THOMAS POOL INTERVIEWS WAYLON GARY WHITE DEER, A CHOCTAW ARTIST WITH A STRONG CONNECTION TO IRELAND, ABOUT HIS ARTISTIC BACKGROUND, PRACTICE, AND THE ENDURING INFLUENCE OF THE CHOCTAW NATION’S GIFT TO THE IRISH PEOPLE DURING THE GREAT FAMINE.
Thomas Pool: What can you tell us about your artistic background? How did you come to be an artist, what motivates your work, and how has your practice evolved over the years?
Waylon Gary White Deer: My first motivation was my father. There’s an almost lost genre, I’m one of the few practitioners that’s still alive, called Traditional Indian Art, also called flat work. And my dad used to paint in that style. When I was growing up, he used to paint on the kitchen table, and I would watch him paint. My father’s paintings were influenced by his good friend, the renowned Apache artist, Allan Houser. They used to paint together. I was influenced by that, very much so. I guess a lot of times we want to do what our dads do. In this case, I did not know that I wanted to paint as well. My parents, when I was about three years old or so, left to find work and I stayed with relatives for a while. When they came back, we moved to Brigham City, Utah. It was there that I was exposed to a lot of Navajo yei designs on blocks of wood that were used as the canvas. My parents had bought some of these from the Navajo students at Intermountain Indian School and hung them up in our home. And so when I was about three years old, I saw all this very stark black and white imagery of Navajo gods, all around the living room, on the walls and so forth. It had a big visual impact on me; I’ve never forgotten those images. So those two things, my father and the Navajo yei art, are what have influenced me the most.
I started painting when I went off to what is now Haskell Indian Nations University, run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the US government agency that oversees Indian communities. I took this art class taught by a Cheyenne instructor, who also excelled in that flat work my father did, the Traditional Indian Art style, which is a little bit like Byzantine or Ancient Egyptian art, that kind of flat, two-dimensional work with subjective use of colour and all that.
So after that, I started painting, and was able to start selling my paintings right away, which surprised me. Shortly after I got married, and I would hitchhike from our little town in western Oklahoma to Anadarko, where Indian City USA is, a big tourist trap, with a little stack of paintings from my in-laws house. I would go around to all the Indian shops and museums selling those until they were all gone. And then I would go eat lunch on my ill-gotten gains and then hitchhike back home. I think about 30 miles. That was how I got asked to become an artist-in-residence there at Indian City USA.
Everything evolved from there. I got picked as an artist-in-residence for the State of Oklahoma, for a year or so. And then, one day, I was walking along the street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when this long black car comes by with tinted windows. One of the windows rolls down, and a man asked me: “Are you Waylon White Deer?” I thought they were there to collect money or something! But it turned out they were from a gallery in Austin, Texas, and they had been following my career in Oklahoma. They invited me down to Texas and put me on a plane with my wife and our first baby – I had a young family and was glad to have a contract with this gallery.
While you now live in Oklahoma, you spent many years living in the Gaeltacht in Donegal. How did such a culturally, linguistically, and geographically unique environment influence your work during those years?
I liked it there. There’s a word, as Gaeilge, called meitheal, which means everyone working together, a communal system. And while everything in the Gaeltacht today is not explicitly communal, there’s still an imprint, an ethos of the older order that I could understand and recognise because Choctaw culture, too, is communal. And so, I thought that was great. I kind of understood how people worked together there, how they didn’t want to step on each other’s toes because their families have been neighbours for generations. They were very decent people; they wouldn’t see you stuck. It was a community whose values were very similar to Choctaw values.
I hadn’t originally intended on moving there. I was back-and-forth to Ireland since 1995, when AfrI (Action from Ireland) brought me over to be a walk leader in their annual Famine Walk in Mayo, and in 2011 I was living in Crumlin with a studio at All Hallows in Drumcondra, commuting back and forth each day. But I was having some issues with my landlord in Crumlin, so my friend Damien Dempsey, the singer-songwriter, suggested I head up to Donegal to the Gaeltacht, where he had a friend. His friend took me around and we found a place for me to rent. There was a house a lady was renting, and she had a fire going and gave me tea and ‘bickies’; it was so nice and I just thought ‘Oh, I want to live here’. It was close to Gortahork, in a place called Cashel na Gór, where there were more sheep than people.
It’s just a magical place. I felt that there was a confluence, like a Celtic knot, of wind and sea and land all coming together. There are places on Earth where there are strong energy lines, where you can feel the presence of this energy much more strongly and clearly than you can anywhere else. It’s very hard to have a lie-in there, because that energy will just pull you out of bed. And Cashel na Gór was one those places.
I gained a sense of the land before I had a sense of the people. And that strong presence, that strong spirit of the land kind of bubbles up in the people there, and so they’re great people. They were very similar to the people I had left in Oklahoma, in certain important ways.
I started becoming known there very quickly, and one of the local papers started referring to me as “Gortahork’s own Waylon White Deer”, and I thought ‘I’m feeling at home here’, which I still feel today.
Living there really influenced my artistic style. I started bringing in a lot of visuals from the sea, and that has a certain timelessness about it. You can gaze off into the horizon, to the infinity point where the sea and sky merge together. I started putting that sense of timelessness from the tides into my paintings because of that, as well as the cosmic. I have a painting in Donegal Castle, Clan Spirits, where you can see that influence. I still have those elements, that I’m working on perfecting in my art, and that’s something that’s stuck with me since.
In 1847, shortly after the Trail of Tears – in which thousands of Choctaw, Cherokee, Muskogee, Chickasaw, and Seminole died as they were forcibly removed to present-day Oklahoma from their ancestral homelands in the American South by the US government to make room for white settlers – members of the Choctaw Nation were so moved by accounts of The Great Famine in Ireland that they donated $170, around €6000 today, to Irish famine relief. You’ve previously and very poetically described this gift as ‘an arrow shot through time’. Can you describe your own connection with Ireland and how ‘the gift’ has affected your life?
I first heard about ‘the gift’ when I was in Indian boarding school. Indian boarding school isn’t posh like Irish boarding school. They were run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and they didn’t teach you how to be an equestrian or have decent table manners. It was just a place to hold Indian kids with not very nice food.
I was in the library to write a report on my tribe because I wasn’t paying attention in biology class. I found this book called The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (1934). I opened it up and stuck my finger on a random page and decided to write a report about whatever it was I stuck my finger on. And the page I landed on discussed how in 1847, the Choctaw made a donation to the Irish people during the Great Famine, and that was when I first became aware of this connection.
It’s been almost 30 years since I first came to Ireland, and I’ve been back and forth ever since. I find Ireland to be an oasis, for me, where I can find a sense of decency and humanity that I often find lacking in America. It gives me an ability to look at my people, and their struggle with colonisation, and compare it, not just to that of Ireland, which was also colonised, but to other places in the world. So Ireland has given me a way to see things I hadn’t seen before.
The last time I was in Ireland was in November, 2023, when I was up in Donegal, where I’m still involved in a number of ongoing projects that bring me back and forth. So I’m still in regular contact with people over here. I have this sense, in my mind, that’s sort of odd, where I can get in my jeep and just drive to Ireland. It might take me a few days, but I have this sense that it’s closer to me than it actually is. It’s just sort of like you’re there, and then you’re here and you’re there and you’re here, and you do that enough over the years, and, sometimes you’re never here nor there. And other times, those two places kind of merge.
‘The Gift’ has created a special relationship between the Irish people and the Choctaw, as well as with indigenous communities in the United States in general. Other gifts have since included the 2007 Choctaw donation of $8000 to the Shell to Sea campaign – which you yourself aided in – as well as Irish donations to the Navajo and Hopi Covid-19 relief funds. You, perhaps more than anyone, have done a tremendous amount to foster and grow this special relationship. How would you like to see it evolve in the years to come?
Well the way the Shell to Sea situation came to be was that it was a by-product of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which devastated the Gulf Coast in the US and the city of New Orleans. My wife at the time, she started a relief programme for the Choctaw communities in southern Mississippi that were affected by the hurricane. She asked me to help organise it, and I thought we should also fundraise in Ireland for it. So I came up with the acronym CHARA, Choctaw Hurricane Assistance and Relief Association, which is also the Irish word for friend. So we appealed to casino tribes in the US, as well as on RTÉ and people in Ireland. We were able to raise a lot of money and were able to procure food and generators for the affected communities. After it was over, we still had some money left. So, I went to the board and suggested we work with AfrI, who were campaigning against the Shell Oil corporation building a refinery off the coast of Mayo, where it would harm the local communities, environment and endangered species.
I had been involved with AfrI since they invited me over in 1995. I had friends who were beaten by Shell security, as well as the Gardaí, so I suggested we give the leftover money to them for Shell to Sea. I’ve always represented the Irish-Choctaw Famine link by public invitation; it was just a consequence of the relationships I’ve established in Ireland since first coming over in 1995.
Don Mullan, the founder of AfrI, asked me to come and help represent our common link as an individual. If it wasn’t for Don, I probably would never have set foot in Ireland. But the way I would like see it evolve is to stay free of politics, going forward. I would like for this ‘arrow through time’, this delicate link, to be more about people to people, and not become academicised either.
I think that in order for it to thrive and go forward – as something that carries a spirit that transcends, both Choctaw and Irish, and speaks to our better angels, you know, just as people – it has to continue to survive the way it got re-remembered back in 1995, as people to people, one poor, dispossessed people reaching out, across a great distance over an ocean, to help another poor, dispossessed people. So that’s the way it had started. I would like to see that community spirit continue and not be co-opted by politics.
As well as being a prolific artist who has shown in galleries across the world, you are also a talented writer. Your autobiography, Touched by Thunder, with a foreword written by the late Martin McGuinness – Deputy First Minister and principal architect of the Good Friday Agreement – received critical acclaim, including from Joy Harjo, the former Poet Laureate of the United States. What was your writing process like?
Well, once upon a time, I was in Zurich, Switzerland, and I was broke. And so, my only pleasure in life at the time, because I had enough change to do this, was to hop on the bus and ride around Zurich all day and look out the window. And, I noticed that, at the bus stops, even though I knew that the route around the city was a big circle, the bus route was shown on the signage as a straight line.
And it just sort of snapped for me. I said, “Oh, that’s the way Europeans think of time. They think of it as a straight line. 1161, 1573, 1847, and time marches on along a straight line.” But it got stuck in my head, this older concept of time, the Choctaw concept of time, that time comes back around.
So I wrote Touched by Thunder in a cyclical way, according to subject, rather than a chronology of my life. I also thought that it was more interesting to include quotes by other people, rather than just having readers listen to me the whole time. I also included a lot of cartoons. I started my art career as a cartoonist when I was in high school. I did a lot of cartoons of people with giant noses and, I don’t know, snot coming out of their ears and so forth.
So, I threw in a bunch of cartoons, but, I was happy to write this book because my mother was kind of a frustrated writer. So since my dad painted, when I was a kid, I said to myself, “I would like to grow up and write a book and illustrate it”, and kind of do both those things that my parents liked to do. I was very happy to be able to write a book like that. So I did.
But it was kind of crazy to write because I was living in Crumlin at the time and I was trying to get ready for this big gallery art show I had at The Doorway Gallery on Frederick Street, and I was writing, trying to finish this book while preparing for the show. I was burning the candle at both ends. So, weirdly enough, I sent my manuscript to Currach Press and after their first read, they said, “We’ll publish you.” And it just happened like that. And I know that will never happen again. It’s like going to a casino for the first time and just dropping a quarter in the slot, and then all these bells and whistles start going off. You know that it just will never happen again.
Are there any other projects you are working on that you’d like to share with us?
I’m working with the musician Steve Cooney. I met Steve at a concert in Manorhamilton in County Leitrim one time, and we got to talking and he said that he had already sussed me out. He knew who I was, for some reason, but I had mentioned that I was writing some songs and that I would like to get his opinion. I ran into him two or three other times, and he kept asking me to send him the songs. So, last September, I went to see Steve and recorded those songs. We contacted several other musicians in Donegal who are very good, and we’re putting together an album. Steve wants to go on tour – which is scary to me because I’ve never even gone to a session and played before an audience or anything! But this ex-coach for Ireland’s Eurovision teams is also helping me, so it’s early days. But my artwork is going to be on the cover of the album.
I’ve also done a film with Ronin Films in Belfast. It’s a documentary that’s going to be on RTÉ and TG4 soon. I heard that RTÉ is going to be promoting it internationally, which is great. For years I’ve been a talking head in documentaries with people asking me “Oh, what do you think Waylon?”, but recently I was also asked to be an executive producer for a film called Long Way Home by Vico Films in Dalkey. So I helped them find locations and people, and I set up a shot at a thatched cottage in Donegal that was right on the sea, then I took them over to Oklahoma to film a big Choctaw powwow for a weekend this past autumn. It was then that I contracted Covid and wound up in hospital, which is why I’m still here in Oklahoma, but I have plans to return to Donegal soon. I’m also working as consultant for a project with animation studio Cartoon Saloon, based in Kilkenny.
I’m also involved with a Primary School now that’s near a Direct Provision centre, whose occupants were being mistreated by some locals. In Ireland, refugees of colour are being treated much more differently than the Ukrainians are. And so, they have these sanctuary schools where they’re aware of the kind of trauma that these kids are experiencing, and not being able to be fully integrated into Irish society. They came as asylum seekers, and so I’ve been asked by one of the teachers at the school to help.
I think if you’re a visual artist that you should extend your vision to the world around you, you know? If you can focus on a very small area, maybe for weeks at a time, you should be able to macro your vision to the world around you and do something good for the world. And that’s what I always try to do, with AfrI, with Shell to Sea – that’s what Ireland gave me as a gift. A gift to see beyond myself, my tribal nation, and our small communities, and see that there’s a greater kinship that we all have. That we’re all the children of the same Mother Earth. That’s the gift Ireland gave me.
Waylon Gary White Deer is a Choctaw Indian visual artist, published author, documentary film producer, songwriter, and traditional cultural practitioner. He divides his time between Choctaw Country in America and Ireland, particularly the Donegal Gaeltacht.