People ask me how long I have been interested in justice for First Americans.
Around 1935 my parents took me to see the Florida Seminoles who wrestled alligators for the tourists. Seminole men and woman told me how their people had been driven from their ancestral lands and how life for their tribe had become bitter with many privations, much suffering. That knowledge stayed with me.
As I grew older, I noticed how museums treasured Indian artifacts, but made no mention of the honorable cultures and traditions from which these objects hailed. Nor was there anything about the toll upon the land caused by settler greed. There again, justice was missing. A seed was planted at that time but it took until 1981 before the Eco Arch took shape in my imagination. About five years later, I learned of an ancient civilization which the whites called Poverty Point, near the Arkansas and Mississippi confluence. This once-vital city, dating to 1300-200 BCE covered over a square mile and could have been the Eco Arch's spiritual ancestor, so similar was its shape!
Throughout my career various projects have taken their inspiration from American Indians. You may find them described in detail in the website section entitled
Transformational Impact. They include Triangular Processions, (Farmington, New Mexico), Maze Escape, (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) and Concentric Rings,Bartlesville, Oklahoma). In Tempe, Arizona 1986, I won the most important competition of my career by claiming to be a Hohokam Indian. Once more I felt my creativity strongly guided by the spirit of the past.
The Eco Arch is composed of a monumental earth sculpture and education center. It is my belief that building this development will allow truth to be told and bring a long-awaited healing to the nations.