It’s all grey skies and scattered showers on the Bruckner Expressway, passing through Queens and crossing the East River into the South Bronx. If you look out the passenger window you can see the steel and stone structures of Rikers Island Correctional Facility. If you didn’t know it, you might think it was just more industrial patchwork, maybe something to do with shipping or a part of La Guardia. If you know what you’re looking at though, one of the world’s largest penal facilities, ten different jails holding a daily average of 11,000 inmates and a lengthy history of violence, abuse, murder and suicide then it makes the dark weather that much more appropriate.
Words: Adam Gray
Crossing into the Bronx, near Hunts Point, simultaneously watching the passing neighborhoods and the road. Amidst all the old houses, brick apartment buildings, warehouses and McDonald’s play-places. I spot the bright colors of a graffiti mural wrapping the walls of a building like an Easter egg. A large and full backdrop of bright teal and purple, bronze skin and black hair and piercing eyes looking out onto Garrison Ave. Even from the highway I’m pretty sure it’s the work of visual artist Douglas Miles, the founder of Apache Skateboards. I take the next exit and drive around hunts point until I find it, below the overpass across the tracks.
Purple mountains loom behind the three figures. Their faces possess a strength and defiance that I’ve come to identify with Miles’ style. The bright southwestern colors seem so out of place here on Garrison that it’s not clear to me what Miles’ mural is doing here, on a nondescript street in New York City, far from his home in Arizona. But I should have known better, the context is crucial and like with so much of his art, whether on a wall or a skateboard, Miles is giving a history lesson.
Written in bold yellow lettering to the left of the figures are the words “Fort Apache”. This was the name of an infamous cavalry garrison once situated in the midst of Apache territory (now Arizona) and the site of a battle between the two back in the 1880s (a John Wayne film was later made with the same title). It is also what officers who worked out to the 41st Precinct once located on Simpson St. in the Bronx used to call their station house in the 70s when the crime and arson rate in the neighborhood were at all time high.
When I spoke to Doug Miles a few years ago regarding a deck Apache Skateboards released in collaboration with Real skateboards that bore his art, he told me that the writing on the deck was the names of past Apache chiefs and it was his hope that people who saw the deck would search those names and learn about them. So it shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does, standing on the street reading about “Fort Apache” on my phone, the layers connecting the past to the present that explain the relevance of Miles work here in the south Bronx. It’s a thin thread that stretches through Rikers and Hunts Point, New York, out across America to the San Carlos Reservation, that can only be seen in the right light. Like the thread from the past connecting the indigenous ritual of surfing the waves of the Pacific to the modern ritual of skateboarding and a brand like Apache Skateboards..
This connection and examination of how a people and a community assert, maintain and continue to create themselves in the presence of the past and the uncertainty of the present, is also the primary theme of the recent documentary on Apache Skateboards, The Mystery Of Now. It’s a visually stunning and poetic piece in which Miles, riders for Apache skateboards and locals from the San Carlos reservation reflect on the impacts of a local skateboard brand, music, art and the past in the community.
Since its release, The Mystery of Now has been shown at a number of festivals and received multiple Official Selection nods. Miles, his son, skateboarder and Apache Team rider, Doug Miles Jr. as well as others involved have attended screenings of the film and participated in Q&As. The film as well as the brand’s presence on social media and in the streets has led to an increase in attention to not only the skate scene but also the various creative outlets for youth in the San Carlos community that Apache Skateboards is playing an important role helping to create. It’s a fine line to walk being a brand that’s based and built on the reservation, creating and giving back to a scene where once none existed. It would be lazy and reductive to look at Apache Skateboards and just assume it is some sort of community nonprofit that also happens to make product to support their activities.
So let’s be clear, Apache Skateboards is a brand, it is a company, it has a team of skaters who all rip in their own right and graphics as distinct and powerful as the mural in the Bronx. But it is also more than just a skateboard brand, it’s rooted in the community it sprang from and using its strength as a brand to bring attention and resources to the streets and the people that helped create and support it.
Doug Miles is more than cautious of this unique position and the benefits and harm that can come from outside attention. The support of other brands, corporations or media projects can and have been beneficial and provided experience and in some cases resources for skaters in the community but he’s also aware that there are many who would exploit the brand’s image, the skaters, and the community for feel good photo-ops or advertising. Apache Skateboards created their brand, their scene on their own, just like in so many other places around the world, and there’s real and tangible value in that. It’s a well known story in skateboarding at this point, culture vultures more than happy to sweep in and capitalize on the uniqueness, the style and the popularity of skateboarding for quick gain, add to that the Native American factor and it’s easy to understand his caution. The skaters in San Carlos, the skaters on Apache Skateboards like all of us, want to be respected and appreciated first and foremost for their skills and their style on the board.
As the Mystery of Now makes clear, the skaters on Apache know their presence matters and can be empowering to the youth in their communities. The resilience, rebellion and strength that skateboarding gives the kids that keeping getting up off the ground and getting back on the board is a power that can’t be fully intellectually understood, only experienced. Apache Skateboards provides the opportunity to Native communities to witness that power, find those outlets that empower, and the documentary allows viewers to see that impact. Pioneering (and legendary) skateboarder Tommy Guerrero witnessed it too the times he has been out to San Carlos to see Doug and the crew, “We all know about the atrocities of the past and the continued suppression of the indigenous people of the states. It’s difficult for an outsider to grasp what’s really going down. But the Apache skate crew is tough, they rise above and take care of business. They are helping to perpetuate skating and the arts on native lands. Giving the kids a reason and a way to stay out of trouble. Skating saved me and many others.”
“Most people don’t want to experience throwing your fucking carcass into the ground over and over and over for hours and days on end. It takes a special individual.”
Skateboarding has that capacity for alchemy and I’ve come to believe it’s that potential that attracts kids/people who don’t always find a home in organized sports or more mundane pursuits, people who need the risk of self destruction as the price for grace. To quote Guerrero from the film, “Most people don’t want to experience throwing your fucking carcass into the ground over and over and over for hours and days on end. It takes a special individual.” Guerro would know better than others, his background growing up in Los Angeles and using skateboarding to escape the difficulties at home and in his life is well documented. When I asked about what attracted him to skateboarding and kept him so passionate that he’s spent his life involved with it, he explains feeling “…as though I was chosen by skateboarding in some way. It found me as it knew I needed it. Once I started I was obsessed. Now I see how fortunate I was.”
It’s a feeling a lot of skaters can recognize and it’s what keeps pulling us back day after day, despite everything; skaters in San Carlos being no different in that sense. For so many of us, native, black, white, rich, poor, gender to gender non-conforming, skateboarding was a rescue in itself. From broken homes, mental health struggles, school, work, substance misuse, trauma and hopelessness. Miles saw that, first in the joy skateboarding brought to his son and his son’s friends when they first began and in how the the Apache skateboards and its riders can demonstrate an alternative to the identities so often imposed upon Native youth. As Guerrero explains, “It [skateboarding] gives them a reason to not give up or give in to all the trappings that come with difficult situations. A sense of identity, an inclusive community, a sense of accomplishment, tenacity, perseverance and on and on. These traits are then instilled for the rest of one’s life.”
I think if you’re paying attention there’s a very tangible feeling in the world nowadays that the stakes are high. What Apache Skateboards reminds us is that for Native communities not just in the US but throughout the colonized world, the stakes have always been high, Miles notes in the documentary “We can’t vote and get our country back because they just took it.” A history of genocide, a present of limited opportunities/resources and a legacy of having outsiders try to define you, are all at play for these communities.
The rebellion I see when I look at Apache Skateboards or talk with Doug is in the creation, the originality and spirit of the skaters, the power to hold the past as it continues to influence the present. Like the names of past Apache leader’s scrawled in bold letters on a skate deck, a bright mural acknowledging the Fort Apaches on the “hostile lands” of 1880s Arizona or the 1970s South Bronx, the legacies of containment in Rikers and on reservations, it’s all present. It’s part of what makes the Mystery of Now so relevant to the current moment when America seems so confused about its identity and its future. It’s Doug’s story, its Apache Skateboards’ story, San Carlos’s Story but it can inform how we as individuals in the world decide how to act, how we want to honor the past with our choices, our skating, our art, our dollars, our lives, but it requires first we learn and listen
. “It’s no mystery that the history of Native American people in this country has been overlooked, misrepresented and maligned to create a more heroic narrative for settlers to sell books, to sell land, and to sell movie tickets,” Douglas shares on the film’s website. “In the middle of this cultural clash, stereotypes and battles for agency, one thing that has never ceased is Native creativity and the making of art. In our creativity we recreate ourselves, and in doing so we create and shape the world around us.”
