Oral History Interview

with

Arigon Starr

Interview Conducted by Julie Pearson-Little Thunder March 13, 2017

Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project

Interview History

Interviewer: Julie Pearson-Little Thunder Transcriber: Dakota Daves Editors: Rosalie Swingle, Micki White

The recording and transcript of this interview were processed at the Oklahoma State University Library in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Project Detail

The purpose of the Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project is to document the development of the state by recording its cultural and intellectual history.

This project was approved by the Oklahoma State University Institutional Review Board on April 15, 2009.

Legal Status

Scholarly use of the recordings and transcripts of the interview with Arigon Starr is unrestricted. The interview agreement was signed on March 13, 2017.

2 Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project

About Arigon Starr…

Arigon Starr took her middle name for a last name because her family moved constantly with her Navy father and she got tired of coaching new teachers and her friends on how to pronounce Wahpecome. Kickapoo, Creek, Cherokee, and Seneca, Starr is equally at home in music, theater, comics, and graphic novels. After high school, she worked a variety of office jobs in Hollywood while performing her original music on the side. She is a long-time member of Native Voices at the Autry, which first tapped her as an actor and later helped promote her singing and composing talents in her one-woman musical, The Red Road, which also became a radio play. Today, Starr is perhaps best known for the Super Indian comic book series. She has edited and contributed stories and drawings to several comic anthologies including Tales of the Mighty Code Talkers. Twice honored by First Americans in the Arts, once for acting and once for her original music, she was also among the first group of recipients of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship for writers in 2017, awarded by the Kaiser Foundation.

In this interview, the artist explains how she fell in love with theater and bass guitar while living on a naval base in the Philippines. She remembers the intertribal education she received while living in LA and how her secretarial stints at Viacom and Showtime, among others, taught her how to promote her own work. She discusses the importance of Native comic and graphic novel collectives in producing and promoting Native-written and illustrated comic books and graphic novels. She also talks about creating a series of graphic novels based on the outlaw stories by Cherokee writer Robert Conley.

3 Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project

Arigon Starr

Oral History Interview

Interviewed by Julie Pearson-Little Thunder March 13, 2017 Tulsa, Oklahoma

Little Thunder My name is Julie Pearson-Little Thunder. Today is Monday, March 13, 2017, and I’m interviewing Arigon Starr for the Oklahoma Native Artist Project, sponsored by the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at Oklahoma State University. We’re here at the OSU Tulsa Campus. Arigon, you’re Kickapoo, Creek, Cherokee, and Seneca, and you excel at many things. You’re a singer-songwriter with her own record company, as well as an actor and playwright. I had no idea, really, of your graphic art skills until your first Super Indian comic book came out. Thank you for talking with me today.

Starr You’re welcome. My pleasure to be here. (Laughter)

Little Thunder Can you tell me first about your unusual name?

Starr Sure! My unusual name actually came out of thin air one day. My given name is Wahpecome. It’s tacked on the end, W-A-H-P-E-C-O-M-E. That’s my dad’s name; he’s Kickapoo. Going through school was like, “Oh, that name, oh, my gosh.” Nine letters of fun, fun, fun! I don’t mean to make light of that name because it means “white water.” It has a meaning, and it’s traditional. That was the name of an ancestor. That was his whole name. How things happen in Oklahoma with naming and Indians, so that name followed me around. It was tough because I grew up all over the country. Every two years, it was a new experience of, “Whapa, hopa, he.” Nobody could get that, so I dropped it, and I use Starr. Starr is my middle name, and that made sense. That name come from my mother. She was given that name by her kinfolk. The tradition was the youngest daughter got the name Starr. That Starr goes all the way back to Tom Starr and Henry Starr and Belle Starr, so I got a lot of outlaws.

Little Thunder Outlaw blood. (Laughter)

4 Starr Yeah, I got some ratty kinfolk. (Laughter) They’re rugged, but that’s all right. That’s where my stock comes from.

Little Thunder How about Arigon? It’s wonderful.

Starr That, like I said, came out of the air. That was like, “I love this!” I don’t know what….

Little Thunder Maybe for Lord of the Rings?

Starr Maybe because my mom read that book to me when I was a kid.

Little Thunder Oh, interesting. (Laughter) So where were you born?

Starr I was born in Pensacola, Florida, very randomly, as my dad was stationed in the Navy. That was where his duty station was. Born on the road. I feel like that song, “Born in a Trunk.” That’s kind of how it happened. (Laughter)

Little Thunder You grew up in these different places that your dad…. Army brat, as we say. What did your mom do for a living?

Starr She got her degree at Oklahoma Baptist University in music. She was also the secretary to the dean, so she had a lot of office skills. She was smart, and then had this musical education thing. She sometimes worked as a teacher of music at different schools. She was also really instrumental, I think, in working with the government’s Equal Opportunity program. She did a lot of that work back in the day to make sure that things were better for us ladies now. She worked her entire career. I think she got to GS-13 [pay scale] or something when she finally retired. She worked alongside where my dad was stationed. She would work at the public works, or work at this, that, and the other office. Yeah, she always worked.

Little Thunder That’s very cool. How about brothers or sisters?

Starr I have one sister who’s since passed. Her name was Gay, Gay Lynn, and she was older than me and was wonderful. She was my best friend. I miss her every day. Her and I were thick as thieves because of that moving situation. We had to be friends because when you move to a new town and you don’t know anybody, it’s like, “What do we do?” We’d get into trouble. (Laughter) She was great. We loved the same kind of music and books and TV shows. All that kind of stuff, we shared. Like I said, she passed away in 2010, and I miss her.

Little Thunder How about your relationship with your grandparents on either side?

5 Starr My dad’s folks passed away early. I think his parents were gone by the time he was twelve. I never did get to meet them, but my mom’s parents lived here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Every chance we would get, wherever Dad was stationed, he would get his time off. He’d get his week off; it was like, “Okay, we’re getting in the car.” Many times, we would drive from the East Coast all the way to Oklahoma in the snow in a VW Bug. (Laughter) We would drive from San Diego or Gallup or wherever we were. Sometimes they would come out to visit us, and that was a lot of fun. They liked to travel, as well. They were wonderful people. David Cornell was born down in Holdenville [Oklahoma]. He was from that community. My mother, Flora Snow, was Cherokee and Seneca. The story was, her father was a Seneca that came out from New York to work in the oil fields, so that’s how that all came to be together.

They were just folks, but my grandpa knew everybody in town. I had this experience last week when we went on a tour of Tulsa with the Historical Society. We went over by Ziegler’s art store, and I was looking at the floor of this studio. There was an art studio right across the street, and I was like, “This floor looks familiar.” The guy who was doing the tour said, “This used to be a TG&Y [store].” I said, “I thought so because I remember Ziegler’s, and coming over here to this place and buying comic books.” All things are related because my grandpa would give us a buck and say, “Knock yourselves out.” He would talk to the people behind the counter and buy his cigars. My sister and I would get our Archie, Superman, Spiderman, whatever, and then go back. It’s weird, the things that you remember from when you were a kid, like the floor.

Little Thunder You remembered the floor. That’s amazing.

Starr I know we sat there, looking, reading the comic books that we didn’t buy. (Laughter)

Little Thunder Were you around Creek language a little bit?

Starr Yeah, a little bit around Creek language. My grandpa spoke it fluently, but he had no inclination to teach my mother or me. We would hear things and go, “Hompvks ce. We know that.” (Laughter) That’s the first thing you learn, which means, “come and eat.”

Little Thunder Do you think sometimes if you have these different backgrounds, then one influence will be a little more dominant than the other?

Starr Yeah, definitely.

Little Thunder What was your experience?

6 Starr My experience was definitely Creek culture more than Kickapoo culture. My dad was not exactly estranged. He had one brother, and his brother did not live in Oklahoma. He lived in Colorado Springs and other places. That was it because his other sisters passed away. We did see them every once in a while, but my dad kind of remembered Kickapoo. Sometimes we’d be sitting, watching TV, and he would come up with some word. I was like, “What’s that?” He said, “That’s Kickapoo, and it means….” The one I always remembered was [inaudible]. You think, “Oh, great, deep meaning.” He said, “That means, ‘orange juice’.” (Laughter) He would say, “When I was kid, we’d sit around at the camp around the fire in the little village down near Shawnee. The old women would sit around and make this black, thick, mud coffee. When the cups were empty, they would yell, “Cup-ahee!” He said, “They were adding a ‘hee!’ to anything to make it Kickapoo.” Our joke was always, “Y’all need some coffee? Let’s stop at Starbuck-hee!” (Laughter) That’s what we do now, “Starbuck-hee!”

Little Thunder That’s great. There was probably quite a bit of music in the household.

Starr Oh, yeah, music came mainly from my mom because she loved—she’s very religious. She’s Southern Baptist, and she was raised…. Her grandfather was a preacher, and her dad was a deacon, so they were deep into that life. In fact, my mom and dad met at a church in Shawnee, set up by my Sac and Fox uncle, (Laughs) so that’s how that goes. She loved classical music, and she loved show tunes. The tradition was every Sunday morning, everybody gets to pick a record. They had one of those old platter things where you could load up four disks. One would play, and then the next one would come. It was either classical, show tunes, Frank Sinatra, Bob Wills, and then if we could sneak in a Beatles, we’d do it. (Laughter) Oh, my God, my sister and I loved the Beatles. We would hear Hank Thompson, Bob Wills, all those, Charlie Pride, that kind of music, with the classical, with the show tunes, with Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. (Laughter)

Little Thunder I can hear some of those threads in your music. That is amazing. How about visual art? What was your first experience, maybe, of seeing Native art?

Starr I’d go back to my aunt Susie Alfred’s house. I’m not sure which artists they have on their wall. It was always that flat, stylized art from, like, Acee Blue Eagle, Jerome Tiger, Fred Beaver, that kind of stuff. That’s what I remember seeing. I was like, “That is really cool. That kind of looks like comic books,” because of the way that they would draw with the outline and the flat color. That always caught my eye. Of course, everybody had End of the Trail or that kind of stuff, (Laughter) the Indian prayer, that art work. I loved that Acee Blue Eagle and Woody Crumbo. Oh, that just makes me happy.

Little Thunder What is your first memory of making art?

Starr Gosh, I would think it was probably back in kindergarten. I was always drawing from when I was a young kid. You sat down in school, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah, let me get on that.” I would win art contests back when I was a little kid. They were like, “This is really great.” I won art contests as I went along because my parents really believed in that. My grandpa was an artist. My uncle on my dad’s side, my uncle Rudolph, was an architect. There were all these skills, music and art, but art, it was like, “Yeah, if you want to draw. You want to paint? Okay, we will get you paints.” They were supportive. They supported my habits. (Laughs)

Little Thunder That’s fantastic. One of them you mentioned in an interview, I think, previously was you loved to draw cartoons…

Starr Yes, always cartoons.

Little Thunder …or comics.

Starr Yeah, because I loved anything animation, of course Disney and then Saturday morning cartoons and all that. I adamantly read that comic page every Sunday. We got newspapers back then, so we were, “Yeah, look at this. How did they do that?” I copied. I got my tracing paper and put it over the Spiderman comic book and said, “Okay, that’s how they’re doing that. Okay.” Of course, if I’d been smart, I probably would have gone to school and did figure study and all that stuff, but I didn’t do it. I just copied. (Laughter)

Little Thunder Like you said, you taught yourself that way. How about some of the places that you went to school that might be connected with memories of doing art, as well?

Starr Let’s see. I’m trying to think. Most of my big art training came in San Diego. When my dad got stationed, he was onboard a ship, so he was usually gone six months, eight months out of the year. They put us up in Navy housing in this new section, right on this big hill. We had to ride a bus at least a half hour, forty-five minutes to school every morning. In those classes, I took a cartooning class. I was learning how to paint. I had learned how to paint. Actually, I started painting when we were stationed in the Philippines because there was nothing else to do.

Little Thunder You had a great experience there.

Starr Oh, gosh, yeah, that was fun, and that’s where my love of theater started. There was a theater teacher there who said, “I like how you read.” They did school plays, so I did school plays. That was where I had my first band.

8 Little Thunder You were what age?

Starr Let’s see. How old was I there? Twelve, thirteen, a pre-teen, teenage kid. Yeah, so that art, everything was all going throughout this singing and writing and drawing. It all was going on. There was no, “I’m going to do this now.” No, I was doing them all.

Little Thunder It was all interwoven.

Starr Yeah, yeah.

Little Thunder The visual art in San Diego, you were what age when you started taking those?

Starr Sixteen, seventeen.

Little Thunder Okay, and it was extra-curricular, outside of school?

Starr Yes, exactly.

Little Thunder What did you do after high school?

Starr I tried to figure out how I was going to make enough money to buy a guitar, (Laughs) because I had decided….

Little Thunder Did you play piano at that point?

Starr Yeah, oh yeah, I played piano and guitar and bass guitar. My mother had decided—because I loved the Beatles, the first electronic instrument I had was a bass guitar. She said, “It’s because you like Paul McCartney.” I’m like, “I wanted to play the guitar.” That came in handy because everybody always needs a bass player. It’s like learning how to type. It’s like, “Can you make yourself useful?” “Yeah, I can. Four strings, I can do this.” I’m walking in with the drummer. I actually still have that guitar.

Little Thunder You performed in a few bands, high school bands or something?

Starr Yes, oh, gosh yeah. I was, “Okay, yeah, let’s do cover tunes.” It’s a great way to learn and to see if you even like it, or if you fit in with people and can work with people. Those are good skills to have.

Little Thunder You worked to get a guitar?

Starr Yes, I did because I had thought to myself—and here’s the sad state of education back then, and funding. It’s not so much the sad state of education, but the funding to get there. I had my eye set on going to the

9 Parsons School of Design in New York City. I’m not even sure how I knew about it, but I thought, “That’s the place for me. I need to go do that,” because I loved….

Little Thunder Did they have comic book illustration?

Starr I’m sure they did. That’s probably how I found out about it. I went to my Mom and Dad and said, “This is what I want to do.” We looked at how much it cost, and we’re like, “Oh, my gosh,” and to afford to live there and go to school. They said, “We’ll call our tribe, and we’ll call the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs], and we’ll do all….” They got nowhere. They got absolutely nowhere. In fact, when they talked to San Diego, California, they were like, “We can’t help you. We know you live here, but you’re not from here. You’ve got to call Oklahoma.” They called Oklahoma. Said, “You all live out there, so we can’t really help you.” My dreams of higher education were dashed at that point. I was in a hurry. I had things to do, so I said, “Mom, can you help me get a government job so I can at least have some scratch to get my guitar?” She’s like, “Yeah, okay.” Her thing had always been, “Learn how to type. If you can, learn how to do shorthand. Learn to be that front office person.” That’s what I did. I got a job with the government, and that’s what I did. I worked in the government for about three years, and I was able to get a transfer up to Long Beach, which, my step towards Hollywood. (Laughter)

Little Thunder You had your plan.

Starr I had my plan, so that’s how it happened. If I hadn’t learned how to type…. I’m telling you, there’s these basic things that kids don’t know. Learn how to type, man. Learn how to type fast. That has always gotten me somewhere, even more than being artistic or whatever, because I knew how to type and kind of how to take shorthand. I took a test over the phone with this personnel person in Hollywood who was placing people with film studios, with production companies, with record companies. If you had these skills, they wanted you. They always need extra hands, so I took the test.

She said, “Okay, I’m going to talk fast. You write it down, then read it back to me.” I read it back to her, and she’s like, “I can get you a job tomorrow.” I was like, “What?” Yeah, I was working at a hotel in Universal City, the Sheraton Universal, in catering. I took this test over the phone, and I got that job. I was sitting at my desk at the hotel, “Oh, well, that didn’t work out.” She called me, and she said, “Do you know what time it is?” I said, “Yeah, I’m at my job.” She said, “You have another job at Paramount. They’re expecting you. You need to get over there.” I’m like, “What?”

Little Thunder How exciting, for somebody who was wanting to break into show business.

10 Starr Yeah. I went in to my hotel boss, and I said, “I’m leaving. Bye-bye.” And that was that. I leapt off the cliff and was working at Paramount Pictures. (Laughs)

Little Thunder What year was this when you got the Paramount gig?

Starr Nineteen eighty-five.

Little Thunder You’re just a young thing, moving along.

Starr Yeah, and that led to other gigs. That led to working at Viacom Productions as a legal secretary because I could type fast.

Little Thunder Did they know that you could sing, and you could write, and you could….

Starr They had no idea, not a clue. What had to happen was, I go to work. I do my nine-to-six. Then I would eat dinner, rest, and go to the coffee house and wait to get on the open mic, which sometimes was until one in the morning, and there were two people there, but that’s okay. I got on stage. I did my songs. I was writing music then and doing all this other stuff, and then meeting people in the interim. Through that, I hooked up with the American Indian Registry for Performing Arts because I knew that there were other Natives in town. I was like, “I’m feeling adrift up here,” because I would always drive down to San Diego. Back then, you could really make it in two hours. It was easy to do. Not so much now. I was like, “What should I do?” I hooked up with these people, and their whole goal in life, (this was set up by Will Sampson back in the early ʼ80s) to have a place where casting directors could come find headshots and resumes. They could hold workshops for people, and that sort of thing. They would have dinners and gatherings and showcases. That’s where I met Bob Hicks, [Harrison Low], Sheri Foster, [Selina Jane].

All these people that are from back here, I met out there, (Laughs) working with them. Then that organization ended, and then it became First Americans in the Arts. Then I worked with Don Jackson and Brian Wescott and Valerie Red-Horse, and all these other people that were…. We put on an award show. We always used to say, “It’s the Emmys, Oscars, Grammys in one night for Natives.” I was still doing coffee houses, still working, and then I did a seminar at UCLA that was called Publicity. It was this woman named Bryn Bridenthal who was the publicist at Geffen Records, and before that, she had worked at Electra Records. I knew of her because she worked for Queen. Queen was one of the big bands that she used to work. I always heard her name, and I was, “That’s really cool.” I went to her class, just kind of being a fan girl. “Will she talk about Queen?” (Laughter) Then I found out I really dug the whole publicity thing. I told her, I said, “This is neat. How do I get into this?” She’s like, “Talk to this person; talk to that person.”

Then I took another class at USC. Again, these were the adult education elective things that they have for professionals, after hours on the campus. I met another guy, [from] Bender Goldman Helper, another dude who said, “I know a person who’s looking for somebody. You’d be perfect. Go talk to this guy named Ramon Hervey.” Ramon was married at that time to Vanessa Williams, and this was just after the Miss America scandal. He was working with this company called Live Productions. Our big clients were Alice Cooper, Luther Vandross, and some other various and sundry. He interviewed me, and I got a job. I left my legal secretary behind and went to the music business. That didn’t last, sadly. I was sorry that our contract didn’t get extended, but I got to work with a lot of…. What was the name of the guy that used to do Soul Train? Don [Cornelius]…I can’t remember his name. He used to call in that Soul Train voice. There was things like Black Radio Exclusive [magazine]. To work in the African American community, and the R&B community, I was like, “Oh, my God.” That was really cool. I did get to meet Alice Cooper and Luther Vandross. (Laughs)

Little Thunder In the meantime, you’re getting this great PR background because it’s a big portion of any artist’s life, and yet it’s probably the hardest thing people learn.

Starr Exactly. How to do interviews, how to approach the press, how to write a press release, a bio, and all that jazz. The education that I got working at Viacom…. The next step after Ramon Hervey is I got hired as a publicist at the company I was working at before, at Viacom. They knew me as a legal secretary, but they just hired in-house publicity. They said, “Hey, we know you. Come back!” I did, and that’s where I got to go on set and work with…. At that time, we were doing Matlock, Perry Mason, Jake and the Fatman, all these CBS shows. It was taking a script because my boss said, “You need to learn how to do this. Read that script. Write me a one- paragraph breakdown of it, and write a log line like you’d read in TV Guide.” I got really good at that because there were twenty-four episodes in each season for each of these programs. Read, read, read; write, write, write; read, read, read; write, write, write. I was seeing something over the weekend about that.

Little Thunder You’re reading these scripts that are not exactly plays, but nonetheless, there’s that writing form.

Starr Writing format, writing for television. It’s this many pages; here are the natural breaks. Learning on the job, every day. Then after that job finished, because that’s what happens in Hollywood, (everything’s cyclable, then they kick people out) there I was, going, “What am I going to do now?” A floor downstairs, there was another guy hiring publicity, so I ended up at Showtime. I worked at Showtime Networks for quite a few years.

Little Thunder Which was kind of new then, wasn’t it?

Starr Yeah, that’s when they were still the ugly cousin of HBO in the shadows. Finally, they had some series that people said, “Oh.” They gave Tom Hanks his first job as a director. I remember working on that show. We had to do this convention twice a year called the Television Critics of America. TCA would come in January and July, and you would have, they called them, the up-fronts. I don’t know if you’ve heard this lingo. They would bring the cast and the producers to this big hotel, put them on a stage in front of the press, and they’d talk about, “This season on Matlock…,” or whatever show it was. This thing that we did was called Fallen Angels. It was a film noir, only revisited with all these amazing directors, including Tom Hanks. I always mention Tom because he gave me a hard time, only because he was being super nice and trying to help us save a dollar. It made me crazy because they always used to say, “Make sure the talent gets in the limo so we know where they are, exactly, at every moment.” This was in the days right before cell phones came in, so we always were sweating it. “Where is he? Where is he? Where is he?” Then somebody told me, “He decided to drive himself,” and I’m like, “No! No!” (Laughter)

Little Thunder That may be material.

Starr Indeed. Then he came in at the last minute all, “Hey, sorry I’m late!” It was, “Go over there! Go over there!” (Laughter) He was sweet as could be, and he was trying to save us a dime, not be Hollywood. From our perspective, it was like, “Please get in the limo. Please get in the limo.” That’s what I did at Showtime, which was different than the publicity I did at Viacom, which was, I set up screenings; I invited press; I pitched press; and had to handle talent. It was on a daily basis, people like Forest Whitaker and all these…and still doing my stuff on the side.

Little Thunder I was going to say, so what was your first big break into doing your own music?

Starr It was my friend Dawn Jackson from First Americans in the Arts because she worked at Disney, and she knew that I was an artist. She said, “Hey, I have a job for you, if you can handle it.” I said, “What is it?” She said, “I’m managing all of the artwork submissions for the Disney stores. What I would need you to do is, (and I’ll send you all the specs about how to draw these characters) I need you to do something imaginative with a pocket on a shirt or a t-shirt. Put Winnie the Pooh, put Dalmatians, put whatever on the shirt.”

I was like, “Oh, okay.” She said, “You can fax your work in. You don’t have to come to an office. It’s freelance.” I said, “Okay.” I got these big books of

13 specs for Lion King and all those Dalmatians. I got a lot of work on Dalmatians. My God, those little puppies. I would fax my work in, and she’s like, “You’re good. Keep them coming. I’ll pay you seventy-five dollars a character, so if you want to put two, three, four characters on it, that’s seventy-five dollars each.” I’m like, “What? What?”

Little Thunder The best money you’d made so far.

Starr Yes. I was able to—I had this meeting with my boss at Showtime. My two bosses, who I loved dearly and who loved me and wanted to see me advance, they said, “We’re thinking about making you a publicist. Are you ready to take that next step?” I said, “No.” I was shocked, and they were shocked. I was like, “I’m really shooting myself in the foot here.” I knew I had another gig that I could go to, and another dream that I had that wasn’t about Tom Hanks and his limo. (Laughter) I told my boss, “No, I’ve got a freelance gig, and I’m going to leave.” Nineteen ninety-six, I left my corporate job with all the bennies [benefits] and everything and said, “I’m going to work for Disney, freelance.” That year, I faxed in so much work that was accepted and put in production that I had enough money to not only to live but to make a CD. That’s how I became an artist, a for-real artist. That was my big breakthrough, doing T-shirt design for Walt Disney. (Laughter)

Little Thunder I love that you call your music production company Wacky Productions. (Laughter) How did you come up with that? Was it the Disney connection?

Starr It was everything because that’s my life, everything that has happened.

Little Thunder It all perfectly makes sense.

Starr Yes, but it’s very wacky because people are like, “What are you doing now?” I’m like, “Well….” They’re like, “That’s so bizarre.” I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, it is.” My whole life feels like it’s bizarre like that.

Little Thunder In terms of your music and the CDs, because you have four of them now, what was the progression of them? Was it a thematic one? I know one involves your one-woman show, Red Road.

Starr The first CD and part of the second one were already material that I had written over the years.

Little Thunder Okay, that you had been doing in the coffee houses?

Starr Yes, exactly. It was really great to flesh it out with a full band, with drums and bass. When people see me now, they think, “She’s this little acoustic guitarist/singer,” but the music on the CDs isn’t like that. My manager, Janet

14 Miner, told me a funny story. We did this show at Agua Caliente, which is this big casino out in Palm Springs. We performed, and then there was this little lady came up at the end. She asked Janet, she said, “Which one of these is really good for massage?” I was like, “Did you not just see us on stage?” She’s like, “Here, take this one.” We were like, “I wonder how that went.” (Laughter) No idea.

Little Thunder It’s not your Native flute.

Starr It’s not a fluty tooter. I don’t know. (Laughter)

Little Thunder How funny. I assume you did your own design work for….

Starr Actually no, I farmed it out. Back at that time in the late ʼ90s, people were still, it was still pen on paper. It was film. I actually hired a designer to do that because she was doing record design for Warner Brothers. I figured she knows how to make that film. They go to the printer, and it’s all good. It actually wasn’t until the third CD that I actually…. I painted the cover for that. I painted the inside flap, but I still gave it to the designer to make it right for the printer because that’s a whole other skillset.

Little Thunder Let’s talk about your one-woman musical a little bit, The Red Road. First, tell us a bit about it, and then, I understand you went to a Comic-Con convention while you were working on it. You can tell us about both.

Starr Yeah, okay, The Red Road came from my manager, Janet Miner, and Randy Reinholz, and Jean Bruce Scott from Native Voices. Sitting there, thinking, “Arigon’s a really good actor. We really like her work. We’ve seen her sing, and we love her singing. How do we bring all this stuff together?” Janet Miner, having seen all of this growth come because she’s the business partner of Wacky Productions, she said, “Okay, here’s what I think Arigon should do. She should write a one-person show so she can act and sing in it.” That’s really all it was.

Little Thunder How it came about.

Starr That’s how it came about. It was, “How do we put all these talents together to present this picture that….” People at the Autry said, “You’re such a wonderful actor.” I said, “But I sing, too,” because they had no knowledge of…. Yeah, I toured England. Yeah, I’ve been to X, Y, and Z. I’ve been to Washington, DC, to sing, and I’ve been down here. They didn’t know anything about that. It was like, “Okay, let’s do this.” I had written the song called “The Red Road” because a friend in Nashville had said, “Would you write a song about a Native truck driver?” I said, “Okay.” It’s funny. I never did give that song to him, but I thought, “What a concept,” because having been….

Little Thunder It’s led to all of the themes.

Starr Yeah, it came from the experience of being on the road all the time because at that time, I was on the road all the time. I was always in my car going to the next gig with the band, sometimes without the band. I had that life, too. I took that idea and started to flesh it out. I said, “Where would this happen?” They always say, “Write what you know,” and I thought, “Oklahoma.” (Laughs) Sapulpa, Route 66, all that stuff came to mind as something to talk about. I had thought—growing up in—I feel like I grew up in Los Angeles because I’ve been there so long. Spending time there, I got to know a lot of the people that were in the American Indian Movement [AIM]. When I was a kid, my kinfolk here had always said, “You stay away from those AIMers. They’re bad people.” I was like, “Okay.” Then I would go to things, and I would start to meet these people. Fern Mathias, who was the director of Southern California AIM back then, she was really nice. She taught me things about Indians that I did not know anything about. I feel like she was one of my tutors. So was Charlie Hill and Floyd Westerman, and all these people that were in that.

There was like, “I need to talk about this. I want to tell the story of a kid seeing AIM and some of the ridiculousness of it because, of course, the guy in Red Road is a buffoon. (Laughter) We’re not naming names, but the way that people see that. The show is set in the 1970s because that’s when I was growing up. I was blinders on. I know Star Trek, I know the Beatles, not realizing there’s all this other stuff going on in the world. Of course, the country music was a tribute to my dad and the music that he listened to. My mother was the one who was the science fiction. I blame that on her. (Laughs) That’s how this show evolved into eleven characters, one actor, all these different songs. I love English music. I told you I like Queen, but I also like The Clash and all these other…. Punk rock was really big when I was growing up, too. I was like, “I got to incorporate all that.” I always did the voices. That was one thing I did constantly as a child. When I would write these scripts and I would record them on my cassette recorder, I would do all the voices, man (in English accent). That’s my British thing because I used to like Monty Python. Always listening, always listening. (Laughter)

Little Thunder You always had that talent. While you were working on that, then you heard about this Comic-Con convention in San Diego and decided to check it out?

Starr Yes, I actually knew about that comic convention from the first time my dad was stationed, when we were living in San Diego. The San Diego Comic- Con started in the basement of the El Cortez Hotel in downtown San Diego. I think it was, I’m going to say, ’74 because I heard about it on the news, and I saw it in the newspaper. I said, “Mom, can we go to Comic-Con?” She’s like, “Well, I have something else to do on Saturday, but here’s what

16 I’ll do. Here’s some money to go in. You stay there for a couple of hours, and then at the appointed time, you come out.” This is how she always did with us. She would drop us off at the sports arena for some concert. “Now, you come out by ten o’clock,” and oftentimes the band had just gone on. (Laughter) Anyway, I went to that Comic-Con the first time when I was, I want to say, like ten? Eleven? I was a little bitty—but the boxes. I was, “Look at all this.” I went back when we were rehearsing The Red Road at San Diego State because Randy is an instructor down there. He’s a professor. We were using their black box to work it out and cut and paste. It was during July when the Comic-Con was on.

This was 2005? Yeah, I’m going to say 2005. Comic-Con was big in San Diego. It was a lot bigger than the basement of the El Cortez. They were in the convention center. Then, you could walk up and buy a ticket. You can’t do that now. It’s too popular. I had a free Saturday. “I’m going to go down there and see what it’s like.” I was like, “Oh, my God,” because it’s ballrooms of people talking about TV. It was more genre, television, film. It was more than just comic books. Then downstairs, it was this humongous exhibit hall, just full of…. Here the studios come present. HBO, CW, Warner, of course, Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, everybody had a booth. They were promoting their latest projects, and the actors were there. I always say the first panel that I saw at Comic-Con was Grant Morrison, who’s an amazing comic book writer, and Deepak Chopra. We’re talking about the Zen of comic heroes. I was like, “What in the world? You can do that in comics? It’s not bing, bang, bing? Oh, my gosh.” I stored that away while I was doing Red Road.

Little Thunder I was wondering how long that percolated before you came up with the idea for the radio series Super Indian.

Starr It didn’t percolate long, only because I think that same year, we had done a retreat for Native theater artists to Brisbane, Australia. It was an international thing. It was a collaboration between us and the Aboriginal folks. I was on this train with Randy and Jean and Drew Hayden Taylor, of all people. He’s so silly. We were sitting there, being silly with each other, and I was drawing. I said, “I really want to do a comic book with a super hero because there’s not enough Indian super heroes.” He was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, and maybe she’d do this, and maybe she’d do that.” I was like, “Yeah, Super Indian!” I kept those sketches and like, “Whatever.” Native Voices then got a contract, or got some money, from Ford Foundation to do radio theater. That’s how it came to be. They put the call out for script submissions. They said, “We’re going to do the—in West Plains, Missouri, the National Audio Theatre Festival has invited a bunch of Native artists to come present a couple of Native scripts.” I wrote Super Indian as a ten- minute episode, and they said, “Yeah, let’s do this! It’s fun. It’s like the old

17 Batman TV series.” I said, “Yeah, that’s what I want. It’s got to be funny. It’s got to be funny.” (Laughs)

Little Thunder Yeah, and it’s the perfect venue for flights of fantasy and things that you could never pull off onstage, right?

Starr Exactly, yeah.

Little Thunder How did it lay the groundwork for your comic book?

Starr Because I did that pilot script and they liked it so much, they said, “Let’s do ten five-minute episodes.” I was like, “Whoa.” I had imagined they were going to air it every week, and it was going to be this long thing. What ended up happening is we taped all the episodes at the Wells Fargo Theater in Los Angeles with live actors, live musicians, live sound effects. They packaged it all into a one-hour show. I was like, “Aw!” That would have changed my narrative because it could have been a more cohesive story. Instead, I attacked it as ten episodes. But you know what? That was okay because I had those ten scripts, and those became the comic book. There were six others that were commissioned but never taped that I was like, “Nobody’s ever going to find out about Mr. Buddy, and Blud Kwan’Tum the Vampire.” I was heartbroken that it didn’t get picked up. I was like, “What am I going to do with this?” I said, “Okay, learn how to do a comic book.” (Laughs)

Little Thunder I was wondering if you even found yourself, for the radio play because it is different, thinking in terms of story boarding, or thinking graphically a little bit while you were writing.

Starr Yes, and it actually did help because I was such a fan of comic books that I knew the structure and what people expected to see with their minds. It’s like, “Okay, and the explosion, and the….” I had really good tutors on my radio series to think audibly. That is, again, a whole other skillset. “Okay, don’t forget to say who’s talking to whom, and when this is happening….” I never thought about that. That was William Dufris, again, great producer, great director, also known as the voice of Bob the Builder on PBS. He also knew a friend of a friend who was—and again, all these weird things that cycled together. Remember I was telling you about Queen? Brian May, who was the guitar player for Queen, knew a friend of mine named Melanie. She worked for him. Melanie come to me once and said, “Brian May wants to talk about Indian stuff.” I’m like, “What?” “You’re the only person I know that knows about Indian stuff.” I had this long meeting with Brian May and his friend Dirk Maggs. Brian May is, like, rock and roll god.

I was like, “I love Queen, and….” I’m sitting here, talking to him about, “Okay, so let’s talk about sacred sites, and let’s talk about….” It was weird

18 to be that representative. Thank God, I knew Fern and Charlie and all those people so I could speak like a reasonable person and not be all…. I don’t know quite what he was expecting. We both are still friends, so it’s all good. Dirk Maggs still is an audio theater producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. One of his good friends was Douglas Adams. He knows Neil Gaiman. He has done all these shows, including an audio version of Spiderman that starred William Dufris as Peter Parker. All these people knew each other. That’s how I got hooked up with Dirk Maggs. Dirk was my other tutor because Dirk did a radio version of Red Road. We had to rethink it as the one-person show. How do you do it on the radio? That was really fascinating. I hope that we get to do another project together. I’m sure that we will.

Little Thunder Tell us a little bit about your superhero…

Starr Hubert.

Little Thunder …Yes, Hubert, a little bit of the premise, and then….

Starr Reaching back into the Viacom days, and the script, and the log line, a reservation boy eats tainted commodity cheese and gains super powers. Boom, that’s it.

Little Thunder I love it! (Laughter)

Starr Hubert ate cheese with Rezium in them. It was a secret, government experiment by Dr. Eaton Crowe, and he develops these powers. He flies; he’s super strong; he does all kinds of Superman-y things.

Little Thunder He’s very hunky looking. (Laughter)

Starr Working as a janitor in the bingo hall by day with his sidekick, General Bear, AKA, Mega Bear, and his super intelligent talking dog, Diogi, who also ate the cheese and has his own super intellect because of that.

Little Thunder You have a lot of strong women characters always. Always have had in your work. I was curious why you chose a young male as opposed to a female.

Starr Yeah, I actually wanted to hook in the little kids. I know that the boys don’t have their person, and I wanted them to have their person. I knew when you write something like this in a comic-book style, you can add as many characters as you want and bring them on in a way that makes sense. In volume two, I addressed that whole issue of the Native female superhero, which was Laguna Woman. Again, through a good friend, Lee Francis IV, I said, “Hey, can I borrow your last name and your tribe?” He was like, “Oh, go ahead.” Because of my many travels, I had met this lady named Shayai

19 Lucero, who was one of the former Miss Indian Worlds, who was from Laguna Pueblo. I said, “I need to pick your brains. This has to be right.” I went to her about her regalia and what she should look like. “What can I take from your culture that’s for everybody that’s not going to cross any lines?” We worked on her outfit and got her right, and she became a cat. She saved Super Indian from Blud Kwan’Tum, the vampire that’s cursed to become a full-blood Indian because he stole some Aztec gold. (Laughter)

Little Thunder That’s great. Indian humor is such a big part of your work, but what other messages are you focused on with your comic book?

Starr I think it’s the humor, but it’s also the contemporary. I could have gone back and done leather and feathers and tipis and all that, but I’ll leave that to somebody else. There’s others that are out there that’s doing stuff. You all go at that because I think the people, that’s all they think or see of us. If we’re not contemporary, then see you later. That’s why it’s this contemporary setting. They’re on the internet. They have cellphones. They do all of that stuff.

Little Thunder All those layers are there, too, all those historical layers. Do you think of your audience as primarily Native, or who are you interested in reaching?

Starr When I wrote it, I was writing it for a Native audience because, again, we don’t have these things. I thought, “It’s wrong that we don’t have these things, and I need to fix that.” My artwork style has been based on the X- Men of the 1980s because I had thought in the back of my mind, “What if this was a comic book that had been done in the ʼ80s, or had always been around but had just been discovered?” I thought, “That answers my artwork question as to how I’m going to make it look.” I went back and bought a bunch of X-Men Companions because that’s one of my favorite books. That’s about the weird, the outsiders, the “how do we fit into society”. I feel a real kinship with that book and those characters because that’s how I feel. I know that’s how a lot of people feel. That’s certainly how Native people feel.

Little Thunder Before X-Men, the movie, got so popular.

Starr Exactly, yeah. I went back to John Byrne and John Romita, and these other artists that were doing this heavy-line style, Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert, all these comic book people. There’s this action style. I said, “I’m going to do it like that but make them look really Indian.” They look like my cousins or my aunties or people that I know. I thought that that was important to bring that so it looks like it has always been, and it’s not this certain style. It’s classic.

Little Thunder Right, you can really see that there. Why are comic books such a good medium for Native storytelling?

Starr I think because pictures and words together are a little less threatening than just a printed page or just an image because it’s like, “I’m going to guide you through this.” You can put your own sound effects in there. You can read it at your pace, or linger on a panel if you want to, or speed through it and then go back. It’s up to the reader. I really think that Native artists, we’ve done that forever. It’s always been pictures on rocks, on walls. We have this tradition of comics, but they haven’t been called that.

Little Thunder You were used to touring with music, and you were used to touring with plays, but now all of a sudden, you’re doing book tours. What are those like? How is that different?

Starr It’s so different in that I akin it to doing powwows because you take all your stuff and you sit at a booth all day, or an art show. It’s the same deal. You have your stuff, and you sit there. People either look at your stuff and go, “Huh,” or they say, “I want that!” The other component of comic-cons and that sort of thing is doing panels. That’s really fun because you get to talk to your audience. You also get to talk to people that are like, “Hey, a Native comic, I wonder what that’s about,” or, “I like Indians. I’m going to go check that out and ask stupid questions.” No, no stupid questions, no stupid questions. It’s good to be out there to be able to talk about the work, and inform, and include.

Little Thunder What did it mean to you when you got your work picked up in this anthology of Native comics, Moonshot?

Starr What’s interesting about that…. I talked to Jay Odjick about this. He’s the creator of Kagagi: The Raven, up in Canada. We both had this discussion at Indigenous Comic-Con. We looked at each other as we were on the same panel talking, and I said, “Can we talk about Moonshot?” He’s like, “Yeah, we can talk about Moonshot.” I said, “Here’s my deal. The editor and the publisher are not Native, and they had a certain concept of what Native should be.” I don’t know if you’ve seen Moonshot. It’s a beautiful book. It’s beautiful, the artwork in it. Some of the stories are kind of rambling, whatever, but I was like, “Okay.” I came into Moonshot as a writer. I asked very nicely, “Could I illustrate it, as well?” They said, “No, we have somebody.” I’m like, “Okay.” I don’t know the origins of this person. I think that he’s claiming to be Métis. Don’t know if that’s real or not. I don’t know. The artwork is nice. He did a good job, but I was like, “Okay.”

Moonshot is a Creek story about the Water Master Snake. Basically it’s like, “Don’t pick up stuff off the ground and eat it because you might….” I don’t know. Something bad would happen. In this case, the kid finds a can of SPAM and has heard it’s a delicacy. He eats it and becomes a snake. “See, told you!” (Laughter) Jay, okay, so we’re back to this conversation at

21 Indigenous Comic-Con. I said, “The same people came back and said, ‘We’re doing volume two, and we’d love to have you involved. Water Master story was real key. Everyone really loved that one, so can you write us another one?’” I said, “I’d love to write you another one. Can I draw it this time?” They said, “No, we have somebody.” I’m like, “No.” Jay Odjick had the same experience where they said, “We don’t want you to write that story like that.” They were dictating how he was to tell a Native traditional story, and he said, “I’m backing away. I’m backing away.”

There’s other artists that I know that are working on volume two, and I’m like, “Godspeed to you.” It was problematic because of the way it was edited and put together. I think people that look at it will probably see that, where you go, “Why’d they tell it like that?” The one that was before that, Trickster, same reason. Problematic because not edited and put together by a Native. Some of the artwork in it is really like, “Wow.” Plains Indians everywhere, everywhere, in every story. There’s some gems in there. Roy Boney is in that, and his story is amazing. There’s some other ones, so you go…. Unless we, as Native artists, we put together these anthologies, we’re not going to see anything that’s really representative of who we are. It’s always going to be that Hollywood “boom.” It’s going to be that.

Little Thunder You have helped found the Indigenous Narratives Collective [INC], right? Can you tell us a little bit about it, and how long it’s been in existence?

Starr INC started as this crazy meeting of me, Theo Tso, who’s Las Vegas Paiute, and Jacques La Grange, who’s San Carlos Apache, at Comic-Con in San Diego. We said, “Let’s have breakfast,” so we had breakfast. We were talking, “We need to get together on this. All the other minority groups, Latinos, Asians, they have all banded together to support each other, and you see that they’re making some inroads.” I thought, “Why don’t we do it?” Jacques said, “We should do a group comic,” and I said, “Yeah, we should. How are we going to do that?” That’s how Lee Francis got involved because he said, “I have some money. You all put it together, and let’s put it out there.” We made it as a free issue. That was really my first assignment of doing an anthology book. I was the one who reached out to all the artists that I knew and said, “Hey, could you do a page on Natives and comics, and/or your experience, or what you’d like to see?” I got pages from Roy Boney, from Ryan Huna Smith, Beth LaPensée. Who else was in that book? My God, I can’t—Spider Moccasin, my friend from Portland. Theo Tso, he was in that, as well. Yeah, it was good. It was the first time something like this had happened. We had a representation of, “This is who we are.”

Little Thunder Then you went on, and you did the similar job, editing, but also contributed to the Native code talkers book.

22 Starr Yeah, Tales of the Mighty Code Talkers, oh, my gosh. Denver Comic-Con, that’s where it was born. It was all Lee Francis’ fault because he liked this little tiny image that was on the cover of that group comic that we did. The cover shows a grandfather reading a comic book with his granddaughter. The book they’re reading is Tales of the Mighty Code Talkers. That’s how it happened. Lee took that little tiny image and blew it up poster-size, and put it up at our booth. I cannot tell you how many people stopped by, “Where’s that book? I want to buy it now.” We’re like, “We better make it.” (Laughter) That’s how Lee has launched Native Realities Press, and INC Comics is still contributing to that. The Indigenous Narrative Collective is still out there, but yeah, that’s how it all started.

Little Thunder Wow, the title came first. The promotion came first.

Starr The title came first, yes.

Little Thunder You won an award from First Americans in the Arts for Super Indian? Is that what your award was for?

Starr No, that was actually for Red Road.

Little Thunder For Red Road. You’ve won two awards, haven’t you?

Starr Yeah.

Little Thunder What was the second one for?

Starr Actually, I think one was for, it was for Please Do Not Touch the Indians. That was an acting trophy.

Little Thunder Joseph—it was an acting award.

Starr Yes, Joseph Dandurand’s. The other one was for the music.

Little Thunder Okay. This year, you received a Kaiser [Foundation, Tulsa Artist] Fellowship. Can you tell us a little bit about the fellowship and what your project is?

Starr I’m really thrilled that I’m in the first writers’ fellowship. This is the first time they offered it to writers. I said, “Tulsa, for a year? Hmm.” I’d seen Sterling Harjo had a posting on his Facebook about it. I’m like, “Looks interesting, okay.” I filled out all the paperwork and sent in my ideas, which were to write a play while I was here, and then also work with Evelyn Conley on adapting some of Robert Conley’s Indian outlaw books into a graphic novel, and then continue to work on Super Indian. I waited, and then, yay, I got in! They’re offering a living space and a stipend and intros

23 to people here in Tulsa with museums, city people, to let them know that we’re here, and then to have a group that lives, writes, and works here.

Little Thunder Evelyn, it’s interesting that you’re—Robert passed, was it two years ago?

Starr Three years ago, yeah.

Little Thunder He did wonderful work. Did she contact you, or had you been thinking about this on your own?

Starr I’d been thinking about this for a long, long time. I’m going to think back. I think the first time I met Robert, Evelyn was in Tahlequah at their home. I think it was 1999. I stayed friends with them since then. I knew both of them really well, so I was devastated when he passed, as well. In the meantime, I’d been talking to Robert about his work. Of course, he’d already given me his blessing. He said, “You do with it whatever you want because I trust your work, and I’m excited about seeing this.” Of course, now that he’s gone, he won’t see it, but Evelyn and I are working on this together. One of the things that has intrigued me about this—because there is a graphic novel about the life of Johnny Cash that was put out by Abrams Books a few years back. It has this really amazing, graphic, stark, black and white work. That’s how I want to approach these novels because I think it would be—I just want to see that.

I want to see what happens with it. Robert and I had been talking about Henry Starr. I’m not sure if Henry Starr is going to be in the first Robert Conley Presents, but I love that Robert was a scholar of Shakespeare. We had a lot of great conversations about this player, that player, “Why did he do that,” or, “this didn’t make any sense.” He said, “To me, Henry Starr is akin to the story of Richard III.” I’m like, “What?” He told me why he thought this, and I was like, “You’re right. Oh, my gosh.” I’m still doing all my scholarly research on Richard III. I might turn it into a play. I don’t know at this point, but that’s how I’m approaching some of this work because it’s classic storytelling. It’s classic. It happens to be Cherokee outlaws, which are my kinfolk. Henry Starr, I’m related to him. He’s a uncle or something. It’s like, “Okay, this needs to be told.”

Little Thunder I’m excited to see what comes of it. How is being in this particular environment—because getting a stipend is a kind of freedom, and yet you’ve sort of been freelancing on your own. You’ve really been taking on what you want to do, but how is it different being, I guess, in an artist community, doing that thing?

Starr What I’m noticing the few months that I’ve been here, the few weeks I’ve been here, is how supportive everyone is. It’s really nice to have your onsite cheerleading team and also be able to give back to them, too. There’s

24 another graphic novelist amongst our group, Melanie Gillman. I’m talking to her about, like, “Why don’t we do this,” or, “I could hook you up with these people,” and all this other kind of thing. We’re making connections, networking, yeah.

Little Thunder You performed your music here at the Tulsa campus and also on our Stillwater campus. Did you add any new material?

Starr The one thing that I did add was the song called “Oklahoma Home.” I had written it a couple of years back, and I’d actually performed it on the campus of OU. I didn’t say that; I didn’t say it. (Laughter) I wanted to sing it here, too, because it hadn’t been sung up here before, just down in Norman. I thought, “Let me roll that out.” I was trying to make it a track, but it was sounding so a cappella to me. It may stay a cappella, which is good. It talks about Oklahoma being home to all these different tribes, and the things that we do, and the places that we go, with a little powwow singing thrown in there.

Little Thunder Oh, cool. What are some other awards or honors we haven’t mentioned that you’ve been especially proud of?

Starr I’m proud, recently, of the 2016 Best Book of the Year from Debbie Reese, American Indians in Children’s Literature for Code Talkers. I was like, “Yay!” Lee Francis’ Wordcraft [Circle] has given me a couple of awards, as well. I’m like, “Yay!” Storyteller of the Year, and all this really jazzy stuff like that. (Laughter)

Little Thunder You spoke in one interview a little bit about how using a computer animation program for drawing, to draw the comics, is a little bit challenging at first. Can you walk us through that?

Starr Yeah, this is what I learned from my comic-cons. After I went to that one back in 2005, I tried to go back every year because it’s not just, “I can meet the stars of The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones.” A lot of people, they just do that, but they have these tracks, these panels. They have the people that actually work on the books talk about the guts, the nuts and bolts of like, “This is how you draw a page in Photoshop. This is how you color a page in Photoshop. This is how you letter a page in Photoshop. This is how you sell your book to the press.” Here’s a whole panel of press from the blogs that will come in and say, “This is how you pitch to us.” Oh, my gosh, they make it so easy if you do those things. “Here’s how to make a web comic. Here’s how to….” You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I say this, “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.” The panel that I went to about digital drawing was this guy named Brian Haberlin. Brian Haberlin had said, “Even people like Brian Bolland….” I love Brian Bolland! He did this thing

25 called Camelot 3000, which was awesome. King Arthur goes to the year 3000.

He was an old school guy, and he switched over to digital. I’m like, “What?” He said, “This is how you do it. It’s Photoshop. You get yourself a pressure tablet.” I use a Wacom [tablet] and a stylus, and with your different brushes, you can make your line art within Photoshop and then color it, also, within Photoshop. Another Brian, Brian Miller of Hi-Fi Color for Comics, published a whole book about, “This is how you do it.” You color on screen. You flat it. Then you use light to render your work instead of dark. This is how you translate RGB [red, green, blue color model] color to CMYK [cyan, magenta, yellow, and black color model] to get it ready for printing. There was another guy, Richard Starkings and J. G. Roshell, who are this company called Comicraft that print and sell fonts. They letter all of the big books. That’s a whole skill, again, in itself of how to do the lettering. I learned from those guys, and everybody at the cons, pretty much, by and large, are generous with their time at those booths if you come in and say, “Hey, I’m working on this.” I got a lot of good feedback from people, really excellent feedback and that really helped it to evolve.

Little Thunder It’s so interesting. How do you think your approach to doing comics has changed since you started?

Starr I think more in color because there’s a lot of things colorists can do to flat line art than rendering a really tight background, a really detailed background. You don’t need to do that anymore. You can use different pops of color and textures within Photoshop to create a background that you don’t have to spend five hours drawing. It’s stuff like that. I’ve seen my work go from there because it’s like, “I need to get this done.”

Little Thunder Right, it helps with deadlines. Do you do any freehand sketching at all still?

Starr Gosh, hardly ever. I may pick up my pen and pencil here on this other project. I’m doing a project right now for a pop culture classroom in Denver, Colorado. They run the Denver Comic-Con. I was sent a script for the Ludlow Massacre that’s two pages. Ludlow Massacre happened in 1914, where there was a labor….

Little Thunder Union?

Starr Yeah.

Little Thunder Okay.

Starr Yeah, the birth of the labor movement and child labor laws. It was a lot of immigrants working in a mine. I’m going to do two pages on that, but I’m

26 going to try a different art technique. This is crazy. I’ll talk about it with you guys first. This is my idea, and I’ve got to pitch it to the author and to the publisher. I want to draw it like a Superman comic from the 1930s or the ʼ40s because I thought, “What if those guys….” I’m sure they knew about it. “What if they had the opportunity to draw two pages on Ludlow Massacre? What would that artwork look like in that old style?” I’m always educating myself, and I’m going to try it.

Little Thunder That sounds really interesting.

Starr I’m going to put it together and see what happens, but it’s only two pages. I’m only committing to two pages.

Little Thunder Right, more research.

Starr More research, yeah. I just got one of the books today. I’m like, “Okay, let’s see what I can do.”

Little Thunder Describe your creative process a bit from the time you get an idea. What are your steps?

Starr My steps are always my favorite….

Little Thunder It might depend on the medium, too.

Starr No, actually, truly it does start with the Stephen King, “What if?” Like I explained to you about this artwork for the Ludlow Massacre, “What if a guy from the 1930s drew a comic book about the Ludlow Massacre? What would it look like?” That’s how I’m approaching the art for the new play that I wrote, Round Dance. “What if there was a Native version of the film Marty?” (Laughter) That’s how it started, and the same thing with Red Road. “What if there was a Native truck driver, and what….” If I’m writing a piece—and I have yet to go look at this, so I’ll have to send you the link. I wrote a song about Celilo Falls in Portland, Oregon area because it always shocks me how our sites have gone underwater, many Native sites, underwater. This is like a sacred place, and I thought, “Oh, my gosh.” I thought, “What if there was a song about it, and what would that sound like?”

Somebody put up a YouTube video with it because I did a recording of it at KWSO in Warm Springs, Oregon, and they put the video together. I’m like, “I need to go look at that because that’s new to me.” I haven’t done that song in years. It’s been at least three or four years since I picked up the guitar and played that one. It’s always a “What if?” That’s how it starts, and then the research. I particularly love the research part. I love libraries. I love books. I love googling and seeing what happens, and looking at images and

27 going, “Yes.” All this weekend was my research on Ludlow Massacre because I didn’t know anything about it. I had no idea, so now I know. Like Robert Conley and Richard III, I didn’t know. You see the play and go, “Whatever,” but really understanding all the pieces and watching different versions of it. I’m always learning, and I love it. I don’t ever want to say, “I know that.” It’s like, “No, I need to learn.”

Little Thunder That’s an artist’s job.

Starr Yes. (Laughter)

Little Thunder Looking back over your career so far, what was a fork in the road for you, when you could have gone one way, maybe, and you chose this other way?

Starr I think I would even go all the way back to high school because I was doing a theater class at Patrick Henry High School, where I went to high school. I wasn’t finding my groove because (I always tell people) when I lived in the Philippines, I didn’t know anybody. Then by the end of our time there, everybody knew me because I’d done all this stage work, and they’d seen me on stage or with my band. I was like a rock star in my world. When I came to San Diego from a school of five hundred, it was suddenly a class, just a class, of two thousand people. I got lost. I got lost. I thought I was going to have that same success that I’d then, and it wasn’t happening. I was crying to my theater teacher, “What do I have to do? I want to go to New York and be John Belushi, and it’s not happening.”

He’s like, “Maybe you need to go to another school, or maybe you need to do this or that.” He had all kinds of ideas for me. I didn’t go to the alternative school like I wanted to. I thought, “I know I can do all of these things. Which one is going to get me there first?” I looked around, and I looked around. I’d seen bands like U2 and all these other kind of groups. I said, “They’re talking about issues; they’re doing it with music. I only have two minutes to convince or tell this story. Okay, I have a short attention span. Okay, let’s do that.” So that’s how I went off to music first, before plays, before comics, before any of that. I said, “I have a short attention span. I can play a guitar. I can write a song.” Boom.

Little Thunder Get my message across.

Starr Get my message across, yes.

Little Thunder What would you say has been one of the high points of your career so far?

Starr Gosh, let’s see. I guess probably doing the one-person show, of actually showcasing all of that. Of course, you didn’t see the artwork in that. That was all the stuff, and all those voices, and being able to tell all those little

28 stories about the bingo lady, and about the activists, and all that stuff, the little kid that loves Star Trek, and the little kid that likes the Beatles, and the “I’m that Navajo fry cook because I lived in Gallup, New Mexico, for long time, and now everybody thought I was Navajo.” In fact, I’ve been asked many times, “Are you Navajo?” Like, “No, come on.” “She spent a lot of time with those people, and they can’t help it.” (Laughter)

Little Thunder You’ve got that down. (Laughter)

Starr I miss our res accents. I do. It’s funny. You go out there now, and they don’t talk like that anymore. It makes me sad. (Laughter)

Little Thunder What would you say one of the low points has been of your career so far?

Starr Gosh, let’s see, there’s been some times—I don’t know if this is the nature of our community or if this happens everywhere. God, I hate to tell on people, but maybe I’ll leave the name of the artist out. There was a joint show that was done for the National Indian Gaming Association while I was doing Red Road. I had just opened Red Road in Los Angeles, and they asked me to come out and do a quick, solo acoustic show. I said, “Okay, all right.” I went out there to Albuquerque and was going to do a show at Isleta, big theater. It was packed; everybody was there. The artist that went on before me had seen me previously, about two weeks ago, and knew my show, knew what I was going to do. I think that person felt threatened somehow, that I was going to be more excellent. I don’t know. I don’t know what the motivation was. At the end of that artist’s show, that person said, “The show is over. Thank you for coming. Good night.” All those two thousand people in that hall exited, and so when I came on with my program, I was playing to maybe twenty, fifty people. The artist that was after me, oh, she was about to…. I don’t know. She had brought her band in from West Coast.

It was like, “Why did that person do that to us?” I don’t know, but that’s happened. Stuff like that happens where there’s these little jealousies and “You can’t do better than me. I’m the only Indian that can succeed. I am the only Indian in the room, in the world.” I think that’s been, to me, the low point where somebody’s undercutting somebody else. For what? Because they feel like they have to be the only one. I’ve seen that in comics, too. That’s happened to me on comics panels with other male artists, where they’re like…. One guy asked me one time, in a panel, with an audience, looked at me and said, “Super Indian? What kind of drugs are you on?” That’s the kind of…. Yeah, those are the low points. It’s that kind of stuff where it’s these other personalities, that…. I don’t know. Ol’ Rodney King, “Why can’t we get along?” I guess we can’t. Sometimes you have to watch your back. Then the people, community that you form within yourself, you got to, “I want to boost you up because you’re good people. I don’t know about that other guy, but you’re good people.” (Laughter)

Little Thunder There’s both the Native community, and then there’s that element of male/female. I was wondering because comics are still a very male- dominated field.

Starr Yeah, at the Comic-Con, sometimes people have stopped by and said, “You did that? How nice,” that kind of dismissive. “I didn’t know girls could draw,” and whatever. Yeah, that’s an ongoing fight.

Little Thunder You need to work on those diplomatic skills. (Laughs)

Starr I know! Always, always but that publicity background…. (Laughter)

Little Thunder Kicks in. That’s wonderful. Is there anything that we’ve forgotten to talk about that you’d like to add?

Starr Let’s see. What else do I want to talk about? I think I want to talk about revitalizing the language and putting language into the programs because that was…. I was excited that with Code Talkers I was able to do that and source out a Comanche speaker, Kiowa, and then also Johnnie Diacon and Roy Boney. Johnnie, fluent in Creek; Roy Boney, fluent in Cherokee, and able to put that into their work. That’s something I hope that I can keep doing. Like with the new play that I wrote, there’s Creek language in it and a Creek hymn because who hears Creek hymns in plays? I thought, “Why not?” A random one, too, not the “Hallelujah.” No, everybody knows that one. (Laughter)

Little Thunder I’m so looking forward to seeing some of these new pieces as they come out. Thank you for your time today, Arigon.

Starr Thank you, Julie. Thank you, OSU.

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