Living in a red rock valley on the Navajo reservation from the time I was born, in 1965, to the age of 13, anchored the fundamental thread of influence in my life. The experience of that place, both the landscape and the culture, would manifest in the ways I function and express myself in the world at large, naturally extending into my art.

My parents worked at the Rock Point Community School, my father as a business manager and my mother as the health educator. Attending school where a bilingual, bicultural curriculum prevailed in order to support and prepare Navajo students for a lifetime of walking two worlds, I also had to straddle two worlds - my parents' culture and the one of the community I lived in. I learned more than math and reading. I learned about the Navajo language, Navajo social studies- the clan system and relationship structure of the people, Navajo cooking, games, basketball, songs, dances, beading and weaving. I learned that I had white skin and was perceived as the other among the dominant culture of that place. I had the understanding that I would always be an other .

I attended high school with my brother in Cortez, Colorado, an Anglo community about one hundred miles from Rock Point where my parents and younger siblings continued to live. Cultural differences between the people at the Cortez high school and me were as glaring as they were between the Navajo community and me. In my perception, my Cortez peers were white and I was different from that. I was sure I looked different, forgetting at moments that I too had blond hair and blue eyes. I knew I acted differently, and I knew I felt different, once again like the other, even though I was among a community largely composed of the same race.

I had an affinity for drawing from as early as I can remember and understood that art would be integral to my future. I studied some art in high school, but focused more on music at that time. In college I recognized my attraction to color and the sensual nature of materials, especially oil paint. Initially, I was drawn to subjects that allowed me to explore my identity: self-portraits, portraits of family members, drawings and paintings of still lives and landscapes in which I could develop moods and symbols of my personal psychology. Given that my earliest childhood associations were so strongly tied to the land, the combination of landscape and my personal psychology as subject matter was natural.