods, because the more the top weighs, the more it'll spin, the longer it'll spin. The heavier the weight, the longer the spin. So those tops that I've made from ebony antique, those ones spun for, like, maybe five minutes.

Gregory Hill: The ones that I'm trying to make from ironwood, that's metal. So that one's taking me a while, but that one's going to probably spin for a very long time, too. There's a tribe down in Mexico called the Seri. They have lady carvers, and they carve nothing but ironwood. And, geez, they carve, like, flamingos and pelicans from one piece of wood, and they make it look like it's like butter. So, I don't know what kind of magic they're using, but.

Ranger Melissa: Women power.

Gregory Hill: Yeah, exactly. Wonder Woman power. But it's fun watching them. I was at a wood carving convention in San Diego, like, in 2015, and all these little noises that I make with the wood, it was, like, amplified by a thousand because there was, like, five hundred wood carvers all in the same room working. Yeah. So that was a big kick for me.

Ranger Melissa: That's cool. Any other questions?

Audience Member: Curious to know, how did you pronounce it?

Gregory Hill: The patukya.

Ranger Melissa: The patukya.

Audience Member: What's been the longest amount of time that you've worked on one particular one?

Gregory Hill: Oh, the longest time I've worked on one. Three and a half months.

Ranger Melissa: Oh, wow.

Gregory Hill: I won first place at a show. I carved a hummingbird. So, the hummingbird was kind of like this shape, but then the wings came out like that, and then the head was dipping into a flower, which I carved. This whole part was a flower, so the hummingbird head was dipping into it, and its wings were, like, fluttering like that. And that one was inlaid with spiny oyster shell, red coral. I think it was bisbee turquoise.

Ranger Melissa: Wow.

Gregory Hill: It was all kinds of flowers carved around the side of it, too. And on the bottom was, like, pottery designs that were hummingbirds. So that took me, like, three and a half months because every little feather was carved out, every little overlapping feather. From the wings to the body to the tail and all of that. So, yeah, that took me three and a half months for that one.

Audience Member: How much time do you envision dedicating to the eight-inch top that you're going to be working on?

Ranger Melissa: Oh, yeah. The one that you're going to make with the twins, how long do you think that'll take?

Gregory Hill: I've been carving that in my head for three years now, so I'm looking for the piece of wood that's perfect for it. I have some good diameters. I'm looking for eight inches or more because I'm going to carve it down because it's going to be a lot.

Audience Member: Has it happened to you where, for instance, you're dedicating 15 hours to a top and then it splits in half?

Ranger Melissa: Oh, does it ever split or break?

Gregory Hill: Yeah, handles break a lot of times because the handles are carved out of one piece of wood. And I find that when I'm disturbed or preoccupied, my tops don't get balanced. So that's how I know I'm bothered about something. Yeah, I've carved tops where I've carved wings and everything out of a butterfly. And then I'm getting to that last point where I'm burning and I do it wrong or something, it pops off. But I've learned that every mistake is an opportunity. So, when I break something, I can turn it into something else. And I'm the only one that knows about the mistake. So, I used to be really hard on myself about mistakes until I realized that, one, I'm the only one that knows about those mistakes, and two, nobody else knows that it's a mistake.

Ranger Melissa: I love that. Yeah, I'm going to take that home.

Gregory Hill: Even in different things that I'm not carving, when I make mistakes in life, I know it's opportunity because I can learn from it and not do the same thing again. Yeah, you got to be more extra careful being a butcher and all of that.

Audience Member: That's ribeye steak!

Gregory Hill: Yeah, right. And I learned the old school way where it's all hand cut. We really used to saw and everything. So, everything was all the different types of knives that we used to debone, to slice, to cut, to make roasts and everything.

Ranger Melissa: Yeah, all ten fingers.

Gregory Hill: I got a good scar, though. I got a really good scar from a cut, but that's my initiation. I took it like that, like initiation. So, I never cut myself after that. Same thing with woodcutting. I cut my finger really good when I first did it because I didn't know what I was doing, and that was like, my lesson learned. So, I cut myself every once in a while, but it's not a big thing to me. Put some superglue on it and get back to work.

Ranger Melissa: Keep going. I love that. Any other questions?

Audience Member: Where do you get your carving tools from?

Gregory Hill: These are actually my grandmother's tools. She was a wood carver, so a lot of my files and rasps are hers. This is my carving knife. It's a brand called Opinel. It's a French made knife. Before, I used to use the old Henry knives. You know, the old folding knives. Those were like the number one wood carving knives back in the day because it was high carbon steel. They stayed sharp for a long time. But nowadays, if you see wood carving knives like the Kachina doll carvers and whatnot, they'll have probably an Opinel knife. You get these, like, on Amazon or whatever. In France, I heard they're like, only $2 or whatever. Here they're like 16 to 25, I think. But they got different sizes. Like, the blade sizes go up and down. So, this is a number eight. I have a number six as well. I use a number six for finer detail work, like really small, carved out stuff I haven't had to buy. Yeah, he uses the same kind. This is the kind I cut myself with the first time, but not this one. Yeah, but all of my rasps and files, they're all my grandma's tools and whatnot. She probably got them from wherever hardware store was around back in the 70s, probably. Yeah. So, it's fun to use her tools, especially a little mallet that I have, because I can feel her energy in it, she's used it for so long. And when I know I'm not holding it right, I'll look at it and, oh yeah, this is how she was holding it. And it works a lot better. So I can feel my grandmother's energy in the tools that I use. And I like that because her carvings are nothing but ironwood and it's like really cool intricate carvings and I'm glad to be able to use her tools for what I do.

Ranger Melissa: Well, thank you so much for coming out. Did you have one more question?

Audience Member: You talked a lot about the tops today, but what about the other pieces you have?

Ranger Melissa: Oh, the pieces out front?

Gregory Hill: Okay. Yeah. Well, being a butcher, I never had time for art at all, but I used to like to draw a lot, like a really good draw. I used to be a tattoo artist in my 20s.

Ranger Melissa: Oh, cool. Should have talked about that. (Laughter)

Gregory Hill: Yeah, right. I'm currently going through hemodialysis because my kidneys are jacked up. So, when I'm at dialysis, this arm just like sits there. And before I was carving there, but then this arm just sits there. So, this arm is free, and I get bored. So, I bought a sketch pad. All of the designs I put on my tops; I never draw them beforehand. It's always just what I see in the woods. So, I don't have any sketches of stuff. But now I started drawing in that sketch pad. So, I've been getting those doodles pretty much. I get it and then I take it home and kind of build up on it. So, I started making relief style carvings with this. So, all of my ideas from dialysis are turned into wall hanging art. Cool. Yeah. So, I call them my dialysis doodles. But yeah, it's like fun for me for doing something different when I want to do something different besides tops. So, yeah, I've been winning awards for my flat pieces, too, so yeah, those ones are pretty neat.

Ranger Melissa: Well, thank you all for coming. The sunset will be nice.

Gregory Hill: It should be a good one.

Ranger Melissa: Get a good spot.

Gregory Hill: Thank you, guys, for coming!

Ranger Melissa: I appreciate it.

Gregory Hill: Yeah, come check it out. Yeah.

Ranger Melissa: If you need the parking lot, it's behind you.

Gregory Hill: If you come tomorrow, I have like 40 more, I think. And these are all going to be carved into tops by the end of Thursday.

Ranger Jonah: Grand Canyon Speaks is a program hosted by Grand Canyon National Park and the Grand Canyon Conservancy. A special thanks to Aaron White for the theme music. This recording reflects the personal lived experiences of tribal members and do not encompass the views of their tribal nation or that of the national park. To learn more about Grand Canyon First Voices, visit www.NPS.gov/GRCA. Here at Grand Canyon National Park, we are on the ancestral homelands of the eleven associated tribes of the Grand Canyon, these being the Havasupai tribe, the Hualapai Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe, the Pueblo of Zuni, the Yavapai-Apache Nation, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, the Moapa Band of Paiutes, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe.

Welcome to Grand Canyon Speaks! We are airing live interviews that park rangers had with artists from the 11 associated tribes of Grand Canyon National Park. This series explores the lives and perspectives of people who call Grand Canyon home.

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Janet Yazzie: I had to believe in myself first to become an artist. Gerald Dawavendewa: Being an individual is one of the last things you are. Aaron White: You know, music is a very powerful tool. Chasady Simplicio: I really do hope one day my pieces will stay around for like longer than I am. Ranger Jonah: Hello, and welcome to Grand Canyon Speaks, an online podcast series that interviews members of the eleven associated tribes of Grand Canyon National Park. This is an experience we have in person in the park, and we are now bringing it to your ears and your home. Through this online series, we hope you enjoy the authentic representation of people who call Grand Canyon home. Noreen Simplicio: It's all going to get taken away. Well, that hasn't happened. I'm still creating. So, grandma, I'm sorry, but I think you were wrong at that. Aaron White: Bunch of crazy 18-year-olds. And then when the clubs would close out at four in the morning, people would pour into the streets. Gregory Hill: I want to combat all the negative things in the world by creating something that's going to bring joy to the world. Cassandra Tsalate: Yes. Over time, it will break, it will diminish. But when it does, that's when you know that life was its full potential. Chasady Simplicio: You're going to have to do some editing. LaShae Harris: (laughter) Start over.