“I don’t believe in “Native skate culture”.” Douglas Miles, the founder of Apache Skateboards says from his home on the Apache Akimel O’odham reservation in San Carlos Arizona. “I feel like that’s something created by museums or as a way to sell product. To make it unique, cool and trendy. It’s dumb, and it’s also a little bit racist. No one says Jerry Hsu or Don Nguyen is representing Asian skate culture or Tommy Guerrero is representing Latino skate culture. Skateboarding is its own culture. The true nature of skateboarding is inclusivity.”
WORDS BY ADAM GRAY
So this isn’t an article about “Native skate culture”. This isn’t about classification or delineation or separation of a group within skateboarding. Of course, everyone has their own cultural history, but we’re all skaters. It’s the bridge that connects us across all differences. It’s the reason I can push down any street in the world and find good company who’ll look out for me. When you untangle that ball of yarn I think it becomes clearer what Douglas means he says “I don’t believe in “Native skate culture”.” But this is an article about skateboarding, and how it has touched the residents of Native communities in America.
NOT A CHARITY, NOT A CLICHÉ
As a kid, Douglas moved from San Carlos to Phoenix and began skating there, but his real passion was art. He incorporated the ethics and attitudes of the punk DIY culture into his own work and blending traditional influences with more modern street or pop art. You get a taste of the way he blends traditional art with more modern styles on a recent collaboration he did REAL and his own Apache Skateboards, ‘Actions REALized’. The deck displays a photograph of the famous Apache leader Geronimo, behind him, scrawled in bright spray paint are the names of great Apache leaders. His hope is that when kids read those names they get curious enough to look them up.
Back in 2002, Douglas’s son Doug had just begun skating with a small crew of his friends. They were the skate scene at the time and the terrain was mostly parking lots and curbs. Doug asked his dad for a deck but many of the big brands were out of his price range. Douglas bought his son a blank and painted the image of an apache warrior on it as a graphic.
“If I had lived one hundred and sixty years ago, I would’ve made him a bow and arrow but it’s modern times so I made him a skateboard.”
Pretty soon the other kids were asking Douglas to paint a graphic on their boards as well. That was the seed that saw Douglas start Apache Skateboards. He was inspired by the way Skip Engblom founded Dogtown Skateboards back in the 70s – a real DIY approach. In the same way that the kids who hung around Skip’s shop became the original Dogtown Team, Apache Skateboards original team became the San Carlos kids tearing up that parking lot. “Skateboarding requires that the skaters have a fearlessness right?” says Douglas “And Native Americans respect that fearlessness. It comes from this desire to try fun, crazy things and at the same time push yourself in different ways. There’s also the rebelliousness, it’s kind of built into Indian kids.”
“Back when I started, [some of the pro teams] were fucking assholes. They were cool but they would jack your board and shit. But now it’s all kinda like love and just inspiring each other and motivating each other to do better and push your limits. In that way it’s changed, it’s more positive.” – Grant Gatewood, Fort Apache resident
Since its founding, Apache Skateboards has continued to create opportunities and outlets for kids on San Carlos and neighbouring reservations, putting on skate competitions, concerts and art shows. It’s become about providing kids with an alternative perspective of who they are, where they come from and what they can accomplish. “I’m not saving them, they’re saving them.” Douglas remarks. It is a skate company that exists for the joy that skateboarding brings, an alternative to the tragic identity often imposed upon Native Americans in reservation communities. It’s about badass pride, flaunted on the bottom of the decks they ride.
“We’re the original punk rockers! When you get back to the roots of all of it, we are the roots! We fought the man long before it was popular. We’ve been rebelling against the U.S. since the 1700s!”
Apache Skateboards slogan, “Innovate! Originate! Skate! Sublimate! Liberate!” really encapsulates the work that Apache Skateboards is doing in the Native American communities and in skateboarding overall. Where societies built upon the principle of movement, of following the natural environment, are restricted to plots of land, skateboarding is now recapturing that connection with the world around them. “When you break it down,” he says, “skating is really about becoming one with nature. We native people know a lot about that. That’s what the skater does. He or she reclaims the land by becoming in tune with that land.”
LIVE LIFE, LIVE LIFE, LIVE LIFE
Walt Pourier is worried about the kids on the Lakota reservations of Standing Rock and Pine Ridge in North Dakota and South Dakota. Many of the kids from these communities are facing the backlash from the Standing Rock protests in which Lakotas and activists from around the US gathered in for almost a year in an effort to stop an oil pipeline from running through their lands. In particular, from running dangerously close to the fresh water sources their communities depend on. The protest camps were eventually forcefully destroyed through the brutal, militaristic policing.
“Three years ago, Standing Rock had a suicide epidemic. Three to five kids a month!”
The Standing Rock protests attracted a lot of attention from media, politicians and celebrities. Some white Dakotans did not agree with the Standing Rock protests or the attention they brought. They make it known through acts of hate. Emboldened by the orange, light-weight Mussolini currently running the country, targeting society’s most vulnerable is (once again) all the rage. “The kids started these [protest] camps. They’re the ones who did the run to DC to try and stop this thing. They were there before it all took off, and since then racism has tripled in North Dakota and South Dakota.” explains Walt. “People hated that pipeline protest, all the non-natives are against the natives now. The kids going off the reservation to play basketball against other high schools are getting yelled at, racial slurs. They call them prairie niggers.”
“I feel like it really brought the best out of me, man. I was a depressed kid growing up, didn’t have a cool ass home to grow up in but skateboarding gave me a new family. My homies. There have definitely been some hard times but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.” – Grant Gatewood, Fort Apache resident
The cameras and the celebrities have now left Standing Rock, but the Lakota remain and Walt fears the conditions are ripe for tragedy. Only a few years ago, the Indian Health Service reported that there were less than ten mental health professionals serving the entire reservation. Combine the limited resources with the facts that Pine Ridge has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the country and the largest population of residents under 20, and it’s apparent why Walt is so concerned.
“I can’t bury anymore kids man.”
Walt started skating on Pine Ridge, rolling down small hills and skating curbs. When he moved with his mother to Orange County, California for a little bit he began hopping fences and skating pools with skaters like Tony Alva. Returning to Pine Ridge he worked as an artist, eventually starting his own business, Nakota Designs which backed The Stronghold Society, which raises awareness and support for young people in the reservations.
After a close relative took their own life, Walt was compelled along with the founders of Wounded Knee Skateboards to try and do something to provide the youth of Pine Ridge with an alternative. The stars aligned, and with the backing of Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament and Levi’s Skateboarding, they had the first Pine Ridge Skatepark built in 2011. Since then they have expanded the Pine Ridge skatepark, built another in the community of Manderson, and created a number of programmes to encourage expression through art, music and skateboarding among Lakota Youth. Next, Walt and the Stronghold Society are going to fight this potential rising wave of death and depression the best way they know how, by building a skatepark in Standing Rock. “Its gonna’ have a snake run and we’re gonna’ paint it black!” he exclaims gleefully. Like a skateable version of the potential environmental disaster the oil pipes present.
“Skateboarding is all about creating safe spaces.” Walt tells me. “I grew up skateboarding and I know it doesn’t care what colour you are, or if you’re a boy or a girl. It doesn’t care about your identity. It’s a culture of release, of going as far as you want to go and expressing yourself. Like art and music, it gives these kids a voice.” In that spirit, Stronghold’s motto is “Live Life.” Rather than focus on suicide prevention, the focus is on changing the perception of how the Lakota youth see themselves. It’s Walt’s view that these kids hear about suicide way too much, especially from outside media sources that come to Pine Ridge and tell the same “poverty story” again and again.
“So from us they’re going to hear ‘live life, live life, live life’. I want their voices to be heard, I want their stories to be heard.”
Skateboarding is a voice, it’s a language that can express rage and grief, joy and celebration; especially for those who find it hard to actually say these things with words. More importantly, skateboarding can be the ultimate form of catharsis. Taking all of that pain or feelings of being ignored and turning it toward flight or the destruction of the crumbling, cold, world around you. It’s a physical struggle, it’s thrilling but it’s also a meditation.
